another story for another time

Like a grain amidst
the sands of time, I live just
for a moment's past

I never realised how much I have severed myself from until one fine day when I tried to seek my volatile emotions once again in another effort to express myself and came up empty handed. It was an unpleasant feeling, kind of like waking up one day to find that one of your limbs, now a stump flecked with dried blood, had been hacked of messily with a blunt axe and then remembering that ta-daaa!! It was you who did that hacking.

There are stories, there are endings and then there are unfinished endings. We live, we are being for a while, we spun the thread that is both the story and our life and then we die, at least for this year. Too much has been said and unsaid, done and undone to the point where I wreaked havoc on everything that I knew and loved and in the process I killed myself along with my demons in an attempt to give everything and everyone the finger. Dramatic, you say. How else would you describe it when you woke up one day and discovered that while you no longer bondage yourself with the troubles of your past, you also no longer recognise the person within you, who now looks back at you in the mirror with a donned iron mask?

I believe I owe a few people an apology, one each for the most diverse reasons anyone could think of. God forbid that I would consider such vagueness as a proper apology for what I've done, but please do forgive my tremendous ego which had, if possible, been augmented to ten times its original size in the past few months, and I really do think that the sheer weight of it alone is giving me chronic neck pains. For what it's worth, I am learning a new lesson every day with the occasional lent hand or two, and then perhaps one day when I'm done being a bastard and my ego has shrunk to its original size of a baby elephant the iron mask would slip off by itself.

"A black comedy of unfortunate events and atrocious timing. Have you read A Midsummer Night's Dream? The chain of events and furious emotions triggered by a prank gone wrong is almost reminiscent of the whole situation, and up till now I still keep and eye out for an elusive Puck and his vial of pansy juice."

"Memories lie well. It is always this ridiculous obsession with capturing things that don’t endure. We often search for constants; was it because of nostalgia? Insecurity? I reject the pointless reminiscence of the nights spent under that street lamp. Isn’t change good? Think of the possibilities! I have always been blissfully comfortable in the same circle of friends to the point when I didn’t recognise the social opportunities that present itself. The other day I smiled at an attractive girl at the line of the warehouse sale who smiled back, and for the next 10 minutes our eyes shyly flitted across each other. The last time that happened the whole solar system was aligned in a straight line. Come to think of it I haven’t chatted up a stranger in years ohmygod I’m a disgrace to the human race."

The entries above were written in my old blog circa June and May 2008 respectively. There is something about rereading the thoughts that you plastered on cyberspace more than half a year ago before so much have changed, which brings to mind the iron mask once again. Those words were snippets of emotionally charged posts, written in the delirium of unbridled feelings that embodied itself all over my blog, and well, to look back upon them once more through the disenchanted eyes of the mask was...surreal. Ah, to look unto with the lenses of practicality where once upon I was blinded by the fires of my own emotions. It makes everything easier to destroy, which I did, but then again the cornerstone of whatever that existed then still stood, wavering but defiant. I chose to spare it, which may be the smartest decision I have made this year.

I am tired of writing about this. This story has lived and played out its life, a dying star with one last twinkle before it fades from the black sky to make way for the birth of new stories. And thus I shall end this as a story that was in past tense, a story that will remain to be just another story from a long time back, to be just another story hidden behind a shadow of a smile, a story never again to be told but perhaps whispered one more time beneath the orange glow of the lone streetlamp.