I am sitting in this room— this big lavender room full of my older selves. Each version looks unhappier than the last, each carrying grief and heaviness in their hearts. I sit in the middle, wondering: how do people let go of this grief, how do people stop letting it from making a home in their bodies? My yesteryears catch up to me the faster I try to run. In the end, I am chained by the endless repetition of running and being consumed.
As a child, my mother taught me poems. She'd make me memorise them by heart it and then test me. Often, I'd forget a word or misremember a stanza and she'd make me start over from the beginning. I’d cry, begging her to let me pick up where I left off. But she’d say, "When you make a mistake, you don’t always get to continue where you stopped. More often, you have to begin again and again until it’s perfect." I can't stop thinking about it these days— how life is all just one long practice.
Every day, I stretch my body into the confines of a tiny cubicle, only to come back and lay down on a rectangular piece of wood, closing my eyes. Seems like I am perpetually confined to a box, with no way out. Sometimes (no, almost always) living is hard. I wish it were simple. I wish there were an instruction manual that taught me how to react to everything happening around me. I wish I were a child again, whose mother told him how many times to repeat a poem until I remembered it. I wish someone could tell me what to eat, how to sit, what to wear, what to think, when to sleep and where to go. I wish someone else either lived my life for me or, at least, taught me how to live this life. I am getting tired of this endless practice of restarting, it's breaking my soul.
I am sitting in this big lavender room and all these versions of myself keep looking at me, as if I am their only saviour when I don't even know what to do. I stand up and they disappear one by one, leaving me alone. I go to the kitchen, boil some water for the tea, and take a long breath. On most days, my heart is so quiet that I almost forget that I am suffering. I put the herbs into the water, and sit watching the clouds through the skylight. How beautiful the sky is, how warm the sun feels. This is all I've ever wanted— to know the beauty of the heavens without a constant gnawing at the back of my mind. There is already enough suffering in this world. Just once, I'd like to be someone who knows how to survive it.
I pour the tea and sit beside my grief. Perhaps, it's time to stop running now. Though I haven't said it aloud, these beautiful, simple little things I want from life are enough to tell me that, in my own way, I want to learn how to live. In my own way, I want to know how to hold joy without mourning the presence of grief.
//I hope my next version
looks happier than I do now//
As a child, my mother taught me poems. She'd make me memorise them by heart it and then test me. Often, I'd forget a word or misremember a stanza and she'd make me start over from the beginning. I’d cry, begging her to let me pick up where I left off. But she’d say, "When you make a mistake, you don’t always get to continue where you stopped. More often, you have to begin again and again until it’s perfect." I can't stop thinking about it these days— how life is all just one long practice.
Every day, I stretch my body into the confines of a tiny cubicle, only to come back and lay down on a rectangular piece of wood, closing my eyes. Seems like I am perpetually confined to a box, with no way out. Sometimes (no, almost always) living is hard. I wish it were simple. I wish there were an instruction manual that taught me how to react to everything happening around me. I wish I were a child again, whose mother told him how many times to repeat a poem until I remembered it. I wish someone could tell me what to eat, how to sit, what to wear, what to think, when to sleep and where to go. I wish someone else either lived my life for me or, at least, taught me how to live this life. I am getting tired of this endless practice of restarting, it's breaking my soul.
I am sitting in this big lavender room and all these versions of myself keep looking at me, as if I am their only saviour when I don't even know what to do. I stand up and they disappear one by one, leaving me alone. I go to the kitchen, boil some water for the tea, and take a long breath. On most days, my heart is so quiet that I almost forget that I am suffering. I put the herbs into the water, and sit watching the clouds through the skylight. How beautiful the sky is, how warm the sun feels. This is all I've ever wanted— to know the beauty of the heavens without a constant gnawing at the back of my mind. There is already enough suffering in this world. Just once, I'd like to be someone who knows how to survive it.
I pour the tea and sit beside my grief. Perhaps, it's time to stop running now. Though I haven't said it aloud, these beautiful, simple little things I want from life are enough to tell me that, in my own way, I want to learn how to live. In my own way, I want to know how to hold joy without mourning the presence of grief.
//I hope my next version
looks happier than I do now//