ana:lies

I know it’s corny, but I want to have children just so I can give them this kind of love. The kind that permeates through loneliness—reaches across the oceans and holds you so close and warm it’s impossible to keep from smiling. I want my children, and their children too, to live forever in moments like that. But is that even possible?

From here.

It’s scary how many things can change in one week.
It’s scary how much one’s face can change in one week.
It’s scary to think how in one day things could all come crashing down.

While people may turn negative and turn the weight of the situation away…
I’m just thankful. I smiled when the first thing he said to me was “Thank God every day.”

And I do, because even though this disease is eating at him, this medicine is eating at him, I’m not angry, saddened, despairing, sure, because there are two ways that you could look at a horrible situation. Sure, you see the bad part in the beginning, have the anger, have the sense of loss… but afterward, I think it’s possible to turn it around and see it from the other side, see the things you still have, the things you can be thankful for.

One day at a time. Then days stretch into weeks stretch into months into years.

I hope it stretches into years.

1. just can’t sleep
2. are sleepwalking
3. are worried or longing for something
4. are just bored
5. feel lost and aimless in life
6. are searching

The Waikiki skyline is pretty nice. walk around further and you can see the mountains dotted with little houses. It puts a queasy feeling by my heart, because I realize how high up I am, or how insignificant our lives are, but the cool night air and the relative silence makes me smile.

Maybe that’s just because everything is just a reminder of how vulnerable we are. I’d look outside wanting to take a break from thinking, but all I do is think more about the possibilities.

I suppose they’re pretty endless.

Sometimes the night feels endless, stretching on with little progress and a lot of spacing out. Sleep, on the other hand, never feels endless.

I woke up today a minute before my alarm went off. I didn’t want to go back to sleep, though I very well could have. I showered, then grabbed my stuff to sit in the very lounge I’m typing in right now and fill my brain with physics. It was kind of hopeless, but it was a comfort. False senses of security.

I got picked up half an hour later due to the 3-car fender bender my parents were unexpectedly pulled into in heavy traffic yesterday afternoon. One car didn’t stop soon enough, but it hit the car in front of it, which then hit my parents’ car. I feel kind of guilty for thinking of nothing more than a fender bender in that moment they first called to say they were late, but I guess there was no need to panic as there was none in my mother’s voice. No one was hurt, thankfully, but the trunk of the car no longer opens smoothly and is hard to close.

This makes me think about how some things just can’t be undone, like children scribbling on crayons upon the walls of a new home, cutting off the fur on a stuffed animal or the hair on a doll thinking it will grow again, or violin bows snapped into pieces. Of course, in this world, we’re always looking for ways to fix things, or we just solve the problems by replacing thing that are broken.

But there are bigger problems that leave holes when they occur. We can say, “It’s just not the same.” when we replace physical items that originally had more personal significance with new things, but the phrase becomes more potent when you think of other things, those that are more rare, more fragile, more precious. Most notably, life.

People can’t be replaced. The relationships they once held with others can’t be replaced, as well. Even the relationships we hold in our daily lives are unique, and in their own ways, can’t be replaced, as well. Sure, some we may hold may not weigh of much importance in our own minds, but they are relationships that are then not applicable if you switch the person being related to. And I think the thing about being human is that you have to realize that people are people, and that life is something to be respected and cherished, and that humans have feelings that one should try, at all times, to understand and take into account.

But enough about people; Let’s step back to life.

Even though I may not love it as much as I did before, I am still in love with little things, things in isolation, things that may not be so significant on a larger scale, but are special in my perspective. While on a large scale, life does not seem so great, there are still so many things to love, and to be thankful for.

On another note, I am thankful for when others are able to sleep.

1. indecision & inner conflict: I am a weak individual, who tends to sway to the sides of others easily, and who tends to avoid making a decision for herself. Many times I lack my own opinion, confidence in my own opinion, or the drive to form an opinion at all. I feel like I have no goal in life. I don’t really know what I’m heading for in the future. I don’t know what I want for the future. I don’t even want to think about the future. I keep myself trapped in the present. I have been a sheltered and uncultured child, and remain a child in heart and in actions, and in a sort of “filial piety”. I can’t bear going against my parents, and I often believe that what they impose on me is out of best interest for me, but at other times, I feel like fighting to escape some of their hypocrisy. In the end, home is “safe” and what I am told to do is “safe” and following instructions is the only “safe” way to go about things. But of course, if someone is always telling me what to do, I cannot survive on my own. I am stationary, and I don’t know in which direction to step. This stems from uncertainty, avoidance of responsibility, and closing oneself off. This all then stems further from fear.
2. fear & death: Of course these two are linked, but I’m not necessarily always afraid only because something leads to death. I am afraid of change. I am afraid of not being strong enough. I am afraid of making mistakes, taking risks, and finding out I will regret something in the end. I am, again, reluctant to take responsibility, unless I have already steeled myself against that which I must take responsibility for, or have already mentally accepted the consequences and outcomes of accepting such responsibility. I fear failure and being insufficient. I fear judgment. I panic easily. I can’t handle needles, blood, and suffering (thus, becoming a doctor is out of the question, especially as I don’t know if I could handle the responsibility that comes with dealing with the lives of others). What will happen if you die? I’m afraid. Just because you are suffering, it doesn’t mean you have to lash out in anger. But I also know you cannot help it, and I feel that it is only right to please you however you wish it be done, because we are losing you and we don’t want that that happen. Human beings are weak and uncooperative, and so vulnerable to each other, and to all that life on this world presents us. I can do nothing except listen to you. I am afraid of your anger. Every moment I am home I am walking through a minefield. All I should do, and can do, if I hold myself strongly enough to it, is grit my teeth, swallow my anger, hold back my words, and tell the truth.
3. truth & lies, secrets & trust: I want to be someone who can trusted. I want to tell the truth always. I spill the secrets I keep about my life and my thoughts in my head easily because I trust easily. I hate being lied to. It hurts me to lie to others. I can’t lie successfully either (thus, if I resort to silence, that is an indication of me having things I want to say but I know would be very bad to say, or it is an indication of me shutting myself down to interaction and real conversation due to discomfort or not wanting to answer questions). I will keep my mouth shut, but I am squirming in discomfort because life in reality is full of shit that messes with my sense of morality and goes against my inner “goody-goody” concept of right and wrong (this, too, stems from not wanting to change, or to get into things that I know I am heavily inexperienced at and thus disadvantaged in). I am naive, but I am not blind. I pay attention to the details and pick up on things. I find it stupid when people don’t tell me something I already that know gathers in their thoughts and their actions every time they encounter me. I do choose to turn a blind eye at times, because people are people and those are the lives they choose to live, and have the right to live it as they wish because it is their body. And if it makes you happy, so be it, do what you want, as long as you are not taking away from whatever makes other people happy, or destroying their bodies. I am a needy human being that often really does desire attention and being told everything, who is hurt by being left out of the loop. However, I am also a human being that then scolds herself mentally for even thinking such things, because she knows that people are entitled to sharing what they want with whomever they want, and that as an individual, she is not really worth anything telling things to because there is hardly any output. I trust the people around me. I will foolishly do so, because I do believe in you. I lie to myself telling me that things are okay the way they turn out to be. My commitment to being an honest being comes out from caring.
4. love: I am a faulty robot that has feelings, but by inputting this into my system error messages begin appearing, thus confuses the tangle of wires which is my brain, my CPU, and causes my heart to freeze and feel nothing in this artificial shell of a manufactured body.
5. existence: “Disappointing. Disappointed. Disappointment.” I need to change.

excerpt from Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother’s mother. Your father’s mother’s mother’s mother. I hardly knew her. I didn’t have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.
I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.
You want a letter from me? she asked.
I told her yes.
Oh, God bless you, she said.
The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.
I learned so much. She sang in her youth. She had been to America as a girl. I never knew that. She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary. I learned that she never learned to swim, and for that reason she always loved riversa nd lakes. She asked her father, my great-grandfather, your great-great-great-great-grandfather, to buy her a dove. Instead he bought her a silk scarf. So she thought of the scarf as a dove. She even convinced herself that it contained flight, but did not fly, because it did not want to show anyone what it really was.
That was how much she loved her father.
The letter was destroyed, but it final paragraph is inside of me.
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with the chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently. When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.
With love,
Your grandmother

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The meaning of life… is to learn as much as you can, through experience, until one finds a method of contenting oneself.

LiFE (defined by letters)… is the individual caught between Love and Fear, trying to find a safe balance between the two… is the individual striving for Everything, but needing to overcome Fear first, as Fear is the that which separates one from everything needed or desired.

I dunno, to find happiness, to find one’s place in the world. -shrug-