Ctrl-Shift-N

After years of wondering,

I found you in the secrecy

of the incognito tab.

Your twitter feed 

offers only distant echoes of you-

I can't conjure you up from

140 characters.

Believe me, I have tried.

It only hides the sound of a voice
which I can't remember.

16

You said "sorry"

as if I would be able to rebuild myself with a 

word.

7 years later and still when you apologise for something 

I remember.

I am all at once a trembling mess.

All at once remembering the many things that I 

never said.

And I never will.

You will never know the fear of hearing ghosts

screaming like banshees

only to discover it is your father

hunched over

wailing.

How do I tell you that I prayed for you every night?

That I worried every night?

That sleep was the balm that let me forget you.

That every waking minute I lived in fear of the pain

that you caused me.

And how do I tell you these things
now?

After all this time, how do I tell you that time or 

one word 

is not enough

to rebuild someone you 

ripped apart.

I know you didn't mean to.

If you did, it wouldn't hurt this much.

First week of teaching

Well, I survived my first official week of teaching. I say survived but I had a mini breakdown last night.

I don't know if that's related to being back at school, being triggered by a memory or merely because I was due to start my period. Incidentally, I have started my period...

In truth, I think it was a combo of all three.

I always keep things locked up but being back at school doesn't really leave time enough for me to cry. I'm not someone who can cry openly in front of people. If that happens, it means I have been caught off-guard. Last night I felt crap and started crying. But once I started I couldn't stop. It was one of those moments where everything raced through my mind. I started to remember stupid things which don't matter but for some reason in that moment they meant the world. I don't understand how people voice their "stuff"* out loud.

In my self-diagnosis (not telling people your "stuff", it becomes inevitable for you to become your own therapist; not necessarily how therapy should work I don't think) I have realised that my inability to tell people things means that I grow impatient with people who can, which is wrong. I have become so independent in taking care of myself in specific ways that when I see other people complain of their "stuff" I am uncomfortable about it. The truth is that I am the problem.

You should be able to unleash your "stuff" with the people you love. Otherwise what are they for. I think that I am a coward for not doing this. And yet knowing that I am coward is not enough for me to even admit on this blog what "stuff" is happening at the moment.

Yesterday, I watched "Take this waltz" and one of the characters said:

"I remember when my niece, Toni, was a newborn, I'd babysit her and sometimes she'd cry, like babies do. Nine times out of ten I could solve the problem, I could figure it out, but...sometimes when I'm walking along the street and a shaft of sunlight falls in a certain way across the pavement and I just want to cry. And a second later, it's over. And I decide, because I'm an adult, to not succumb to the momentary melancholy and I had that sometimes with Toni. She just had a moment like that. A moment of not knowing how, or why, and she just let herself go into it. And there was nothing anyone could do to make it any better -- it was just her, and the fact of being alive, colliding."

I feel the same way. I will be on the train or I'll be walking and I'll see something in the window and I will feel like I just need to cry. Today I was walking somewhere and a few leaves feel from the tree I had just walked under. Isn't that just so utterly and intrinsically poetic. There is something so beautiful about trees shedding their leaves. And they float so gently to the ground. Maybe that's just me being soppy. Or maybe it's the shedding. Maybe that's what I envy the most. (self-diagnosing again?)

Until next time,

T

x



*"stuff" being a reference to everything that plagues our mind/heart

The Seagram Murals. Part 2

Today I visited the Tate Modern for the first time since last summer.

Last summer was hard. I remember feeling so bad that I would look forward to each evening when I would finally be able to unleash the tears that I had been with holding from myself. One day, I remembered the murals and from that point it was not just a casual desire to see them sometime- it was a must.

I just had to see the murals. I wrote about it here on my blog (if I was a good blogger I'd link it here now but alas).

Never in my life have I experienced a sudden need to do something like that -- visit a place for no apparent reason (well, I realised the reason later).

When I entered that room with all the murals facing me I remember being overwhelmed with emotion and I lost the battle to my tears. They escaped as desperately as I had been fighting them back. Quickly.

Today I went to see them again but it was a different scenario. I had planned to go alone but my brother ended up tagging along. And I wasn't in as much pain when I walked into the room. The room was busy (more so than last year) and there were people taking pictures. I still felt that sense of being swept up in an abyss of colour and emotion but there was a distance that I felt from my previous summer's experience of the murals. I felt like I could look at my past self objectively from a place where things were different. I wasn't looking into the murals searching for a way out of my pain; I was looking at them having accepted the pain. My thoughts were less foggy.

That isn't to say that I don't feel similar pain and anxiety to last year. I suppose the difference is that a lot of what I was dreading last summer, I faced. Now, although I am facing more challenges ahead, I think subconsciously I know that I have sort of 'been there, done that'- written the blog post, if you will.

It's strange. I'm not sure that I will ever in my life experience that intensity so acutely when seeing the murals. I cannot tell if that is a good or bad thing but it's amazing how timing works. For the moments in which I experienced the murals, they were everything. They were the visual manifestation of everything that I had locked up inside. Everything that I wasn't saying verbally to anyone, confronted me in this abstract art form. It was liberating, poignant and for the first time in a long time it felt like I was being honest with myself (which of course is a lie; if looking at a beautiful piece of art work is how you justify not sharing your issues with someone, then you are most certainly in denial and lying to yourself. But that's another blog post).

The (not so) generic update blog.

For my future self:

You've changed since this time last year; to be more precise, you haven't changed much at all. It's a strange phenomenon and I'm not quite sure it's a solely "millenial" experience but in the blog/vlog/media sphere it is almost a given that when you see the word UPDATE anywhere you will watch/read about/ listen to the following:

• someone telling you that things have been tough lately
• they are on the mend
• everything will be fine.

When I was younger, it was an insult to be told that you had changed. It was honestly the worst thing you could be called. I remember how I would physically recoil from the accusation that I had changed. It was a visceral and physical reaction to a word which was a plague; the mere mention of it had me thinking I was tainted with a disease. I imagine that this is to do with the naiive way in which you think that things stay the same forever. There is a lot of complexity you could unpack from that but for me in this moment, the reason that I'm remembering that is because as I'm growing older, there are changes that are happening and I can sense that somethings are shifting in my universe. But at the same time, things are stagnant. Really stagnant. 

This time last year, I was really sad. Deeply and profoundly sad. I won't forget that moment I had where I just needed to see the 'Seagram Murals' at the Tate. I have no idea why but they just seemed, at the time, like something I had to see. I will go back there before I start school again, to see if they evoke something else.

Reflecting back on last year, I was hurt. I was lonely. I still am those things but I have a bit more certainty than I did last year. Also, I feel like I cried so much last summer and this past year in general that my body has almost given all of it up. I feel the same things but just not as acutely. What worries me though about my future, is that my fear about pursuing the things that I want will get in the way of me actually achieving them. Getting older, there is an inevitability that follows you. Multiple 'inevitabilities' if you will. Death. Ageing. And they're the minor ones. 

I can't express entirely what I mean but it's this feeling that there are certain questions that I need to ask myself about how I want to move forward in my life (what a horrible cliche). However, these questions are questions whose answers I have maintained for years. Surely my answers should be changing. Or I should at least be more open to changing them? Instead, even when my hopes are pointing in a particular direction, my answers are stagnant. Again, it's this desire to give in to my fear rather than overcome it.

Eurgghhhhh. I have spontaneously word vomited here but anyway, to end my (not so) generic update blog-

• 
  
• things have been tough this past year
• they are not entirely on the mend
• things will probably be ok but I have a feeling there is more suckiness to come.

x

T

I see you

in the reflection of the bus window
as I'm standing at a crossing

in the elevator of Russel Square Station
on the steel panel I am a
dancing shadow

opposite me
curving into the tunnel of
the tube
as I am blustering in the humidity
of a packed out train

You are always a surprise to me
I
forget
how much
we are alike

We are hurtling through the underground
and your face blurs into
film posters and faces of the
other people on the train.

Hip students with headphones and backpacks
Old couples with 'visiting the museum today' comfy shoes
Men in suits with laptops and ominous looking folders.

You pop back every so often in the glass.

Peeking at me.

Shadows and reflections reminding me that we are
in fact
one
person.


It is always unsettling
your resemblance is always uncanny

and I am always waiting for the realisation that
you and I belong

The man opposite stands up to exit the train and
I face you.
Alone.

We are both
Alone.

I am not quite sure how to approach you.

Instead, I take out my phone and I write you and me
a poem.

Hoping that maybe here
in this space

We come to be

us

Adrift

As you get older, your world becomes bigger.
I remember when I was younger I felt things with urgency. I never acted out because of this but when I felt something I was adamant in my feeling of it. When I was hurt, I felt it with every fibre of my being.

I am still like this now but I am able to make sense of things in a different way.

Your world is too small when you're young. There are so many lessons to learn and so many things to experience. And one of the hardest lessons is that people leave. People move on. It is inevitable.

If I look back to being in primary, I think that's one of the biggest lessons I learned without realising. That was the first time I was uprooted. I mean sure we moved houses when we young but it was nothing like realising that I wouldn't really see my primary friends again. I loved primary. I had an amazing time there. Whenever I think back to it I always think about how that was where I was happiest.

I'm thinking about this because I've just been scrolling through the twitter feeds of old friends. There are people who I haven't spoken to for 10 years. I haven't physically seen or spoken to them in 10 years. 10 years. These were people who I cared about deeply and now they have all moved on in their lives and I don't know who they are anymore. They are strangers. It makes me sad because I'm sitting here thinking about them and I wonder if they think of me?

Are we all just destined to make our friends only to move on from them?

I'm at a point in my life now where I have my uni friends, school friends and friends from various groups I belong to. But it is hard to keep track of everyone. And I don't have a person. I don't have that one person who is my closest, bestest bestest friend. I think this is what makes it worse. It makes me focus on everyone I'm not in contact with anymore.


So to all my primary friends, you guys were the best. I hope you are all swell and in great places. I send you love and warm wishes.

Love,

T

x