Enough of the doom and gloom; everything shines brighter now. The fighting is over – no more obtuse wrestling head-on with the vague concept of threat, a suppositional enemy – and I’m finally home.
—
It’s somewhat eerie how attachments to inanimate objects form with such ease; if a thing’s there for long enough, undisturbed and seemingly in its own comfortable pocket of the universe, even if it serves less than a legitimate aesthetic purpose, it simply slides past our attention into the mental sphere of untroubled acceptance. Over time, the scents of mysticism pool: existential (of the object’s presence) quantifiers – and qualifiers – become superfluously intricate, and superstition is born.
I prefer my miscellany to tell stories and ideas, rather than dictate them into existence, even if these narratives have not a bit of context.
In my billfold’s coin-pouch there sits, perpetually, a disparate pair of coins – an American penny and a Qatari dirham – their low monetary value being the only thing they have in common. They’re beyond useless, but they’re there precisely because I’ve never bothered to take them out. Perhaps subconsciously I like carrying the loot of my travels, even if they’re incurred incidentally – my attachment to regions greater and more fantastic than my native, gentrified island city glisters through the gleam of loose change.
When you’re in a routine, time seems of infinite depth, like two mirrors arranged in parallel, reflecting the abstract world with biting lucidity; a daily-occurring period has all the echoes of those of the past, and is pregnant with the anticipation that accompanies those of the future. It was a vaguely pleasant time, school – but it always seemed to lack a certain autochthonous vibrancy, as if the time expended came with its quota of anaesthesia, and we were expected to compensate somehow, all congenitally groggy and unamused. It was the breeding ground, sure, of ideas and mirth, yet these invariably took our lives firmly by the hand into late nights heavy-lidded and caffeine-sustained. Condensing this passage of time conceptually – efficiently – now renders it a moderate shade of rewarding, but one wonders how many of the reality-constructing trivialities we forget, and questions the validity of looking back fondly on something I had greater expectations of.
—
Now I’m in a veritable parody of school. There isn’t much to be gleaned by reflecting on this, not anymore.
By Nic | February 7, 2009
The only emotion that I want to feel right now is despair, but I think I’ve become more resilient – more vaguely hopeful, as if the cumulonimbus descended and everything beyond my immediate field of vision turned hazy and indistinct, and therefore possibly better.
—
They did not just expect me to play soldier; I was an undertaker, a gardener; an insidious custodian of a penetrating nature, bending the elements to my will, even destructively – but always maintaining my place among the dense copse, hiding as if I’d done something gravely wrong. And maybe I have, to have had this unfortunate sequence of events line my path. But I’ve told myself I’d plow through it all, and plow through I shall.
By Nic | December 22, 2008
Every mistake mints us into the people we are. We feel fire, fire that rushes up, all-consuming, from the jowls to the forehead; we hear thunder, unexpectedly and frighteningly self-manufactured; we experience the painful catharsis of realizing the thing that’s happened and what we had done to cause it. And in that moment of truth we flinch with shivering determination to preserve the immaculate conception of ourselves, and try to find solace in hiding, pushing the broken wheel of fortune as far down the road as the incline facilitates, hauling it to a different address. Or, sometimes, on the days when the rainbow hangs bright and low, we open our doors to the load that is now our burden. It is admittedly a complex game of chance.
The reason why we keep certain breeds of cats and dogs as pets and count them as among our closest friends is because their actions, once properly noticed, do not look like deliberate mechanisms of nature – their choices and mistakes do not translate to purposeful moves in this Darwinian game of chess. They act independently of a transcendent organic force. This observation may seem inaccurate from a macro perspective of a crowded park with its dog owners and their requisite golden retrievers – yet it is within our individual human perception to recognize that there is humanity in the eyes and gait of a loyal canine. We have found ourselves in these animals precisely because we care for them too much to think of them as cogs in the eternal wheel. Sometimes we ought to do more of the same for ourselves.
And if we think the person – one out of billions – whom we label ‘I’ can be refined incessantly through experience (weather a noble process of distillation, and hopefully turn out for the better) – then why not the next?
By Nic | November 2, 2008
It’s always there, isn’t it? Right in front of you; that cloudy mirror, forever reflecting more light than image, more hope than cold reality. We hurt our eyes squinting to get a glimpse of how we’d look, what we would’ve accomplished – but at the same time we cautiously draw a veil of illusion over our line of sight, an ineffectual shield from the razor-edged truth that crops up, inevitably, from time to time. It never shatters the glass but it can shatter our hearts, the way it hits us, who are always too sanguine to notice, like an bullet train: inexorably.
We – with our fragile veils – are compulsively drawn to that mirror, though, and I suppose it’s just our curious reaction to fear – we want to believe in our aspirations, to calm the raging torrent incessantly swirling inside us. I know when I see the future, I want to envision utopia, to transpose all that is right and good – and reassuring – onto whatever’s really there; but another part of me tells myself that is disingenuous, that I should be realistic in order to get a more nuanced and better informed grasp of what could conceivably arise so I can react with more wisdom. And what do I really want, anyway – paradise, or life?
That doesn’t mean I relish every last bit of the challenge. I’m worried – worried about the next five days, worried that I might not be able to anneal all these imperfections and insecurities out of myself to face these Herculean labours. I don’t have an explicit regimen of toughening up; I’ve always tried to keep flexible, adapt. This method seems inadequate, though: the obstacle is unprecedentedly big, at least it seems that way, and it’s true that self-confidence is not the only – or even the most difficult – hurdle to overcome. I particularly dislike the idea of existence as a race – if I preferred undue and immoderate competition I would have applied to Oxford or Cambridge (lol sorry, guys) – but at junctures like these I can’t help but think I just have to pave my own path through. Excellence does not have to fit into a Darwinian paradigm but I know it takes effort and zeal. And damn me if I’m not gonna try.
BRING IT.
By Nic | October 17, 2008
From the position I’ve always assumed, assiduously and rather inconspicuously behind the vanguard of sharp minds and keener ambitious, it seems like a lifetime’s work is required to finally transcend that delimiting reassurance of being merely ‘better than average’, straddling the line between obscurity and celebrated brilliance. I am in fact fond of this liberating (in an ironically socially-regulating way) space; I don’t like to brag, really. But it seems like I am forced to arms in this leg of the unending Darwinian contest, where the result, for once, is a searing brand that isn’t in the least easy to expunge. And certainly some urgency is required at this juncture if I am to wholeheartedly devote myself to courting that elusive maiden, excellence, whose eyes I have met fleetingly from time to time; now is the hour to seize her, firmly, by the hand; to be the foremost suitor for just this little moment – and lay forever content in the budding realization of a dream I can believe in.
I sort of need to do well for the final exams to get into a good college of my preference, is all.
