Regret

I am imagining myself five years from now.


 I am sitting at a train station somewhere in Europe, waiting to be transported to God-knows-where. I look at the strangers passing by and enjoy their strangeness. I catch myself and realize that I am the strange one here. I am like a shrub horribly mixed up with gigantic trees. I look like an Asian junior high school student lost in the metropolis and can't hope of asking help because she doesn't speak English. But I speak great English, probably better than most people here. Perhaps I'm in Belgium. Or Brussels.


I heave out a sigh and revel in the visible puff of air that comes out. It's cold, so it must be nearing winter or something. I search the faces before me, and I see him appear like the dream that he always was—fragile and susceptible to dissolution. A feeling creeps all over me, overriding the alien feeling one is wont to get when they are million miles away from home. I smile at the association and realize that I still love him after all this time. His cheeky, awkward self.


I want to remember memories that lovers remember when they're apart: walks while holding hands, kisses, gentle touches, the whole compendium of the clichéd and the romantic. But another feeling washes over me, something sharp and heavy and painful. I don't remember us ever being lovers. We were just friends, always just friends. I feel my eyes sting with tears, and I let them fall because I deserve it. I deserve to cry over our could-have-beens because it's partly my fault. 


The feeling ebbs and slowly fades, giving way to the numbness that has allowed me to be here and pretend that I'm happy being alone. The word that I don't want to say hangs on my lips, begging me desperately to let it go. I decide against recognizing it, but it's there. It's there when I eat in a restaurant by myself. It's there when I sit on a park bench and unintentionally observe lovers being lovers. It's there when I look at pictures and remember conversations over beer and cocktails. It's here now, sitting on my chest, suffocating me softly. I open my mouth and my tongue hesitantly slides against my palate. 


"Regret."


The train finally arrives, and I am back on a swivel chair, rapping on a keyboard.

My Writing in Retrospect

Reading my blog posts from way back in 2006 makes me cringe. I wrote just like a child—so immature and foolish. Who would blame me anyway? I was in high school, and my hormones were starting to realize what they're for, and I had every right to make disgusting blog updates about puppy love, bad days, and food. I can't believe how much profanity I used! I wrote in fuck whenever I had a want for the proper adjectives to make the proper purple patches. I wrote about my childish romantic feelings, which all seem so ridiculous and stupid to me now. I wrote in sticky keys. My ideas were a mess. My paragraphs were obese and visually appalling.

I can't really say I've improved much over the years. I still can't find the right adjectives to form the right purple patches. And I've sort of given up and have decided to be a follower of Wordsworth's "rural subject" and "plain language." I find that I like writing using simple words because then I don't have to pretend to be really good when I know that I'm really not. I'm not the type who can use the big words like lacuna or antidisestablishment. Even though they're at my disposal, I can't seem to bring out pinnacle or endemic when I need them. This sometimes makes me wonder if I really can write at all. I don't (or ever will) write in sticky keys anymore, and I have had training in copyediting, so my punctuations are more or less groomed. I have managed to trim down my paragraphs too to a sexier appearance.

But are my ideas really there? Am I present in my words? It sucks to admit that I don't have the answer to that. When I read other people my age, my words don't hold a candle to theirs. Mine seem too bland and just mediocre compared to theirs that contain long and difficult adjectives and lively expletives.

Someday

She feels the weight of the backpack as she walks steadily under the gaze of Persian pyramids, holding a map that points to nowhere in particular—perhaps to a noisy market or another crowded street. She looks at the strangers working around her and wonders about their life. How many kids do they have? Where do they live? What is their mother like? Do they like dogs?

She inhales the air thick with sweat, goat manure, and humdrum labor. And she exhales her freedom. Nobody here likes to speak English. Some Farsi words are too ancient and lenghty to pronounce all in one breath, so she doesn't speak at all, reveling in the homely boisterousness of the people's domestic routine.

Where would she go from here? Her steps are calculated, her fingers snapping subconsciously as they are wont to do when she gets nervous. It feels like summer. Maybe, maybe it is.

What Makes You Happy?

On this random Monday afternoon, I came across a question that has haunted me all my life: what makes you happy?

Wise men say that happiness is a choice, a state of mind—slightly like freedom but a little more tangible. It can come from the strangest things, from the most random moments, and from people we've known all our lives but still sometimes feel like strangers.

I am happy when I write. When I am lost, and somewhere in that vertical axis of nothingness, I am found. I am happy when I get reconciled with ideas and when I discover the right words to bring them to life.

I am happy when I hear people laugh because it is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

I am happy when I hold someone's hand— to be reminded that I'm grounded and that I'm still here. I am happy when I am embraced and kissed.

I am happy when it rains and there is good music and coffee to keep you warm.

I am happy when I don't have to wake up very early in the morning.

I am happy when he's with me, even if we're just friends. Yes, I can be happy that at least we're friends.

I am happy when I am in the familiar presence of my family and friends.

I am happy with long and meaningful conversations.

I am happy in a four-walled classroom, in a vandalized chair, with theories that deconstruct the world around me.

I am happy when I get some time to think and immerse myself in the necessary pointlessness of life.

I am happy right now, with the miracle that is a new morning, a brand new chance to change and do something.

So be happy.