dear readers,
as always, i hope you are well. i come to you from the other side of the Void with a few recent conversations and moments to share with you. i haven’t blogged properly in several weeks, and i’ve been missing it. i’ve been lost in thought, with no time to write them down. i try not to quantify my blog posts into how often i post per month, but i’ve been sad to have such little time to write recently. plus, eleventh hour (my normal blogging spot) was closed for a week for what looked like deep cleaning. regardless, i prevail to bring you riveting anecdotes from my life.
because of the eleventh hour closure, i’m at rcc dining hall, sitting on the patio in the sun with my knockoff marshmallow cereal and kind of gross “french roast” coffee. there is a girl here with her dog, a beautiful pointer of some type with a sleek chestnut coat. i had seen her walk by the patio with the dog, and then enter the dining and come out to the patio and sit. the dog stands attentively in front of her, fixated on the food she brings to her mouth, until the woman tells the dog to sit and lie down, rewarding her with some kind of meat stick. the woman adjusts herself, foot up on the chair next to her, scarf draped over her head to shield the morning sun. the dog lies at her feet, licking it’s paws like a cat. the woman shifts and i see the cover of what she’s reading: how dogs love us.
edit: the day after writing this, i met this woman at a meeting and rode the bus back to campus with her and her dog. i forgot to ask for her name but she was very sweet and what a coincidence to meet her the day after she appears in my blog.
the girl sitting next to me on the other side- a first year i assume, is talking on the phone. she is wearing a long lacy pink skirt, a tie dye shirt and sunhat. she has rainbow painted headphones and many rainbow bead bracelets, and a rainbow pixel backpack. she’s fending off the sparrows who encroach on her half-eaten hashbrown (although the bird later succeeded).
she asks the person on the other line if they ever have a voice in their head that knows what to do. i’ll paraphrase: “like leaving home, not talking to some of those people ever again. that hurt but it was beautiful.” she goes on, talking about a breakup. about how she saw him (“jacob”) in the dining hall and got excited, but then sad. “i still love him but i feel like i don’t want to see him.” i feel for her, honestly. but she has a good head on her shoulders. “if you’re not actively choosing to be with someone, that’s not love. like if you don’t wake up every morning… well, i don’t know”.
her conversation makes me reflect. sometimes i feel sad about the loves that i’ve lost. sometimes i wish i could have one more hug, or one more final conversation with them. but i’m alright, and i know my dining hall companion will be alright too. i look to the future more than i look to the past. i carry those lessons and knowledge with me to this day. i know the emotional depth that my heart is capable of, the profundity of sadness and raw heartbreak that i can withstand. the (hit or miss) poetry, art, and writing that comes out of it.
yet on the other hand, i’m equally amazed by how much can change in two, or four, or six years. i know the depth of healing that has happened in the interim, i carry the wisdom from those loves into my current ones and future dreams. i am blessed in feeling truly and deeply in love now, and to have it be an experience of beauty and growth, rather than one of melancholy. to have it be one of future promise rings, of slow dancing and soul-understanding like i’ve never experienced before. in the words of my dear izumi suzuki, our hearts are intertwined.
izumi ~
this depth of love has lead me to axelle’s living room, the comfy chair. my first anecdote. it had been a long day in a long week. i was feeling sad, about nothing in particular. i was feeling jealous of my friends, a symptom of the low self esteem i know i’ve been maintaining recently. i got talking about my style, my qualities and values. i asked axelle what makes me important or special to people. even though i wasn’t feeling as down on myself as this makes it seems, i know this isn’t a good thing to ask your girlfriend- even if it’s out of genuine reflective curiosity. in hindsight, i feel kind of embarrassed about how i was behaving, but i suppose everyone has these moments of childish insecurity. regardless, i think there was some interesting food for thought that came out of this conversation.
i’ll spare you the long winded debrief, but i was essentially wondering what my “self” was. who am i without the clothes that i wear, the music i listen to, the things i “like”? what makes me like those things, and how do those factors influence my “true self”? is there even such thing as a “true self”, independent of external societal influences? the idea of “my true self” being “who i am when no one is looking” (from that popular quote) might be a total illusion. scientists think it’s such a mystery that particles behave differently when they’re being observed versus when they’re not. they wonder about the implications this has for physics and the science of “consciousness”, but don’t we operate the same way?
at the most fundamental level, what is the self made of? i guess this turns into the nature versus nurture question, which i ponder a lot. there were more intricacies to this conversation i’m forgetting, but i’ve explained the gist. this conversation morphed into one about internal monologues, since i have a prolific one and axelle seems to think very different from me. we talked with their roommates about this as well, explaining the complexities of each of our mental worldviews.
we deduced that there must be a spectrum of internal operations. on one side, a full blown internal monologue (what i experience) with full or semi-full narrative thoughts that may or may not be heard, “seen”, or just sensed. of course, people who experience a full internal monologue can also visualize things, but it’s not the primary way we process information. in the middle, a narrative that focuses on the gist of a situation. axelle’s housemates’ boyfriend described this: instead of thinking “i need to knock on the door because she didn’t answer her phone”, he thought “call, door, knock”. on the other side of the spectrum, there’s what axelle experiences, where they visualize thoughts through images, emotions, and physical sensations. they process information through the body, through emotions and re-imagining literal situations, instead of drafting soliloquies in their heads as people like me do. at least in some cases, this seems to make it harder for them to have a “filter” because everything isn’t run through mentally before it’s said.
axelle tells me, “maybe this is why you love writing”, and i agree, although i also think it explains why i am such an overthinker. indeed, i think i’ve been overthinking more than normal recently (not necesarily in a bad way), especially after my several rewatches of Ghost in the Shell and my continued work on my Divine Machinery zine. i love the work, but it’s definitely a mind fuck that makes you rethink your whole reality.
the progress photo of another zine, debrief upcoming~
another anecdote i want to share is the funny intro questions that we went through for a recent meeting. we were all struggling to think of a fun question. we started with “what’s your favorite color”, but then added “what’s your favorite shape”, “have you ever been in love”, “what’s your deepest secret”, and “do you think you make good first impressions on people”.
i answered blue or green, spirals, definitely have been in love many a time (and cherish the experience of being in love, even in moments where i’m single), and that i don’t think i make good first impressions on people since i apparently come off as mean and disinterested (this could be a whole blog post on its own). i couldn’t think of a deep secret. i love these questions because they’re the kind of deep conversation starters i want to have in social situations. i’m filing them away in my brain for a future party setting.
another funny anecdote happened in a text conversation with my sibling, who normally talks with an air of chronically online. they are almost never deep, but they were super stoned when we were texting, and i mentioned that i’ve been listening to bts again for nostalgia’s sake. to my humor, he simply wrote: “time is circular baby”, and i find that quite true and funny coming from him.
many coincidences have been happening recently. i had been scaring myself a little, because i have recently really wanted to dye my hair again but keep thinking that its going to completely wreck my hair. i want to have long and luscious natural hair, but also have some color and interesting style in it. i had been really contemplating this, feeling as though length and health needed to be totally sacrificed for color, until i passed an older woman, probably 70s or 80s, with long hair down to her waist that was dyed entirely magenta and purple. we smiled at each other as she passed, and i was too much in awe to compliment her hair but i hope she got the idea. i am feeling very inspired and might add a little color to my hair soon. until next time!
---
in love and circular time,
- ek
p.s, i think i’m going to shift to posting in times font. it’s maybe not as aesthetically pleasing, but i think it’s easier to read and write. this being said, i might change my mind sometime.
