Angry tonight

I am angry tonight. I am looking back, and I am thinking.

I am thinking of a deceitful person.

I am thinking of deliberately inflicted hurt.

I am thinking of calculated coldness.

I am thinking of selfishness.

I am thinking of misrepresentation - to others, and to self.

I am thinking of the weight of someone else's baggage.

I am thinking of perfectly valid hope and belief - spat upon and crushed under-heel.

I am thinking of disrespect of commitment, and welcoming predation from an opportunistic and equally disrespectful creature.

I am thinking of desperate longing for shallow validation - and rejection of deeper appreciation.

I am thinking of the turning away from what is good and right.

I am thinking of denial.

I am thinking of self-destructiveness.

I am thinking of cowardice.

I am thinking of all the choices made to create a version of self that is all of the above - and this, above all else, is the unforgivable.

"It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

But, then, I look ahead, and I see.

I see kindness.

I see a gentle hand, gentle arms. 

I see loving eyes waiting and inviting.

I see affection without hope or agenda.

I see generosity of the soul.

I see openness. 

I see an open door. 

I see a place of rest and comfort, to rest, to heal, to breathe again.

And I am no longer angry.

Sleepless memory of sleeping touch

Can't sleep again. The anxiousness has diminished over the week, though, so at least it hasn't become a chronic motor habit as I previously feared. But the mind still won't shut up when it's too quiet and cool in the room.

I'm in the middle of the memory of a warm body sleeping next to me, the smell of him softly blanketing us both. He won't stop touching me in his sleep - his leg, his arm, his bottom, his shoulder, something has to be in contact with me even when he's fast asleep and unaware. I can't sleep when he does that.

Was it really less than 2 weeks ago?

And now, on a cool bed all to myself, I still can't sleep. But the memory makes my heart lukewarm at this moment, not aching anymore, not beating panic-attack fast anymore, just a little warm.

Sketches of a younger heart

I found a tiny, old sketchbook I'd had since 2000. Flipping through it, I found little poems, passages and thoughts that spanned one journey from longing to heartbreak, one rebound relationship, and stopped in 2003 at the start of the longest and most serious relationship I'd had up to recently. It describes a few dreams I'd had in the wake of heartbreak, including one which made me ache to remember - about an exorcism I was being put through, not of a spirit but of something unnamed yet necessary to exorcise.

The sketchbook was also speckled with snippets of one of my other loves at the time, astronomy. I looked to the night sky often, deeply, and lovingly at the time. (I still do, just nowhere as often.) Little stories about the constellation myths, a sketch of my favourite of them - Andromeda and others involved in her story - and a full list of all 88 constellations in alphabetical sequence.

1 April 2003, 12.08am, was my last entry in this sketchbook. I wrote about my idea of the difference between loving someone and being in love with them.

"One may use words to say how it is that they love someone, or why, or what it is they love about him/her. But being in love, that is an entirely different concept. Poets and painters have tried to embody it over the eons, but no words or images can claim to be the true expression of being in love - you just know it. It becomes you, fills you in that wordless, thoughtless enigma. How you can know something and yet not know it."

I was 24 then. That idea has changed a great deal since. I now know that being in love with someone is neither mysterious, nor thoughtless, nor unknowing. On the contrary, much like "gut instinct", it is your brain's way of streamlining a rational process so that you get the answer more quickly and with less energy spent on conscious thought. It's reasoning + bodily response + experience made efficient and quick - this is the right person for you at this point in time.

Loving, on the other hand, is a verb. It can take place with or without being in love with someone, though the former is much preferred in cases of romantic love. It is the ongoing process of caring, nurturing, expanding, complementing, negotiating, and all that hard work. Most of all, it is a choice.

Love is a choice. And it's not an easy one.

Which would you choose? To take the easy but lonely path, or the hard and reward-filled path that will expand your world and help you grow as a person? The safe but self-eroding path, or the difficult path that compels you to discover your authentic self?

Love is a choice. So let me ask you: do you love yourself?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs got it wrong. For adults, esteem and self-actualisation are greater than love needs. Without loving and discovering yourself, you cannot love others fully. However, esteem and love from others are interconnected - if you allow yourself to believe and deserve the love others share with you, loving yourself and growing as a person could be so much easier.

It's so much easier to believe the bad stuff than the good stuff, isn't it? I started believing the good things people who cared about me were telling me only after spending years beating myself up. I started trusting myself and them only after much painful experience.

Only after I started trusting did I start being able to push fear aside, and I:
- Tore down the stone walls around my heart
- Recognised who I am
- Discovered what I want
- Allowed myself to feel fear, and to give fear the finger anyway
- Started feeling true to myself
- Acknowledge that all of the above can and will change over time
- Most of all, accept that I will be hurt and that's ok 

Here is my heart, it's wide open. Feel free to step inside.

He loves me. If he falls for someone else, he is not the right one.

He loves me, and he is hurting too.

"When I close my eyes, I see your eyes."

Hold on to that.

Happiness on a page (or screen)

Notice how people write a lot more when they’re unhappy? There’s something to be said about the therapy of penning thoughts and feelings while dealing with various issues that bother us. It’s no secret that people write a lot less when they are happy. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and organised a few thoughts about the phenomenon where people are less tap-happy while in a happy place.

Happiness is less interesting on a page;

Gushing is unpopular;

When you are not superstitious and don’t believe in jinxing at all but penning down how rosy the world looks to you now might be a potential bitter pill for the future though you hope to heck it won’t happen that way;

When your heart is full to bursting on a daily basis, and you are suddenly bereft of the right words to say;

When you feel guilty for being so happy, because you reckon no one should be this happy when there are so many others, including people you care about, who are coping with their own struggles at this point in time, and you choose to minimise expressing how damn freaking pancreas-busting-ly happy you are;

When you have the urge to broadcast what you feel, but what stops you is the knowledge that some things are between you and the other – I don’t mean dirty laundry or passive aggressive button pushing, but simply knowing that you and the other are the only relevant ones in this thought, this feeling, that only the both of you will fully understand. And that’s why we share, isn’t it? To be understood by at least one other human being;

When you hear someone say the words you’ve been afraid to say but have been playing around the periphery of your mind and dancing on the silent corners of your lips;

When the little things cease to matter all that much, or when they do, they don’t matter for as long a duration;

When what you are writing about has taken a different track somewhere along the half page you’ve just tapped out on;

And I’m now standing on a different thought path blinking at the surroundings I never intended to enter into.

Just realised

It's been 17 years since I first fell in love.

It's been 10 years since I last fell in love.

It's been 6 years since I was last in love.

The years have whirled by so eventfully I have almost forgotten the passage of time. Days meld into the next, night and daylight weaving into each other like gold swathes on velvet, occasionally leaping into bursts of blinding delight, unfurling and unfurling and unfurling until each fleeting moment of beauty is but a distant memory.