Anneli Xie
2017/07/13
2017/07/13
tags:
#diary
#diary
a fleeting premonition
#1: there’s no such thing as a perfect piece of writing, just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair
and so I walk the familiar roads leading me home. home-home; my black jeans absorbing every ray of sunshine that lund has to offer at 8am. yet again another goodbye, yet again another ”i’ll see you soon”, but with a promise so loose it no longer carries meaning. heavenly tweed and matias’ guitar plucking piercing through my headphones, every note slowly finding its way into my heart. a 2:32 masterpiece and glossy eyes that turn the world moist and shiny every time i close and open them again; like the tears make the world glisten but my heart is heavy.
somehow i always end up in situations like these. ”why do I keep surrounding myself with such intricate people?” i ask carlie. i think about dry piles of saliva and cries of despair in the music room; kotch thudding in the background. i think about sleepless nights holding someone else's hand; about the longevity of the night and the frustration, the anger, the anguish. but first and foremost: the hopelessness. the 3 am despair and waking up with a feeling of excess. like there's something already dragging you down although you haven't even gotten up from bed yet; the still sun sending its stark shine through the curtains. and then carlie's soft voice interrupts my course of thought as we get off the train in malmö. "well, you could view it two ways, really. intricate or self-absorbed. i guess one is more positive than the other, but often times they mean the same thing”. maybe she’s right. i hope she is. at the same time, i hope she’s not.
–
"why should you apologize for having a big heart?"
/
lack of compassion
/
i always envy the dreamers ;
”?”
"People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can't dream at all".
–
and so I dream for the first time in a long time. of the lips of old lovers and the laughter of old friends. i think i have forgotten and so my memory brings it back in the most vivid of forms, the most vivacious of sleeps; the ones where i open my eyes to cloud the real world with thoughts from my imagination, ideas from my illusion, reflections on a delusion. most times i can’t separate right from wrong; tangible from intangible; real from fake. it’s confusing.
–
when I lay in ladbroke square park with e it feels like nothing else matters than him and me and us and the little blonde naked boy running around on the grass around us, his father shouting ”you’re disturbing the lovers!” just to let out a self-satisfied smirk at us; our tangled legs on the grass in the daze of the afternoon; the sun kissing our bare arms and e's soft lips against my forehead. i’m picking at the grass, pulling the straws off the lawn with closed fists. mostly without realizing but also as a distraction; to defy reticence; because i need to keep myself occupied to keep my mind from wandering too far too deep too remote. and so i pull the green straws out of where they belong, out of their home and into the warmth of my hands just to get tossed away an inch away, ripped apart from everything that they were and turned into nothing. and so ”stop destroying the grass!” e chuckles and grabs my hand. ”here, fidget with my hand instead”.
and so we lay there for five hours. maybe six. we lay there until the sun sets in a pale blue and the screaming children have been replaced by wine drinking parents and beer drinking businessmen taking a breather before returning back to their stressful lives. maybe. i wouldn’t know. all i know is that i have my head on e’s chest and my fingertips against his bare skin and his arms hugging me tight and warmth in my heart and his soft lips against my skin.
i fall out of reality and into love too quickly. what a wonderfully painful unfamiliarly familiar feeling.
-
#2: chapter 23
"[...] the process of thinking about people's raison d'être produced a strange frame of mind, a kind of obsession, in fact, that compelled me to convert everything in my life into numbers. This condition lasted for about eight months, during which I had to count the number of people in the car the moment I boarded a train, the number of steps of each staircase I climbed, even my own pulse if I had the time. According to my records, from August 15, 1969, until April 3rd of the following year, I attended 358 lectures, had sex 54 times, and smoked 6,921 cigarettes. I believed in all seriousness that by converting my life into numbers I might be able to get through to people. That having something to communicate could stand as proof I really existed. Of course, no one had the slightest interest in how many cigarettes I had smoked, or the number of stairs I had climbed, or the size of my penis. When I realized this, I lost my raison d’être and became utterly alone."
#3: the ocean in my head
carlie and I were playing the sims a couple of days ago and "your eyebrows are quite arched actually" carlie says as she curves the hairs on my sim. i laugh. "haha, i look so angry!". "yeah, sometimes you do actually. i was thinking about it today on the train because you got this little wrinkle between your eyebrows and you just looked kinda bothered."
/
querulous. that’s the prettiest synonym i could find for ”annoyed” in the thesaurus. i’m querulous. the crease between my eyebrows having appeared so much throughout the day that my head feels weird. so much that it’s not until i actually think about taking a deep breath and relaxing that i realize that it's there. i hate that crease. it’s not a reaction to surprise; not a shock nor a panic. it’s a long-lasting nagging, a deprecatory force, a scathing voice inside my head. it’s a lump in my throat and breathing becoming ten times harder; the world turning glossy and bon iver on repeat over and over again.
#3: p. 88-89
She was the one who broke the silence, pounding her left fist into her right hand again and again until the palm was quite red. She stared at it with dull eyes, as if she'd lost all interest all of a sudden.
"I hate everybody." The words hung in isolation.
"Even me?"
"Sorry." Blushing, she returned her hands to her knees, as if trying to pull herself together. "I don't hate you."
"Not so much anyway, right?"
She nodded and gave me a faint smile. When she lit her cigarette I could see her hands tremble. The smoke rode the ocean wind past her hair and vanished in the darkness.
"When I'm sitting alone, all these voices start speaking to me," she said. "All sorts of people—ones I know, ones I don’t know, my father, my mother, my teachers.”
I nodded.
“Most of what they say is awful. They tell me to drop dead, or say really filthy things.”
“What kind of things?”
“I can’t repeat them.”
She crushed the cigarette she had just lit with her leather sandal, and gently pressed her eyes with her fingertips.
“Do you think I’m sick?”
“It’s hard to say.” I shook my head to show her that I really had no idea. “If you’re worried you should go see a doctor.”
“Don’t worry—I’ll be okay."
She lit a second cigarette and tried to laugh, but couldn’t pull it off. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told about this.”
I took her hand in mine. It was quivering, and a clammy sweat oozed from between her fingers.
“I really didn’t want to lie to you.”
“I know.”
We fell quiet again, listening to the soft sound of the waves lapping against the pier. Time went by, more time than I can recall.
Before I knew it she was crying. I traced the line of her tear-soaked cheek with my finger and wrapped my arm around her shoulder.
#4: facebook messages in despair
sent 6:58: "I feel so helpless"
sent 6:59: "I know it's not my fault but it feels like it
still, you know?" "I hate it so much. it just takes up a lot of head space"
sent 7:09: "i love you tons"
sent 9:25: "Láz I miss you so much"
–
"Need is a warehouse that could accomodate a considerable amount of cruelty"
it was nothing, but still, it was something.