View from the Window

Part of the "Write Something Every Day Project"
Prompt: Pick an element of the outside world with which you have a special relationship. It may be a room, an object of furniture, a plant, a space, or an element of a landscape. Write about it. Do not tell us how you feel about it, but choose your words, mostly nouns and verbs, so that we know.

The setting sun is almost visible through my window. Its light hints over the silhouette of the macadamia nut tree that stands black in my view along with the swaying forms of the palm trees, and it's just bright enough to paint the sky with soft strokes of color--soft like the evening, soft like the lullaby that the trees sing to the world. The hammock leaves of the palm trees sway in the breeze as they shush the people tucking into the golden light that pours through the windows of their houses.

I see the city down the mountain flickering with electric starlight against the velvet ocean behind it. Squinting, I can see the lights of cars moving like shooting stars and the distant traffic lights cycle from red to green. It's traffic I can hear, but only in my head, buried by the whispering evening music of my clacking blinds and gentle laughter of the neighbors. Evening in the city brings magic from the cracks. A veil of shadow drapes over everything like a theater curtain, thrilling in the anticipation of what's behind it. There's a music in the negative space, in the void where hurried, harried thoughts mingled together in crowded quarters, smashed and tangled like gum suddenly find the sky. The voices turn upward and fall silent; they let the night sing for them and suddenly there is freedom. Stars hum in their domed stage as the world breaks free and flies upward, and I hear it in a spectrum of light and color from miles away up on the mountain. The city sings in sunset red and evening periwinkle while I stand at the window and listen.

Air comes to me unsoiled now like a high clean note of song that I alone have heard. All things draw themselves toward me for in the evening at my window, I own the world and own it completely. The sky and its infinite gradient and bright Venus peeking out from the iridescent blue all belong to me as though I can reach up into great oblivion and touch it. The rustling trees are mine; the way the air sits like a blue screen over the shadowed yard is mine; the winking city lights and shooting star cars are all mine, just for a moment. Just for a moment, the entirety of everything is captured in the frame of the window, and for a few fleeting minutes, I can touch infinity.

Strength

Sometimes I wonder where strength comes from. There have been days in my life when I think that if I even tried to stand up, my legs would just give out, and I would have to just lie where I fell for a long, long while before I could get up again. I think this, and yet I stand up and I walk, all the while thinking how much simpler and easier it would be to just hit the floor.

There are days when I imagine what it would be like to act on my emotions in the moment. The results of losing self-control could range from screaming randomly to throwing large, heavy objects at windows. I imagine this, and yet I sit calmly and make small talk to acquaintances and classmates, smile politely and maintain normality. Perhaps I'm so ingrained to think of the consequences of my actions that this awareness allows me to keep myself in check.

Or perhaps it's that I am, in a way, too stubborn. When I think about it, the worst thing that has happened to me is that I am stressed and unhappy with my given circumstances. Granted, I have been in circumstances that have made me feel utterly miserable, but ultimately, my unhappiness is largely self-imposed. I have not been financially displaced. I have not lost a loved one recently. Really, I am in the privileged position of one who's life is so good that they can raise their standards for what makes them happy. Having enough to eat for the day is taken for granted. Being in school does not feel like something I want to celebrate. In other words, my unhappiness is caused almost solely by my dissatisfaction with the way things are versus my excessively high expectations. I am lucky to be able to entertain such expectations in the first place.

Even when I feel like I am so miserable I can barely keep my head up, I think to myself how good I really have it and how bad things could possibly be. There is a world of things that could go wrong in the future. I could watch my world fall apart around me, and if I can barely handle a heavy load of homework without being supported and encouraged, how can I expect myself to be strong in any worse circumstance? So I mentally slap myself in the face and say, "Get the hell up. This isn't even bad."

Others have things so much worse than I do, and somehow they manage. The way I see it, I have to train myself. Learn how to buck up for the small things, and maybe I'll be ready when something great and terrible this way comes.

Nostalgia

Stream of thought/Prose. Please feel free to critique. Trying to write more often and not care about perfection. Just get my thoughts out.

I'm leaning against the glass window at the gym, waiting for my partner to finish up with the exercise machine. Outside, the sun is going down, shooting rays of light through the distant skyscrapers and glaring off the leftover puddles from the morning rain. Trees shimmy in the breeze and the gusts shoot ripples across the pools of water on the ground just outside the building. I squint as the puddle shimmers in the light and can almost hear the rush of the wind as though I were standing in it.

When the light shines just right, I am taken back to the summer all in a rush. I am at the beach house again, where my family and I vacationed, and though the sun was higher and the colors brighter, the way the wind moves the water is the same. I no longer see some leftover puddle but the high-tide water that flooded the property each day. Little red shrimp swim around in the grass, and I wonder how on earth they survive so far from the ocean because once the tide recedes, their life-water dries up. I wonder how they ever got so far from home in the first place and whether any of them ever try to return.

The beach house is like its own little pocket in time and space. There is no wireless or cell phone connection. I am alone with my family and the constant rumble of waves and the whisper of wind through the palm trees. We relax in blissful idleness together, counting stars and feeding the fish in the tide pools until our time there recedes like the ocean tide, and we are forced to return to the shadows of our daily lives.

Sometimes I feel like those little red shrimp, so displaced and stuck in a rhythm. I am a slave to time as it rushes around me, and sweeps me wherever it pleases. It has taken me so far from home and the people who I love. We have found ourselves scattered like detritus across the shore, only bound together by shared memories. And we cling to the memories like they are our last anchor, lest we float so far away from our point of origin that we forget who we are. Constantly, I wait for the high tide to come again and take me back to that pocket of time when I am brought back into communion with those who I've bound my heart to. There is always the danger that what keeps me tied to my home and my past will eventually drag me down and strand me. I fear I may not be able to move forward enough when a simple puddle rippling in the wind is all it takes to pull my heart back to the time when life was beautiful and perfect.

But perhaps there is a reason that human beings are given recollection. The pockets in time never change. I could count myself fortunate that even though those precious moments I had will remain forever in the past, I still keep them with me. What was good was not lost because of the passage of time, and I have not forgotten, nor will I ever forget. And though time will take me where it pleases, I am free to take a piece of it with me to hold onto. Little by little, I will thread the stories of my life together and whenever I feel as though I have lost my way, I can look back at the canvas I have woven and see the treasures I have gained. And then, fully equipped for the future, I will raise my creation like a sail and succumb to the currents and let time sweep me forward. Because all I have to do is look back and see that I already have everything I need.

Sore Loser

The funny thing about college is the learning.

Not academics, mind you. That would be too obvious. Up here, I'm learning a lot about growing up. I've learned what it's like to be independent, depressed, stressed, and tired--things I thought I already knew well back in high school, but being away from home in this environment made me realize I didn't know them well at all. In high school, such things were akin to that acquaintance you always wave at when you pass them in the hallways, but can't quite remember their name or when you met them, or if they're even the person you actually think they are.

My last post spoke of exhaustion. Now here's a semi-new experience. I've come across a situation in which my best, and I mean my absolute best, effort was worth nothing. Today, I got a C on a test, which might seem somewhat petty, but my grade was counting on this test, since it's the second C I've got in this class on a test. The thing was, I studied ridiculously hard for the test. I could explain all the concepts, and I knew the math. I took the test, missed a few problems, but overall thought I answered the questions well. Apparently not. I walked out with a 74 and no curve, because apparently the class average was a 79 and therefore not in need of a curve. The thing is, I still believe my answers were good, but I still walked out with shit for a grade.

I called it a semi-new experience because I felt the same way at homecoming of senior year. But, while winning senior homecoming was important to me, it could never hold a candle to the place academics has in my heart. So this is a new experience in the sense that I have never been so beat down in the area of my life that is my pride and glory.

I realized, after much frustration, self-abasement, and internal arguing, that contrary to what I had previously believed, I am still as much of a sore loser as I was at my cousin's birthday party when I cried because I got eliminated in the first round of Simon Says. The only reason I can endure losing is when I've convinced myself that I've got no stakes in the game. When something is as important to me as school, I'm just as bad at losing as I always was.

It must be that I feel that it somehow demeans my value. How can I view myself as an intelligent person if I've got nothing to show for it? I'm average, an average old idiot! I know this can't be true--and it's not something I just tell myself--I know I'm not stupid. And I've got lots to show for it. A couple Cs does not make me stupid! Lots of people have been in this situation because no one is perfect!

I honestly don't know what I'm trying to prove or who I'm trying to prove something to. Who do I need to convince that I'm valuable aside from those who already see me as someone of value, 4.0 or not? I don't understand. It's not something I've figured out about myself. I have yet to figure out that part of me that makes me who I really am, what lies inside myself that, despite success or failure, makes me valuable. I don't know. I could use some help in that area.

But I know I'm not a loser. Losers give up. Right now I want to give up. But giving up is easy, and I spit on easy. Strength comes from doing the hard thing, and being a sore loser makes things extra hard, because it makes you question the point of everything. I hate losing, but my greatest failure would be accepting it. They say failing is not in the falling, but the refusal to get up again.

I'm not a loser. Because I'm stubborn as hell, and I don't stay down.

A Little R&R

Before I started attending college, my sleep schedule went a little something like this:
Sleep at 10:30pm
Wake up at 6:00am on school days and 10ish on weekends and holidays.
I would say that's pretty reasonable. After a while of living on my own in Seattle, however, I found myself staying up slightly later until midnight, but waking up at increasingly later hours. Now, waking up at 10 is considered early for me. If I allowed myself, I could sleep until 2 in the afternoon before I feel ready to get out of bed. Usually I force myself to wake up by noon at the latest since I feel like I am wasting the day and daylight is actually quite precious in the throes of winter.

At first, I thought perhaps it was a delayed onset of teenage sleep syndrome (not a real syndrome, by the way). Or perhaps it was a build-up of jet lag, pushing me back further and further in the day. Then I wondered if it could be some sort of underlying sign of depression. I think that might have been the closest guess. The conclusion I have reached at last with which I am finally satisfied is that sleep and rest are somewhat different things to me.

Sleep is a vague thing, and there remains some debate as to whether it is actually useful for something or whether we just evolved this trait since we could not occupy ourselves for 24 straight hours. The fact remains, though, that we need to sleep. Unfortunately for me, getting enough rest is not simply a matter of getting enough sleep. No matter how early I go to bed, if my insomnia doesn't keep me up until 2 in the morning anyway, I still wake up tired if I wake up before 10. I never really feel fully rejuvenated until I have had a day in the week during which I can sleep in for a long period of time and in general, act like a slug. Until I have such a day, I feel generally completely worn out. This was never a problem in the past, back in high school when I could go for several weeks without having a day to lounge around. Now, I feel utterly worn out without it.

I believe the reason is that living on my own creates a weight of additional responsibilities. I am the only reason I have to get out of bed every morning. No one else is going to command or encourage me to get up. Should I choose to, I could stay in bed the entire day if I let myself. I think it must take a toll on a person to be the only one they can rely on. This is the daily exhaustion that comes with being an adult. So every day, I go about my business, getting this and that done, lest I face the consequences of inaction in the future. Every moment of the day, I am thinking of what needs to get done, what responsibilities I must tend to. So there really aren't very many moments when I'm totally relaxed. Thus, the only time I have to really forget about the world is that period between sleep and wakefulness when my mind gets to wander and float aimlessly in my imagination. I don't notice anything when I'm actually asleep. But when I'm half-conscious and still abed, I'm aware that I don't have to think about much of anything, and I can finally let my neurotic mind rest.

So I need those breaks when I sleep in for most of the day. It's the only way I feel I can recharge. Because the routine of life is the only reason I have to get up every morning, and right now, it's not quite motivating enough.

So happy right now

My Kung Fu Panda 2 fanfic has been getting positive reviews from some high profile writers in the fandom. I can't hold all these feels.

To have people I don't know tell me that my story is interesting and enjoyable is more than I could ever ask for as a writer. It's one thing when your friends say you write a good story because they tend to be a bit more biased in your favor. But when someone has nothing to go on but how well you executed your craft, and they say it is good and they liked it...!?! What can compare to such excitement?