She can’t always be sunshine.
I’ve been reading old entries from my old blogs, and lately I’ve been missing those days. Those days when my heart was full of nostalgia, and the pictures were brighter in my head. All I have now is my humdrum existence, school and home, those seemingly endless commutes. I’m not complaining. I’m not even sad. I remember I took an online test on a whim back when I believed in those things, some personality test or another, and it told me that I had the tendency to “never be where I was, always looking forward and back”. Maybe it’s true. Or maybe it’s just the way things are right now.
I’ve been writing stories in my head. Scenes and conversations happen so naturally, then they flicker and fade out the moment I take a pen to a piece of paper. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been feeling anything real. My diaries contain nothing but the same old words, the same old despair. I’m tired of reassuring myself that yes yes yes, everything is okay. And it is okay, perhaps too comfortable and easy. And who am I to complain, right?
It’s just me. Maybe I’ve been getting too comfortable in my silence. It doesn’t help that it’s much easier to keep things to myself now. The filter inside my head has clogged up so much that even the truth gets trapped inside. I think maybe I am censoring myself too much just because I think I won’t be able to express myself so that people would understand. Maybe I built my walls too high.
Funny, when I was busy being open-hearted and hurting and vulnerable, this was exactly what I wanted. A thick fortress where nothing might get to me. I was tired of feeling too much, and I wanted respite. And now I have it. Ridiculous as this sounds, those online test results resonate like some bizarre haunting. She is never where she is.
Today, though, I had a moment.
I was walking down Tip top shop to my house. The wind was blowing and the sun was shining high in the noontime sky. I was walking on the grass beside the walkways because I’d rather have mud than water on my shoes (hah). That squelching sensation underneath my feet was wonderful. It made me remember days after heavy storms back in Sungai Buloh, when the swingset pits were filled with water and the school lawns were soft with mud and wet grass. And then here, in this city, in this town, I’m walking on the mud amidst leafless trees underneath a cloudless sky, feeling the sunshine warming my face as if winter never happened. And I knew I was alright. I was fine. I was okay. It was not the desperate reassurance I have written in my journals when I really felt empty and numb and alone. But it was the real kind of okay, the kind that illuminates, even for the briefest of moments. It was enough to make me write this.
