I kind of miss writing!
Uncanny
I have experienced life in its absurdity - in its persistent, whimsical ability to show you that change is the only thing constant in this world. I have experienced blinding passion, of the sort that makes you wonder, “Is there anything else I want more in this world? No. Nothing.” I have experienced disillusionment - when I possess the thing I allegedly desire, I realize it is something else I want. This has happened many times, as if life were mocking my indecision. It makes me realize that I, indeed, am so, so human.
I have experienced bleakness and loss, knowing the only thing I can do is watch. I am slowly coming to terms that the grandmother who practically raised me is now but a child herself. I have to remember she is not the person I knew. I have to swallow my tears when she asks me, “Who are you?” I have also experienced the shallow kinds of bleakness from stupid but true realizations like oh God, I’m slowly but surely turning into my mother. Life is stubborn in its inevitability. It is hopeless. There is nothing you can do which someone else hasn’t done before (unless you are the next Einstein/Newton/Picasso/Plath/Nabokov/Gandhi, which, chances are, you aren’t).
And yet, when faced with the meaningless of life, I choose to side with hope. I am not the next world changer. I cannot stop my grandmother’s slow deterioration. And I sure as hell can’t stop myself turning into my mother. I still, however, feel the unquenchable desire to live. This world is mine, in the sense that while I am here, there is nothing stopping me from constructing meaning with what am I given. Nobody is going to care twenty years after I die, but who cares? I would rather people care about the living, bouncing, potential-filled (somehow) version of me now rather than the me that will not be in x years.
I will place meaning into this uncanny inevitability. I will graduate (without honors). I will go to law school. I will do something I am excellent at. I will stop drinking and partying (eventually, just not now please). I will not, however, stop doing happily stupid things. My grandmother will live on in what she has passed down to me. I will marry a many kinds of wonderful man who will love me even when I turn into my mother. I will live all sort of cheesily disgusting (in other words, beautiful) cliches you think you only see in movies but slowly realize, you see more in everyday life. I will fill my life with moments that make me absurdly sad, happy, in between moments and I will have to be content with how they make me feel at that moment. Isn’t it enough, I guess, that it brought you to tears, laughter, contemplation at one point?
One day, as an old woman, I will remember what I wrote and will think how young I was. Just the way I do now, in the strange pretension of the young. I will probably have lived all those cliches and I will have lived them with gusto. I will know by then that the things we have experienced bring us to greater highs or lows than we can ever anticipate. I hope I will still know by then that the best choice is to orient oneself towards hope. I mean- who cares if the modern world is run by Putin/People’s Republic of China/Obama/the Kardashians? I have built my own world, and it is mine. It makes me (and the ones I’ve surrounded myself with) feel something, somehow.
And one day, when I face the only surety that is death, I will face it like every night I’ve lived and say, well, at least I had a lot of fun.
