Today is the first day i've wanted to go home.
But then arose the confusion of, what is home? It's not LA, I barely spend time there anymore, it's not New York, because I don't have a home there and there's a lingering anxiety whenever I think about New York and having to find a place and settle in again. The older I get, the more I feel my heart split, a little piece here, a little piece there, mostly embedded in memories of feeling comfortable in a place. Is that why I like to spend time alone, undistracted by the present, thinking of the past so I can be at home because in the present, the concept of home is only an abstract source of confusion?
Then comes the question, what is memory? In Hiroshima Mon Amour, He said to Her that he'd always remember her as the symbol for love's forgetfulness, and she replied that she was forgetting him already. It's a crushing thought to know that someone that means the world to you now may be forgotten some day, how feelings and your identity are so dependent on whom you form your attachments to, and those aren't permanent. And then there's that crevice in which the threatening thought of mortality can creep in, nothing is permanent. That's why, in my happiest moments, I'm simultaneously sad, knowing that this moment is impermanent and in the future will mean very little to me. Maybe I'll remember it wrong, maybe I'll even forget to remember it, maybe it just won't mean as much, when right now, it feels like everything. I'm afraid I'll forget I was happy, rendering happiness absolutely meaningless. Because if happiness were meaningless, then what's my purpose?
I always thought that I wanted to be happy, and that's what I was fighting for, going to school, building a life. But I realized, I am happy. Maybe what I'm trying to do is create a space and temporal reality that is stable, where I can feel comfortable. Thus, a home. I want to create a home. But this thought is ironic to me, because I'm someone who always runs from home, someone who ran to New York to be far away from home, then Shanghai, and now Paris. Always running away from comfort, because it scares me, so why am I trying to create my own, my own worst fear? Then this becomes, my worst fear is my dream. Why can two concepts drive each other that are so distinct in our minds? It's like love and hate, they seem like separate sides of the coin, when really, they're fueled by the same emotional impulses. I hate change, yet I love it. I hate comfort, yet I love it. I hate who I am right now, yet I love it. I hate you, yet I love you.
It's a struggle being anything definitive. I guess in that way, the only definitive is my fluidity.
Today I looked at pictures of myself. Before I graduated high school I had this innocence in my eyes that has since disappeared. I couldn't shake the feeling that maybe I'll always be this way now, there's no way to recover that girl anymore. I can't predict myself anymore. I see patterns, but only in retrospect. And as I get older, the spirals of my patterns wind tighter and tighter, until they turn into tiny coils. They just repeat and I'm completely aware and even manipulate the metal to go in a certain way because it's so predictable that it's comfortable. Comfortable. Which I hate, so I spiral OUT of control into a different spiral, to create the coil again, and spring into something else.
this is the time we draw psychological distance, because the end is approaching fast. this is the time in a friendship when tensions rise and you fight before the other departs. it's an airbag, it's a way to cushion the blow if you convince yourself hard enough you hate the place now, you won't be so hurt later when you leave it. maybe that's why i'm feeling the way i am, disconnected, in disarray. this place that i love has grown so threatening to me. the cusp, always the cusp. i'm on the cusp, i'm a gemini taurus, and i can never predict which side is going to venture out. i always think i'm one way, to find that i'm actually the other.
Why is it that periods of depression and melancholy feel so much more believable, more real, more tangible, than all the good moments in my life? they're fleeting, and i'm busy living, too busy to process and remember the moments themselves. they feel out of touch because i can't recreate them despite how hard i try.
happiness is a little death each time. one more marker for your life passing. depression feels like a pause.
the irony of all of this is that i've found that home isn't anywhere permanently, and that it's within yourself. all this time i'd been going around and around trying to find my home, my people, and leaving always, out of discomfort or because it just floated away into the past. and it took all this traveling to figure out that my search has been in vain because i am home, and i gotta deal with it.
yesterday as I walked to the train with my french teacher, i tried to explain to her how i was feeling in french. and i shudder at the thought of the immensity of what i told her. it's hard to believe, seeing me on a day to day basis, that i've experienced so much in such a short amount of time. it's hard for me to digest. but if my life weren't this pace, i'd be terribly bored. maybe in better health, but very very bored. i have to wonder, if my life style contributes to the way i feel, or is it remedying it? will i ever be at peace with mundanity and easy patterns? will i burn out?
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