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frayed, interlaced
Realizing how lonely it is, to be unable to put expression and thoughts into words towards those you wish to know better. To be unable to tie the intent and meaning you have into the words you weave, wish to feel less fleeting and empty in passing- to wish you can share any moment that doesn't fade through the pauses, slip between the cracks in scarcity. To not have the energy, the mutual interests, to feel like you can't bring to bear anything that fosters any lasting relation. Familiarity and acknowledgement in the nuances that govern such delicately metered dynamics- or is it all fabricated by the mind? What if it's not? Unable to express how the threads weave together between one stitch and the next, eyelids droop as the flesh overclocks and computes, counted silverware dwindles and the cycle begins anew.
Would fading into afterthought and accepting all that could never be sting less than brushing against a just out-of-reach reality? Be content in serving as a spectacle every now and then, perhaps. Too much to think about- silence becomes a catharsis that perpetuates. A self-made prison.
Too different.
Too strange.
I speak softly and take comfort in words spilled forth in a space tucked in a corner where few think to look. Hello, hello.
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New Year's resolutions...
...and reflecting back on 2024 a little bit. Or a lot a bit. This is the first and last time I want to dive into this so deeply in public, and a closure to what's been happening this past decade. I don't think people read these anyway.
cw: heavy talk, body image, death/suicide ideation.
2023 didn't exactly end on a great note- depending on how great you'd call being nonchalantly pushed out of the only home you've known, being told you aren't. But then again, things have built up over the years, leading to these ultimatums that leave you sitting there, thinking 'so this may as well happen'. It just so happens that selling the house and forcing you out of your only secure shelter after it being (allegedly) written to you in Will- your pleas being responded to with 'It was Never Going To Be Our Forever Home'- might be just a little bit devastating. Dread and fear reacted to with confusion- why are you so upset? We're just selling away your life.
But then again, I was never listened to.
The house becomes old news, because you wanted to move on with your life- I was an adult, and should learn to be independent. Because, yeah- at a certain age, an objective threshold of time marking how long you've existed in this world, you're supposed to know what you need to know, to be able to do what you need to do. Right?
So why didn't I? Why was I left behind, grasping for what comfort I could, the ticking of the clock a slowly tightening noose always echoing in the back of my skull? There were times I couldn't see what came next. I didn't know what came next.
There were only a few things I knew:
- find and cling to the joys that make it bearable.
- eat enough so your body doesn't eat itself.
- loans are due on the 18th of each month.
This is the meaning of your miserable life. Make the most of it or die.
Nothing was ever enough to satisfy. Maybe I did want to hear the words 'I'm proud of you' without dismissing me within the next breath. Asking for and receiving help was always a double-edged sword. To be given it with a condition, an expectancy. A hand extended to help you up, just enough to lift you out, but you'll promise results...
...right?
A body that doesn't break down, a mind that keeps up- oh, you're just making it up, making excuses. Holding yourself back. Pray. Believe. Oh, it's just so difficult for me to watch you struggle, it breaks my heart, I'm worried about you.
I won't help you, though. No, rather than outright refusing to help, I'll make it so that you won't want it.
Stress is a part ββββββ of life.
How long would that help last, how much would I have to beg to be heard? How many bouts of sickness that would leave me in more debt, until I decide it would be far better to succumb? Met with a hand waved- you'll make it. You'll survive. You'll be fine. I'm praying for you. So smart, so talented, so tenderly my hands would be held as I would be told such things over and over. The broken and forgotten promises, dismissed as if they meant nothing. The countless dreams where I cried and begged for you to listen, to look at me, I take the knife and twist it, splay my entrails wide open only to be met with your back turned, left to rot and die. A sacrifice as if to a god who would not listen. Over and over and over and over again. (I spare you this knowledge, this awareness, for it would only serve to haunt you and change nothing.)
It would only repeat, until I wouldn't be. And I'm not interested in waiting until it all takes me or I take myself for you to bury your head in your hands as the salt stings saying that you should have listened. No, not when for the first time in my life I can finally say that I love being alive.
So I left.
It was a hard thing to do in practice, but an easy decision. My fiancΓ© and I have been wanting to figure out what we'd do to live together, considering we were long distance international, and his situation was secure and welcome. So why the fuck not? In December of 2023, we drove across the country. All 20 or so hours on the road, car filled with as much shit as it could carry. I wouldn't have been able to do it without him or his family's help.
Before then, though, I was asked to stay long enough for my mother and in-law to come see me off in person- on Christmas, after their family plans, and so our schedule was adjusted against our convenience. They arrived, greeted us, went to bed. The next day, the in-law's family arrived to move stuff out of the house. They took the beds, but I had been promised on the phone the day prior that a mattress would stay so that my fiancΓ©'s older mother, who would drive the next day, would be able to sleep somewhere that wasn't the floor. But as always, her mind changed- the mattress had to go. Why did the mattress have to go so fucking bad? They were suggested to find a hotel, because, well...
She thought we'd have left by then.
When we drove off the next morning, she cried and said she'll miss me. She says a lot of things. I didn't look back once.
For most of 2024, it was more of the same routine, scrounging up money to pay for loans each month. But I wasn't alone. I wasn't struggling to feed myself. I wasn't demanded of things I couldn't provide. It's something, to be told by friends you call with every day to tell you that you sound so much happier. I hadn't even noticed.
Nevertheless, the stress of meeting student loan deadlines would persist, shackled to it as I was. (I'd be prodded if a payment were even a day late. Her credit was riding on it too, and she wouldn't let me forget it.) I got really sick in the summer- chills, almost ER-level fevers, and a sore throat so agonizing I couldn't swallow at all. No food, no water. I was taken to the hospital, but thankfully all it took was a short consultation and a prescription of some heavier painkillers.
And the craziest part of all that is that what would have likely sunk me into more debt back home only cost... less than 30 USD, if I remember correctly. Uninsured.
After that it was clearer than ever I couldn't keep going on like this, so with the encouragement of my closest friends, I confronted her, only to be met with the same shit I've always been given. It always came down the same thing: get a real job, be independent, don't rely on anyone else. Ignoring my disabilities, my outright pleas that continuing on like this will kill me someday. Nothing was ever enough- not the sunken gaps between my ribs, not the sweat and burning skin, not the tear-stricken motionlessness of a dying light laying there as you ask it to talk to you, tell you what's wrong. If you couldn't be convinced when it was all right in front of you, how could words thousands of miles away do any better? Many hours, days; of tears, overthinking, tension, and mental torture condensed into a long string of conversations are being glazed over here. I don't want to recall it.
I would never be heard. My friends were there for me at its roughest and I wouldn't have been able to do it without them. After so much deliberating, I decided to stop paying. I told her not to talk to me again.
There was a lot of fear in making this decision. What with my situation and all its intricacies held- I was afraid. Afraid of what she might do. Of what could happen. What could happen to me. To people that may get dragged into it all.
And so, a couple months later, she comes with another message.
She's removed me from the loan. Refinanced under her own name.
I'm free.
I'm free.
A decade of slowly being pulled under, becoming disabled, sick and sicker, frail and frailer, poor and poorer, and it was that easy. Just like fucking that.
Sometimes I still don't know what to think of it. How a decade of my life was stolen away by decisions I didn't make, made worse by no fault of mine- all remedied in a mere instant on a whim. Something that always could have been done, but decided against because my suffering should be a lesson. But I've become so tired, so ragged that I can't even be angry about it.
Just... relieved.
I've been tired.
So, so tired.
It's crazy to me that it all happened in October. I've spent a lot of time since then learning to enjoy things again, learning to feel like a human fucking being again. Learning to move on, to live for myself and my new life here.
2025 is around the corner, and I have a few aspirations, but only one true resolution I'm going to keep.
I'm going to live.
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I wanted to write something
...when it comes to externalizing thoughts and feelings, how do you determine the what, how, why, and where?
I wanted to write something. Something in its own space- words I want to put somewhere out there, not intended for anyone but myself (and anyone else who may stumble upon it). Something thrown to the wind of the storm, not quite a message in a bottle, but something left out in the world for someone to find. Perhaps under a rock, or in a hollowed tree. A rotting log among the bugs that make their home in it. That's my long winded way of saying that I don't think anyone will pay much attention to this site or blog very much and I'm just gonna say whatever I feel like.
I wanted to write something that sorts my thoughts, lines them up, lets me draw lines in between to make something that makes sense until I can figure something out, even if not right now. I wanted to figure out just what this blog will be, and what it means to me.
It's been a bit since the crushing weight of student debt has been lifted off my shoulders, in such a way that I tire to even think of how I can even convey it again, with how much I've run the thoughts ragged in my own head. Yet in the wake of such relief, I still have responsibilities, the dregs of all the self-perceived disappointments that almost a decade in debt and everything it brought left behind. I'm free- but I'm left to pick up the pieces. It's left scars in ways I sometimes can't even follow, and it's harder still to navigate and decode what exactly it is that affects what and where, to the point of not even knowing where this thought train is taking me. But it's something I continue to run my fingers over, over and over, trying to make out its shape, where it diverges and comes together, what it's trying to say.
Whether it's trying to say anything at all.
Websites- I've already talked how for the longest time I felt beholden to the idea of something professional, something that does the job, impresses prospective seekers- but for what? I'm never going to be employed, not by anyone who would care about that kind of shit. Disabled, unreliable, unpredictable, undesirable. But that's fine, I don't care.
Making this site has been a catharsis, a freedom, a wresting away from everything I've been compressed into in order to conform to a standard imposed upon me since birth. Being as profane as I want, returning to pet sites, planning shrines, making lists of the things I like, showcasing things in a way that sparks the synapses in my brain all to say that this was so needed. How silly it feels, that.
But it is what it is. And it's going to be okay.