The Unofficial Guide to Life
For the first time in forever, I went to a café. Going to a café is a very normal thing to do but even normal things become thrilling when you haven’t experienced them in a while. Sitting at that little table, I felt like an old person revisiting a childhood home or looking through photo albums and reliving distant memories. Things came back; I remembered.
Continue reading “Remembering”
It’s May, the most gentle month of the year. So far, it’s rained every day and I’m wearing a winter jacket again but I don’t care and neither does anybody else. It rained on my walk today, the type of rain that falls sideways and makes your hair stick to your face. I passed shops I had never seen before, saw signs of life in places that were once deserted. Chairs and tables have appeared in empty spaces. People, too, seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, their shapes visible behind glass windows where I once only saw my own reflection.
Continue reading “Coming Alive”
Cherry blossoms combine every lovely, soft, and delicate thing in the world. I see them and I think about happiness, and their petals in puddles, and that spring I spent in Japan, being very young in a very old country.
Continue reading “Blooming”
In the time that I’ve sat here doing absolutely nothing, the sky has turned dark and I can no longer see anything outside my window. I’m not surprised that the darkness came; I’m surprised that the light lasted this long.
Continue reading “Light at 9pm”
When I get tired of lying on my bed, looking up at the ceiling, I sometimes lie on the floor. There’s something I find comforting about the hardness of the surface beneath me. It feels supportive and solid, and I like knowing that this is the bottom and the ground is holding me, and that I am safe.
Continue reading “Looking Up”
Finding yourself on the road again is a bit like going back in time and a bit like going towards the future. It’s like the past because the scenery blurring in streaks across the window are full of ghosts: former places you used to go to or abandoned landscapes. You’re moving forwards but the melodies you’re listening to are full of memories. Only the songs that meant something to you last spring, mean something entirely different now or don’t mean anything at all.
Continue reading “On the Road”
Apparently, teenagers go through a phase where all they do, or want to do, is sleep. This was something I never experienced – but then again, I don’t think I experienced a lot of ‘normal’ teenager activity. In the times before, I didn’t have time to nap or feel tired enough to sleep during the middle of the day. Eventually, I reached a point where I physically couldn’t ease my body into slumber because it felt awkward and I felt like there were better things to do with my time than close the curtain while the sun was shining.
Continue reading “Naps”
The British daffodils I bought for 0.99p are dead. They’ve shrunk and withered and yet, they’re still sitting on my windowsill and every time I walk towards the apartment, I look up in search of my window with the dead daffodils. After all this time, I should probably throw them out but it’s just like me to cling to dead things and hope that they’ll come back to life.
Continue reading “Dead Daffodils”
There is no denying the wild horse in us, said Virgina Woolf. There’s more to the quote but that’s the part I like best. Essentially, the quote is about passion which means it’s about feeling things deeply which means it’s about having a heart. Most of the time, I don’t think people feel things to their full extent and I blame that on a lot of things, mainly fear. We are afraid of being vulnerable, and of being too much. Also, we forget how to feel things. Like many things growing up, the permission to experience true emotion is trampled out of us from a young age. It’s hardly appropriate to be fully governed by emotions after the age of two.
Continue reading “Wild Horses”