The Unofficial Guide to Life
Reading on a windowsill is not just sitting on a windowsill with your nose in a book. Since the beginning, it’s meant something more to me. The image of some ideal life I wanted to achieve, a symbol of being luxuriously lazy, of having an infinite amount of time, of being young enough or old enough to be free from real life.
Continue reading “Reading on a Windowsill”
My past relationship with time was twisted. I had too much of it and then I never had enough. When I was in elementary school, I remember tapping my fingers on my desk waiting for Christmas break. Even when the air was cold, we rushed outside but we couldn’t rush fast enough: it was only lunch recess.
Continue reading “My Friend, Time”
It’s been one month since I sat down to write a blog post which I never ended up finishing. It is nearly the end of June now; it is summer. The world is soft and green, stretching out like the perfect lawn in front of the perfect house, or else like a very fine afternoon, or a very soft blanket. I’m 29 now, and in a new relationship, and applying for a Masters program at the University of Edinburgh. I’ve also had one dose of the vaccine and sat in bars, bookshops, and restaurants. I’ve felt very happy, felt very confused, felt like I stood up for myself and then felt like I should have done a better job of it.
Continue reading “On Life Going On”
Life can be very, very blue until suddenly it is not. I often think about those winter mornings when it was always dark and I was always cold, rushing to places I didn’t want to be and worrying I was too old when I was really very young. There weren’t too many good things about those mornings – being half-asleep and fighting for the spot by the door on the skytrain – except for the sky.
Continue reading “Pink Skies”
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”
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”
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.
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In sophisticated settings, people are always drinking whisky. It’s a real grown up drink: the classy men and the alluring Anna Kareninas of this world drink whisky. So do larger than life people, and people who are falling in love, and young and stupid people. It’s the type of drink I imagine writers drink, the bohemian ones who smoke a lot of cigarettes and never sleep during the night.
Continue reading “Whisky, Whisky, Whisky”
Everybody knows that change is inevitable but somehow it still manages to take us by surprise. When I woke up this morning it was cloudy, and then it was pouring rain, and then it was hailing, and finally it was sunny. Each time the weather changed, I looked up from my computer screen in wonderment. I thought for sure the sun would stick around this time; I thought for sure the rain would keep on falling. The sky looked so certain, and confident, and set in its ways. But it changed all the same, unexpectedly and loudly and quietly, all in the span of a few hours. ‘That’s Edinburgh for you,’ people say. Yes, but it is also people, and plans. It is also everything.
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Things I Learned Growing Up 