Echoes.

I lean over the railing that separates me from the gushing, frothing water below. Drawing my jacket closer and hugging myself, I breathe out white in the clear still winter air. A dancing flickering reflection of my black-and-white swathed form peers back.

A black covered figure appears behind me in the reflection and puts her hand on my shoulder. Smiles. Kisses my neck. I gasp.

The cold wind whistles through my ears and the bite in it brings me back to earth. Echoes of music are drowned out as my misty eyes gaze at the water in focus again.
High notes, low notes. Smiles and tears and a lot of hurt. My heart on the floor, stomped over. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

A cold, desolate desert, and the water that was below me has vanished. The barren, frozen wasteland that seemed to be my life after you left me. Impossible to navigate. To survive.

Deserts and endless oceans later, I come to myself and see what’s left. Wounds and scars slit open again. Very little left to salvage.

Slowly, very slowly, learning to smile truly again. Smiling into a mirror to make sure it reaches the sad empty eyes.

Fake and real smiles later, going through a night without dreaming about you. Having silly dreams about cartoon characters again.

Dreams, nightmares and sleepless nights later, finding it in myself to talk to other people. Without grieving you at least once in every conversation.

Many conversations later, making new friends. Trying to look forward to the lifetime I’d overlooked in my childish stubbornness to remain sad about you. That I am still young, all of seventeen years and six months old. Not ancient, not here since the dawn of time.

Very little had been left to salvage, so I built a new self.

Reconstructions and recoveries later, looking into a mirror and feeling truly proud of myself.

High notes, low notes. Smiles and tears and a lot of hurt. My heart on the floor, stomped over. I still remember that.

But I’ve left it all behind.

Malinda Lo and Veronica Roth.

She's one of 'em.

One of those writers you just get obsessed with, because reading their stuff isn't reading the same thing over and over again. They always give you something different.

J.K. Rowling was the first on that list, and then there was an embarrassing Stephenie Meyer phase (in my defence, I know FB like a page called 'Bella Swan is the biggest setback in the feminist movement since the sandwich'), and also Holly Black.

Malinda Lo caught my eye with her novel Ash, which is supposed to be a retelling of Cinderella, with a twist.

Rephrasing required.

It is a twisted retelling of Cinderella.

Strangely enough, I enjoyed this novel. A lot. Her almost ethereal writing style just holds you in a place which is but one town and one forest, yet a magical dimension on its own.

Now she's got out Huntress, which unlike the previous novel which had the Cinderella happy ending, this one didn't have a happily ever after. Even better.

The lead picked a destiny over love.

And embarrassingly enough, I couldn't find the book online and was simply dying to find out what happens...so I went to this 'Library On The Move' blog and just...read...the synopsis. Ending and all. *cringe*

In my defence, I have no idea if the book is even available here, and since I couldn't get an ebook...first and last time. Promise.

Anyhoo, the lead in Huntress can abandon her destiny as a sage (which requires celibacy as a vow) for the girl she loves (yes, Malinda Lo seems to have a...thing for lesbianism, in both her novels) or she can give up what seems to be the love of her life.
And contrary to what we would all like to think, 'Love conquers all' accompanied by a roll of our eyes, she gives up her love. She becomes a sage.
I don't know why I find this ending satisfying, since I'm generally a silly hopeless romantic at heart (try not to show it) but I do. Makes you feel like there are more important things. Something I knew before and have to reconcile with - again.

Veronica Roth, on the other hand, seems to have brought in a completely different element to fantasy, because I can't put down her book to any other genre. It was beautiful. Just, ohmyGod addictive. I dreamt about it.
Amazingly crafted, you can't for a second doubt the world they live in, though if I ever suggested it in real life I would be risking getting locked up in a padded cell myself.
A world where we're divided based on our qualities and choices? Not race, religion, gender. Based on whether I'm honest (Candor) or brave (Dauntless), selfless (Abnegation) or inquisitive (Erudite), or just peaceful (Amity), I have a faction. And my faction is more important than the family I was brought up in - "faction before blood".

(Read the book for the rest - believe me, worth the three hours. I could just provide a synopsis, but I just finished it and I would've HATED it if someone told me the whole story.)

Of course, I could immediately relate to the chief character - that's the difficulty, establishing a lead we can all understand. And there's the hunky lead guy - mysteriously named Four. (yes, he is my new fictional-character-crush. I haven't had any in three years now, and thought I was over it. Thank you, Veronica Roth.)

But he's just so...
(No no. Don't get started.)

Aaaaanyway, the book was a massive success, staying on the NY Bestseller's list for ELEVEN WEEKS (Man!) and the sequel, 'Insurgent' is still being written. The tentative release date has been set as May 2012 (oh noez. Countdowns. And I thought it would end with Harry Potter.)

And there's Four...

Right. Signing off for now. READ THE BOOKS.

Black Swan.

I feel evil.
I feel it becoming a part of me.

If there was one thing I knew about me, that I liked, it was that I'm not evil. I may make mistakes, I may be wrong a lot, but I wasn't evil.

Evil is bad that thinks it's good.

Am I bad? And living under the delusion that I'm good?

What is good and bad?

Good is certainly not thinking "muahahaha" when someone is crying on the phone with you.
Especially not when the someone happens to be a person you care about. Or did.

I feel hideously guilty sometimes.

I feel like it's not my fault sometimes.

Sometimes I feel like I've just grown up.

Is this irreversible? I know the answer to this one.

Someone put it pretty well for me: I feel capable of hatred.
Is hatred evil, or bad?
Only when it isn't self-righteous, or reasonable.

I only know that some part of me has changed, that I now have a personal demon to train and control.

Sigh.

Love. (Yes, we shall discuss it. In a monologue.)

A book I read recently made me rethink. A lot.
Yes, the book was by Paulo Coelho. I gather I am not the only one on whom he has this sort of an effect.

The book is titled Eleven Minutes, and focuses around the eleven minutes of sexual pleasure around which, or so it seems, the world is centred nowadays.

From literature to art to pop culture, there is always a separate theme titled 'erotica' or 'sensuality' or something similar - always to draw in those most fascinated by this particular aspect of human life, which, timewise, occupies very little of our lives.
I speak generally. I do not know how many of my imaginary readers spend their lives like someone affected by a death-by-sex faerie. (In simpler words, like a sex addict.) (Reference to: the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning.)

Unfortunately I happen to be a part of the sex-is-just-sex generation, where no actual love or affection is required to complete this act that was once considered divine-ish. Call me pagan, but that made much more sense than what we have these days - 'random fucks' to use the common lingo.

But it makes me ponder the basis of everything - love, sex and everything in between.

What is love, really? Mr Coelho insists that true love is having but not possessing. Fine lines.
He also says that reciprocation for true love always exists - there is just the little matter of how blind people can be, or how much is needed for the realisation.
I am not going to go into the specifications or definitions of love - that differs according to who you are.
But once you love someone, and they love you too, what do you expect of it?

I've always thought that when I fall in love, when I meet The One, I will be with them forever. Or as long as forever is for our sad little mortal lives.
But is that right?
It's hard to set someone free. Even harder to wait for them to come back. Not knowing if they will, or if there's some other pretty little bird around the corner.
Because the whole bloody world is filled with thieves who feel half and fake half. I would know.
Point being, if love is giving someone all of you, gift-wrapped, then...
Well that's a major risk - what if they don't value all of you?

But if you can't give someone all of you, do you trust them? Isn't trust essential to love?

We're living in a time of parodies - to everything. Faithfulness is no longer being true to someone lifelong, it's having affairs you feel guilty about later, or decide that it was merely 'passing' and meant nothing. Selfishness reigns supreme, and people who fail to keep up get trampled. Used.
This is the bizarre era where people have sex before thinking about whether or not they even like their partner.

Wanted, a person with appropriate sex organs, preferably good-looking, in bed tonight. No character or personality traits required.

Prostitution was, is and always will be for the overflow that apparently cannot find solace in their respective partners; they need someone 'new' in bed.
Appalling. So we no longer control our urges, they control us. How long before we turn into right animals that go around sleeping with the 'better specimen', under our Pradas and D&Gs?
Sophistication covers a lot of vile things.

And then of course we have various torture devices like S&M and what not - apparently we cannot find satisfaction without experiencing pain of some sort.
So we're pain addicts now. Why? Has it become part of our genetic programming, suffering? Or is simple sick-mindedness, where we've just experienced too many good things in life and are afraid of the bad that must come to balance it out, and just seek to inflict pain on ourselves than leave it to karma or nature?

I can't make head or tail of the reasons, rituals and pure paradoxes of our world.

Argh. I suppose it's a good thing I'm easily distracted.

Black And White. (Oh dear, how cliched.)

Fresh out of school is an interesting place to be, pardon the understatement. Not particularly enjoyable at times, very trying and certainly confusing, if not completely baffling.
One of the most ‘interesting’ bits, I would say, would be my hunt for a job.

Living in a zone where working under the age of eighteen is not permissible, wanting to be independent can be a true pain. That’s not to say that opportunities are limited, no, they barely exist.

But we try to make do, and one of these instances of seeking employment led me to a certain music and dance centre, where I was angling upon the opportunity to take on a job as a receptionist at worst and a part-time dance teacher at best. The owner of this particular organisation was a woman who I respect strictly for her energy, mental and physical. She took me on trial basis as an emcee for the annual function of the centre.

Public speaking has always been one of those things I knew I could be good at if I tried, but I’ve always sought a non-verbose way of getting my point across and hence that remained undeveloped. While this was not a task of a nature that I had not tackled before, I wasn’t happy about what I had to do. Stages weren’t exactly my happy place.

But desperate as I was for summer employment, I talked myself through it and the day of the event arrived. Without going into details, I could say that the event had been…good, certainly, but not because of us. The emcees. Maybe it was my fault for letting my frustration with the light and sound crew show. Maybe it was the fault of the technical department. Whatever it was, it is not the key.

When we were called for a meeting later - me and the other two emcees, along with the owner - she made it plain that she wasn’t really jumping for joy over my performance in particular. She blamed it on the fact that I for one, always having been something of a tomboy, wasn’t exactly well-versed with the art of makeup, and that my notes were handwritten.

I’m somewhat meek and didn’t really want to say, “Oh, please, give me a break, get your stuff in order first,” though it was certainly running through my mind. I merely said, “But I tried…”
And here is the key. What she said in reply, with what I might call a very mean look, was, “There is no trying. There’s doing, and there’s not doing.”
While she is clearly not a woman of many words, her meaning couldn’t have come across better, with all the soft backlighting of a naked bulb.

Somehow this was what really made something snap inside me. This was where all my respect for her melted away. Suddenly I couldn’t see eye to eye with her any more, literally or figuratively, and was almost glad that my chances of working there had dropped to practically zero.
As I stayed up late at night thinking her words over, I realised that everything was so easily deemed as black and white.

In theory, I like the world of idealists. Their world is simple. There is logic to everything. There’s good and there’s bad, there’s doing and there’s not doing, there’s black and there’s white. In theory it all makes sense.
In practice I can make neither head nor tail of this.
I don’t understand how they fail to see that vast stretch of grey that bridges the black and white.
Of course there is trying. Trying is what is the difference between failure and success, or as the lady-owner so wisely put it, doing and not doing.

So maybe I am not comfortable onstage yet and my makeup talents need unearthing and refining, maybe I am no good at hiding frustration and I need to slow down while talking. Maybe I simply need to get better at bluffing when people decide to tune their guitars just before their performance.
Whatever it is that I have to learn, I know I’m only going to get there by trying. There’s a long arid greyness that gets whiter and whiter as I progress, and it’s never going to be perfectly white because there’s only so much I can do about things that I’m not good at. Plus nobody’s perfect, right?

Where I stand today is only of consequence if I know where I have to go tomorrow, and that works vice versa too. So while I thank that woman for showing me where I lack, I disagree with her worldview completely.

Because there is no black and white. There is only grey, and degrees of darkness or lightness to it.
Trying is what will bridge my today to a hopefully better tomorrow.
And it will not be the circumstances that will have improved, no.

I will be a lighter grey.

Running for Time.

Have you noticed how time seems to just run away screaming just when you think that there's a lot of it?
Give it time. Give me time.
And before you know it, with all your brooding over it, it's gone.
Gone, gone gone.

Never to come back.

It's true that right now I'm stuck in this massive abyss of an interstice, between school and college, between heartbreak and moving on, between love and friendship and nothing at all.

(Reference to: Friends Lovers or Nothing on my brilliant new John Mayer cd. *aaa*)

So basically stuck in an interstice of periods, time should be one thing I'm willing to allow the passing of, regardless of the utter pointlessness of my permission - I mean, as if time is at my back and call and halts at my merest suggestion.
Hah, I wish.

But still, we like to delude ourselves about our own control over things, so I'm supposed to be ok with time passing yes? I'm supposed to be freakin' out of my mind with all this excess time at my hands and just want it out of my way. I'm supposed to want to get to college already and turn eighteen and apply for my driver's licence (whee).

And here I am, an idiot if there ever was one, reading up old diary entries and things I should really really not even look at, given the delicate stance of all things around me right now.

So your first kiss is always your first kiss and you sometimes feel lonely and want to feel it all over again, and winning that school competition you never even got your certificate for was one of the most exhilarating things that happened to you.
So what?

Must move on.
Must move on.

And it's so so easy to think that you are, getting caught up in little tasks of tomorrow (read college applications, Transfer certificates etc) but the truth is that when you lie in bed at night, you dream about those school corridors and people that have quite unwittingly become a part of you.
Love 'em or hate 'em, they're there.
Deal with it.

And then you have a reality check and realise, all in a rush, that you're not ready. Stark terror seizes you when you realise that where you are still has some light shed on it by the past, but the future is this big black something you don't recognise.

Talk about pessimism.

And urgh, suddenly you wish that this interstice could go on forever and ever and leave you with some ghost of an excuse to just hold on to everything and not let go.

But the excuse is slipping away fast, like time. Time is the excuse. I'd better think of a new one.

Ah, life, and thy misery.

The First Time I've Cried For You In a Long Time

My tears are falling down
even surprising me;
I didn't see them coming
so sudden and so free.

They speak of times
they speak of a place
A scar in my heart
that your fingers trace
A dream that flew
off a high terrace
Before getting lost
in outer space.

They wonder what will
replace your name
on every foggy
window pane;
What dreams would I dream
to make me smile
every morning in bed
and close my eyes for a while?

I wipe the tears away
and chide them for being so silly
They play hide and seek with the fact
that there's someone else out there for me.

I shush them, quieten them
put them to sleep
there're no more questions that
I want to weep
I want to wake with a smile
for no one but me
And go back at night
to my own sweet dreams.

And again they come
out in a spill
Surprising me again
as they always will
This time not in want
this time not in pain
Nor were these for
a jaunt down memory lane;
no, now the tears that fall
are making peace with time
that heals, for now I know
that even without you, I'll be fine.