I'm thirsty

I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But somehow fate manages to do it. It manages to dry this world of happiness. It manages to flood us with tears. It manages to make our parched souls hike around in an arid air of unrealized misery.

No. Shut up. Sorry. Misery’s not the word to describe it. Unfulfillment is.

There is something terribly wrong with life. It’s the fact that we are all thirsty and no matter how much water we drink, we remain insatiable. I’m not just talking about the literal H2O water – I’m talking about every single thing we are determined to get, only to find ourselves wanting more and having to work even harder once we actually do get it.

A year ago, while my new house was being constructed, I would think to myself how great my life would become upon its completion – how I can be finally proud and happy to live in a comfortable place. Fast forward a couple months. I’m all settled here, and it’s as usual to me as the old crypt I used to live in was. Now downgrading to the place I was fine growing up in would seem like an earthly hell, and I still find myself envying others for their ‘superior’ properties.

It’s not just that. A year and a half ago I told myself that I’d be satisfied with my academic life once I got the scores superior to a fellow colleague we like to call ‘sway.’ Ever since I did, I have only since found myself proven wrong again, as I still find myself in frustration and envy of that other girl’s one extra IB score, while stressing over how I am supposed to sustain my already high grades for the next terms.

I can only tell myself that I am already very privileged – that millions out there don’t even have the hope of getting into college; that people live under bridges – but that reassurance means nothing to me. I keep wanting more and more. I suppose it’s the same for everyone else - wealthy celebrities who have everything but are no less miserable than we are; popular jocks who secretly wish they were geeks.

You see, life is cancerously self-destructive. You are constantly told to put in insurmountable amounts of effort and determination into being somebody, blind-sighted and completely oblivious of this fatal flaw of human nature. For people like me – those caught up in this vile vortex of determination and thirst - the more you put into it, the harder it becomes, because you can’t ever give up, and you put in more and more of your energy into life until you eventually die an exhausted death. Success isn’t hard to find. There's a goldmine of it right next door. But no matter how deep you dig, you’d have to have all odds going for you to find a single drop of contentment.

I Fell Apart

Please, excuse this clichéd melancholy. I am extremely downhearted and unable of writing about anything else of more significance.

I recall a distant past where my life was continuously filled with a sweet scent of the early spring bloom. Now all that’s left is a void of asthmatic suffocation.

My life hasn’t always been so sour. I once had joy – back in the day when my smiles weren’t so artificial. Yet I don’t know why, but it feels like I haven’t tasted anything sweet in decades. Memories that are in fact not so far away from this present day all seems so distant - faded and shrouded in a lightless mist of desolate gloom. These memories of friends, love, and spirit are only mere remembrances of a person I once was.

Just a year ago I was on top of the world. Among my peers, I was of the highest caliber. I had the skill; the commitment; the persistence to make myself really mean something, and nothing could stop me from becoming someone – someone whose existence in this world won’t be left unnoticed.

Things fall apart. Nobody knows why, but they just do. You fight for good intentions; you build yourself a lavish life based on those intentions; and for several years – decades, if you’re lucky – you believe that you may actually have a shot in life. Then a minute detail – a tiny crack on the foundations of rapture – leads your life into becoming less than what it should be.

Not so long ago, I had two intimate friends with whom I confided in. I remember our many small moments – coffee in the local Starbucks, their forcing me out of bed to go to Bogor, and the laughter we shared that continues to echo through my mind. With them I felt as though I could really be myself and feel accepted, as though I was liberated from all the confusion of this harsh labyrinth.

After a series of unfortunate events, misery took hold. These two now treat me as though I am a stranger. They view me as though I am a nuisance who divests them of the joys of their youth.

I avoid seeing them because doing so reminds me of what I’ve lost. The hollowness within me is palpable, because losing a friend – someone who, over the years has become a part of you – is like losing an integral part of yourself.

I have no one to turn to. My best friend doesn’t care because she’s unaffected. The other person I can confide in is thousands of miles away. My fears of becoming a shadow have, in actuality, been realized. I am only someone they used to hang out with; a former acquaintance.

Things fall apart, yes. But that’s just how it is. When your life is shattered into pieces, you rebuild those pieces. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Those who find happiness are those who are persistent on their pursuit of happiness. Friends leave, tears are cried, happiness is lost, but even in the remnants of rubble there is still light.

I once had a horrible fear of leaving high school, in anticipation of how I’d have to leave these wonderful people. But things don’t look so bad now, since these wonderful people have become much less wonderful to me.

College – a new world; a chance for a new beginning. High school and this ensuing melancholy will all disappear into the dusty photo albums of my unvisited attic. At least there’s some hope that that will happen.

Should I remain in this state of depression, then I’ll soup myself up in Prozac and die of an overdose. Who cares, right?

My Restraint is my Own Suicide

*Not to be graded, unless I don’t post anything next week*

Disclaimer: This post was written at a time when the writer was in an extremely emotionally unstable mood. Therefore what is said here should not in any way be taken seriously.

Happiness to me is among the rarest things on earth. Yet happiness is knocking on my door, only to be rejected by my idiot self.

Christians claim that Christ is the only way to true happiness, and that worldly and iniquitous pleasures only brings out a temporary joviality within ourselves - the rest is supposed to be a hollow, lightless emptiness.

Not so, I have come to learn. The happiest people I know are the most dissolute - those who are wise enough to indulge in everything the world has to offer. The emotional train wrecks are the uptight, prissy, unrealistic nuns who drown in this pool of heinousness.

If God really is just, then where is he? Why is it that morality is punished by exclusion and loneliness, while evil is rewarded with popularity and a sense of social significance?

On the night of my birthday, I was greeted by a deeply unwelcome sense of emptiness and rejection. My bestfriend, angered by my chauvinistic idiocy, told me that she wouldn't be coming on time for my birthday party because she has a date, and I am now sure that the people I care about won't be there for me as I "celebrate" my coming of age. Imagine that, being left out from your own birthday party. Here, on the day that was meant to be the day I bask in the joys of friendship and hope, I instead mourn the loss of my hope – the deathlike feeling of seclusion.

In truth, perhaps I do deserve to be excluded from everyone else. I am a chauvinistic, intolerant, uptight, two-faced bastard, and inconsiderate of other people’s privacy. In my fruitless endeavors to please God, I have instead angered everyone around me.

Why then should I continue my one-legged dance of unfound hope and light? No good can come from it – my peers will be infuriated by my fanaticism, social tension will arise between those who judge and those who are judged, and I will of course be devoid of any sense of belonging as I witness the crumbling of my social life.

I look back to the old me – a rebellious person on the verge of expulsion from school, a person with a 13GB porn collection, a person everyone sees as fun, a person with an actual “life” – and realize that life was so much better for me back then than it is now.

Why then, should I continue committing this social suicide, when no one benefits from my irrationality? Shouldn’t I just conform so that I am accepted?

Christ is an illusion. Persistence for the truth is nonsense – merely a byproduct of Christian denial of God’s non-existence. Spiritual euphoria is resultant of the insanity associated with Christianity. I will never find light in Christ. Heaven is already here – this heaven of sex and drugs – yet I am too stupid to accept it. These thoughts continue to resonate in my mind like an echoing scream of despair.

I’ve always told myself that what everyone around me does doesn’t affect me. Peer pressure is very much real, my friend. I struggle to juggle my spiritual and social lives as I enviously witness others who manage to completely segregate their spiritual lives from their social lives. But my passion, unlike theirs, is uncontrollable. My raging fury is beastlike, and my own integrity is self-destructive. My soul is on the verge of its own demise. And my words turn into my own poison, as my restraint becomes my own suicide.