big bear, little stars

A little journal of sorts

[stuckinapril]

i mean i do live my life as if i'm already 80 years old looking back at the present moment as if it's already gone and the happiness is already spent and i will never feel something like it again and there's a poignant sadness that underpins every single thing i do bc of it. but i'm fine really

[individuality-as-sin]

Influence

It's crazy how much movies influence us. What is considered normal and cool seems to be found in movies with characters we look up to. What we find cringe or ridiculous are traits that are shown to be the ones of the loser of the story. Simple things such as how long to keep eye contact or how to walk or how to laugh. We all saw them somewhere and picked them up from someone.

"I'm an empty shell filled with people's interests and opinions." is what I first wrote down when I realized this. I found it absolutely heartbreaking to only be the result of my environment. To realize I couldn't exist as me on my own, that I'm inevitably influenced, shaped and forced into a certain someone.

I am guilty of being influenced by media. What I find cute or scary are all things I have received from my parents, my brothers or friends, which they picked up from media or 'powerful' people. People with influence. People who have ideas and make those into projects, into plans and finally into products. People who create scenarios how they play in their head and make them a reality - movies, classics. A way to perceive something put into an ad. A subtle, almost innocent kind of propaganda.

The short words we use in our conversation to sound unbothered. The winks, the smirks in situations they're not necessarily needed. Did you ever wonder why we associate red cheeks with cuteness? It comes from shyness, a natural reaction of the body. But from where does that association come from? Why is shyness seen as cute? Why do I think people will think I'm that kind of person if I do this? Or if I try this or if I say this?

Sometimes, we've all seen it before. We want to replicate a scene from a movie - how stupid it may be - or we want to avoid making a situation into such a scene to avoid discomfort. Because life has no bottom, no 'basics guide', it's a bottomless happening, we search for our own bottom. Role models to act, think or speak like. Situations to replicate. We all have that same knowledge of cinema classics also known as clichés which we also have a clear understanding of. Our repertoire.

We don't want to distance ourselves too much of what is 'normal'. Once you choose your own things to find normal, you have a much higher risk of being seen as the black sheep and being criticized or mocked when actually, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. People that are normal are only following footsteps of other people because that's safe. And when I say normal people, I mean people pretending to be normal. Those who stay still as a rock in transport, who do not bop their head when listening to a bop when really, they'd want nothing more. People who are ashamed of eating in public like they do at home. People who dress the same as everyone in the fear of being different, when they'd want nothing less than to dress like those models wearing pants with skirts and still looking good. People who feel self-conscious sneezing, yawning, blowing their nose. People who want to fade into the background to avoid discomfort or confrontation.

In short, we are filled with other's aspirations and desires until we realize norms don't mean anything and we can define our own notion of 'normal'.

[trappedinourheads]

It does hurt when i think about the girl I grew up with, a girl who doesn't exist anymore. Daydreams fill my twilight hours, when sleep is catching at the edges of my consciousness and I dream of what-ifs with her. I think about meeting her, running into The Man again, several different scenarios tweaked and reedited to make me the hero, to give me her side of the story, to make my friends see what amazing baggage I carry. I garner their imaginary sympathy, I win my vindictive little battles with her in my head, my words and blows land vicious on him, and it has the power to hurt.

Yet at the end of the day, I look at the books on my shelf - I borrowed them with the naive promise of giving them back, an excruciatingly long five years ago- and scoff at my mother telling me they could be a peace offering. That I could turn up at her house and pretend I'm returning what's hers and beg for normalcy, when I'm still a wounded little girl inside who never got over what I saw as a betrayal. I tell myself I will choose the cowardly option , that I will mail it over to her house (with the foolish hope that I remember her address). Meanwhile the books will sit, on a new shelf in a new house, inevitable and proud and sick with memories.

[trappedinourheads]

I don't know how people exist so easily.

I laugh a little too loud, the silence in the room is slightly too long, and I'm sure my fear shows on my face. What am I doing here? And abruptly, I'm stunned into silence. It's something close to a thoughtless panic that silences me, makes me eat my own words when I sense even an accidental second of indifference.

It's ironic, thinking this way when I realise that outwardly, I'm no better to anyone else, withdrawn and unresponsive at the worst of times. Not when my interactions with those around me are so heavily dependent on what insecurity plagues me at the moment.

Maybe my friends do understand, they give me my space, but what if inside I'm begging myself to let my voice free?

Maybe others have managed before. Yet I feel like an impostor, a fraud, when I walk past a reflection and straighten my shoulders and convince myself the tshirt I'm wearing doesn't feel heavy on my body. I wrap their observations around my thoughts, I admire how you don't overthink, you're mean and I love that about you, I think it's cool how you don't give a fuck sometimes.

I've envied people who wear their heart on their sleeves. Even if unintentional, there's courage in exposing your soft bits to the world, to the biting winds and allowing people to pick at it. I'd rather flay myself alive than be open, be free. They are braver than me, because they have bared themselves to the world in a way I can only admire.

[trappedinourheads]

Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.

-Bonnie Burstow

[trappedinourheads]

Rubbery, dust-covered, I found the memory of a little blue elephant under a table. It contained the selflessness of a little boy, when he once gave his cousin something to remember him by when he flew back to his home.

Back then we were strangers, bound only by distant familial loyalty. We started talking again, on our own terms, each secretly trying to learn who the other was as a person under the mysterious garb of 'cousin'. Perhaps we're friends now.

But it's been months since I've talked to him. I see his stories, and it's weird- feeling like a long lost sister when he's... right there. He visits my mother and sister. His brother borrows our family car. And here I am, six hundred and fifty kilometres away, getting snippets of stories over sporadic video calls.

I never actually found the elephant, by the way. I wish I find it before we move out soon. My house is a mess, and those shelves hold too many lost little elephants.

[metamorphesque]

Missed Time, Ha Jin

[trappedinourheads]

Summer was just a season.

But one night I closed my eyes, a song, well worn by the radio, playing in my ear. And I remembered a tiny forest glade, and the leaves crunching beneath my slippers as I ran with all my might.

Summer of '19. The elder ones were there that summer. Raw mangoes, meticulously cut in someone's front yard and dripping with oil and spice. Bicycles knocking against each other, the younger ones in a pointless little race. Freshly mowed ground, a saggy badminton net tied over makeshift poles.

We got caught twice. Our parents didn't approve of us scaling walls and climbing sun-shades.

A neighbour uncle gave us this look: five- ten girls with creaky legs and breathless laughter, too old to be running. We didn't care, emboldened by each other's company. I was childish, so was she, so was she.

The boys were out all summer though. Their football fell into someone's pond. And no one cared.

[bookwyrminspiration]

being an older sibling is like. you've never known a life without me. mom yelled at me and it taught her she never wanted to yell at you. I painted my room purple and grey and then you did too. we live in the same house but I haven't spoken to you in months. I don't know your favorite color. I saw it was going to rain so I picked you up from school on my way home so your books wouldn't get wet. i was so worried when you woke up sick when you were three. you don't remember being sick. mom and dad made their worst mistakes with me and I'm glad they didn't make them with you. I'm doing everything for the first time so you won't be in the dark. I don't know any of your friend's names anymore. I used to know them all. if something happens to mom and dad you won't have to worry because everything will fall to me. you don't like to be home alone but even if you don't see me just knowing I'm there makes you feel better. at least that's what mom told me. you still give me jars to open for you because you can't quite get them. I only see you during dinner. i'd never even think about missing one of your concerts. I stand at the counter when I eat and now you do, too. when offered a selection of books you picked the same one I did when i was your age. I'm terrified you compare yourself to me. I love you. I don't know if you like me. I want you to. mom says dinner's ready

[trappedinourheads]

Phone contacts are a graveyard of people in my life. My thumb hovering over the delete button, once I wondered- will the few hundred other names in the list be gone like this? One Sunday morning several decades later, will I be looking back and vaguely remember the girls I met in my first year of college, or the high school friends not close enough to keep in touch with? I am a grossly nostalgic person, and there's a strange panic that rises when I think about forgetting. When my phone memory recedes and newer, shinier people push back those from times left behind, will I recall them again?

[trappedinourheads]

I recently turned eighteen, and being on the cusp of society's adulthood is terrifying.

Childhood didn't end here abruptly, it faded away from me somewhere during these past years until I look back now and realise. Oh. It's over, huh.

It's not really an ending. College is a clean slate, a new start- something I have been craving for since the pandemic began and I, trapped in my home, realised that I was going to stay stagnant for two years. I know it's necessary for me to leave home, to figure out how to stand alone and proud.

But I was sheltered for so long, kept safe in my self imposed safety bubble of close friends and family, that the thought of new horizons make my knees shaky. I cannot talk to a new face without feeling my face go numb with embarrassment. How can I keep my head high for my journey forward?

Whatever comes next is necessary for me to be able to spread my wings, and I know it. Yet that does not dispel my irrational fear, and thus, just for once, I'm indulging it here within my words.

I'm scared of a lot, actually. I'm scared of never finding people as good as the ones I had by my side all these years, of ending up alone or unwanted or second-place, of staying with people out of need and not want. I'm scared of my own insecurities holding me back, of being humiliated once and never trying again, of giving up. I'm scared that after four years, I'll find myself still as scared and unsure and weak and cowardly as I am now.

I'm scared, but there's a hope that overpowers it all for now. Maybe that will be enough.

[trappedinourheads]

I've never really thought about the aesthetic appeal people see with getting soaked in the rain. Singing in the rain? Never seemed very practical.

It's been hot lately, so unbearably hot. Each night we drag our beds directly underneath our shitty two-decades-old fan, shirts sticking uncomfortably close, and that body musk hanging in the air, still lingering after a shower or two.

And suddenly, we heard the rain start to pour.

Call it a whim. I took my headphones out, stepped out, and let an old playlist play.

It feels nice. Maybe my phone has more than a few drops on it, and the water is worryingly soaking my trusty headphones, and my shirt is sticky again, this time with water and freezing air, but. It feels nice.

I have my obligations to return to, and soon. I've been putting off too much for too long. But right now, I have songs holding nostalgia from simpler years, and time doesn't exist. The sharp scent of soil and water; I haven't smelled it in so long. It feels like something precious.

[trappedinourheads]

A seemingly insignificant moment, but it brings up an old, buried memory. Are our lives truly anything more than an amalgamation of people and memories and experiences, a messy collage cut out of life?

My sister begs me to teach her how to blow bubblegum. I think about how I asked the same question, one school day in a leafy basketball court with a friend. A memory I never witnessed, years ago in America, when a boy showed her how.

I hear people absently click their tongues, tick-tock, amusing themselves, and I am instantly reminded of the boy I used to like, with his incessantly annoying clicking habit a constant throughout our childhood friendship.

I get into a car with a sunroof, and I can feel the phantom wind rushing through my hair. I am twelve again, and my best friend and I are squeezed tight together, waving at traffic cops and feeling the dust of a metro city night on our faces.

All these ghostly imprints on my heart. How I wish I could see my fingerprints on theirs, too.

[trappedinourheads]

It's windy outside, and tonight i can see the stars. Orion, the North Star.

I'm reminded of a younger me, talking about stars with my best friend. She used to be very fascinated with stars, and some of that fascination rubbed off on me. I loved the infinite vastness and darkness of the universe, but I was never in love with space the way she was.

I once gifted her a canvas of an astronaut I painted.

Everything is hazy, but I recall snippets of conversations- about how utterly unquantifiable the universe was, about the beauty of stars, about vague, half-formed dreams of becoming astronauts, about a child's fascination with learning science.

See, the thing about being childhood friends is that you never realise when things change- when you change. I know neither of us are satisfied yet with the people we've become, but I'm still happy with our progress and the fact that we could undertake this journey together. But sometimes I wonder when we lost that child inside of us- when she stopped wondering about space or when I never again had my shy convictions of becoming an author. Maybe it was somewhere in between realising science was actually harder than middle school or accepting people saying that writing was for those far more passionate and unstable than me.

[trappedinourheads]

My curved back and protruding spine speaks of

Days where I curled into myself like a turtle shell

I take up space now. The curve of my back

And unsteady hands, and dry, nervous lips

And downturn of my eyes, are more of a bother

I feel like a toddler, wobbling on her shaky legs

But with none of her curious fearlessness

I have to learn how to stand up straight

Because I walk among others so sure on their feet

My path is not a steady trek further uphill-

It's a jump off a cliff with eyes closed and heart open

The rocks look so uneasy, the water sharp

But really, I know it's just the sunlight hitting it wrong

All I need is some courage, or maybe a quick push

[trappedinourheads]

My dear Marwan,in the long summers of childhood,when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfather’s farmhouse outside of Homs.

We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother’s goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east.

We took you there when you were a toddler.

I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip, showing you a herd of cows grazing in a field blown through with wild flowers.

I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn’t have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams.

I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan.

In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses.

I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square.

But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour.

First came the protests. Then the siege.

The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials.

These are the things you know.

You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright.

You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark.

Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere.

But I hear your mother’s voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.’

These are only words. A father’s tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how vast, how indifferent. How powerless I am to protect you from it.

All I can do is pray.

Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are a flyspeck in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this.

How I pray the sea knows this.

Inshallah.

-Khaled Hosseini, 'Sea Prayer'

[trappedinourheads]

I remember someone saying once that daily life is just waking up every morning and fighting against the sadness and the lethargy that overwhelms you. Sometimes you lie in your bed, weighed down by anxiety and fear, and the day ahead seems insurmountable. But each day, every day, even if we don't have the motivation or the heart to, we must gather our courage and willpower to go on. Make it through the end of one day, then the next; and eventually time won't seem as draining as it once did.