I’m happy for you, really, but how did you find love without me? How did you find such a good person? Is it because you’re a good person, do good people just find good people? Is that a law of nature, is that why I’ve been so unlucky, that I have never been able to last long with someone good? Is it because I’m a bad person? I’m trying to be better. Tell me how I can become better. Tell me why everyone deems me a bad person, to begin with.

2018 was the year where I realised that I was happy in spite of (or because of) everything that had or hadn’t happened. It was the year where I learned to express myself more minimally, and how I ended up hating myself for this censorship - I spent the last four months trying to counteract the self-damage. If I denied myself, I’d never be happy. A lot of people spent this year telling me how selfish I’d become, and I learned to not feel guilty - there will always be those who expect too much and turn their ears against your explanations, expecting excuses, presuming non-truths. Maybe in a sense they were right, but perspectives are always subjective. I am nowhere near where I even want to be, but at least I have a marginal image of where this place is, and I’m taking a few steps towards it. 2019 so far has consisted of the fifteen minutes wherein I spammed happy new year messages to everyone except the one person that I’m afraid to reach out to. 2019 is the year where I’m learning that no matter how selfish I will let myself become, there’s still a limit that I can’t breach - I cannot touch someone who seems happy without me. I need to learn to respect their own pace and growth, and how there are other people that they will want to choose to share this with instead. Still, I love you, loved you. Even if I was a negligible moment to you, I’ll always have a soft spot for you. Thank you for giving me four months of good memories. I’ll spent the rest of the 364 days, 23 hours, and 45 minutes of this year being unafraid.

Some days I still want to wreck myself, but I know that I am too inherently cautious, too self-conscious.

I thought about you yesterday, and almost cried. Today I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, but suddenly felt my eyes stinging, felt a familiar pounding in my head and my face growing damp. I realised that the common denominator behind whatever sadness I wring out from time to time was never you. It was always me.

You liked to draw using the free shitty pencils that they always gave in hotels. You’d make your sketch, and the lines would never be light nor careful. You didn’t wireframe or scaffold a draft anatomy like most people would. Instead you’d press down hard and, afterward, intentionally use your pinkie to smudge what you drew, until everything on paper was a cast of bold strokes and dark smears, a still-frame from a noir film without a lighting budget. After the entire sheet was covered, you would take an eraser and start to rub everything away. “I’m migrating my drawing to another plane of existence,” you’d explain. There would always be residual shadows left even after fifteen minutes of tunnel-visioned erasing. You’d study the faint outlines of what once existed on the page, and then you’d begin to fill in the dirty blankness with something new, this time a more careful sketch, drawn slower, more tenderly, sometimes even filled in with color. It was as if you needed to flush an intrinsic ugliness out of your system before you could create something that you could finally accept, after trying so hard to erase the mistakes you’d made before. But every time I looked over your shoulder, I would see the ghosts of your former drawing haunting the page, never allowing the new life that you’d built even a moment to breathe easy.

During one of the nights when I was staying in Akasaka, I was smoking with this guy downstairs at the hotel bar. He wasn’t even a guest there, just an ex-pat having some late drinks with his coworkers. I didn’t have a lighter on me and his own had just run empty, so he cupped one hand around the back of my head, and guided me toward him until the cigarette in my mouth was touching his, our tips pressing together until mine began to emit the same weak orange glow as his. We’d already been there for about two hours drinking with his friend and an older French lady, when he randomly asked me if I was an insecure person. Apparently I’d spent the entire night voicing my opinions very cautiously, as if I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of anyone around us, and he wanted to know whether I was being kind or if I lacked confidence. It’s been more than three weeks since that night, but the question still sticks with me. I remember constantly shivering because I was under-dressed, wanting to go upstairs and change but never once making the move to leave my seat. I remember regretting ordering a highball. I didn’t even like highballs that much, I’d just asked for one because it was the only thing I recognised on the menu and no one else was drinking wine. I remember when he asked me about myself, the first thing that came to mind was how you once told me, “You’re too apathetic, and sometimes that bothers me.” So when he asked me if I was an insecure person, even when I laughed and said no, the answer of course was yes, because for once I didn’t want to be a bother - that night I simply just wanted to be liked.

“I think that it is scary to leave the person you love, but it’s scarier to stay with them knowing you’ll probably leave them later. Maybe your relationship is really solid and you know at the end of the day you’re happy, but if something better ever does exist and if you’re afraid of losing that too (maybe even more sometimes) then all you need to do is take a risk. Sometimes we hurt the people we love, and sometimes they hurt us too, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care and won’t later. Relationships can be rekindled into friendship.” 

It seems fitting to use the lyrics to a song from a Canadian band that I used to really like, to describe what I feel about the person whom I used to really love, as you currently make your way to Canada. The words are disjointed, because not every line applies, but as always with me, I pick and choose my own history, memories, and situations. The things that don’t apply, I throw away, or choose to forget. Maybe the problem was the fact that I chose to forget too many things, and only within the last two days did I remember that there were so many happy memories I completely voided out. It’s not that I chose to only focus on the negatives either. It’s just that for an entire year, I was concentrating on my new studies, new projects, new job, a new love. Reading your letter was confusing, not just in terms of the slight anxiety attack that it gave me, and the complicated emotions that I’d always assumed that I’d left behind. It was confusing because I legitimately did not understand probably a third of the references you were making regarding the things that I did for you, the little notes that I wrote for you. You said that I poured so much love into you, and it made me sad, because if I couldn’t remember so many of those moments, would that then illegitimize what you referred to as my devotion/selflessness/efforts? I spent half a day afterwards trying to remember. It’s weird, because I remember everything that you did for me, the good and bad - they came back to me so easily. I’m not sure what I did for you, but it’s enough that you said that I made an impact on your life. You should know that I always want to be remembered, even during my depressive states, the moments of low self-confidence when I want everyone to forget me. 

I think you’re my first love too. Despite the fact that I always tell people how, “The first relationship doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the first love.”

The things you’ve done for me in the five years we were together, I need to be honest and say that I’m not sure whether they made as much of an impact, whether you ever really understood me. But rationally speaking, no one ever truly understands anyone, despite all their best efforts and claims, and the time that we spent together is still valuable. It still shaped specific parts of the me that’s functioning right now and in the near future. I’m relieved that, after a year, I was still able to feel something for you, even if it’s no longer necessarily love or a tangibly defined notion of care. Whether we ever genuinely root for each other’s respective happiness and pursuits going forward is irrelevant. What I’m trying to say is that I remember you, I remember the concept of this past ‘us’, and I’m grateful.

It’s nothing but time and a face that you lose […] Live through this, and you won’t look back […] There’s one thing I want to say, so I’ll be brave: you were what I wanted, I gave what I gave. I’m not sorry I met you, I’m not sorry it’s over. I’m not sorry there’s nothing to save.

The best thing to do to respect the time we invested in each other is moving forward and doing our best to be happy with ourselves. So thanks, and all the best to you too.

hanthelion:

one day
you’re here right next to me
and then you’re not
i go in and
i go out of realities
one day you’re here
and then you’re not

“You said that you’d be happy, no matter what. A person who can be happy without me has no appeal at all.”

Whenever he feels joy, he immediately feels guilt and the self-hatred returns. Men who hate themselves lash out. In the end, he’ll hate you for making him happy and he’ll loathe himself all the more for it.

I am always one step removed from myself, standing in an isolated corner, witnessing the speeds by which the other parts of me travel. The bystander me watching the separate sides of me speeding toward each other. The bystander me, anticipating every crash, but too apart, too fragmented from the rest of myself, to stop them.

You know how when you have a cold, it’s not just the physical cloudiness of your overall body that you feel, nor that constant feeling like you’re drowning because of the liquid pressure in your sinuses, but there’s this pervasive sense that you’re existing in a fugue state, like a mental purgatory where everything is just a dull accumulation of sluggish formlessness. And when you’re sick during rainy weather, that feeling is intensified, but then again even when the sky clears up, it still won’t be enough to disrupt the obsolete nature of your half-conscious state, to bring you the satisfactory jolt of clarity.

Do you really remember that woman from yesterday? Can you remember whether she was wearing a skirt or pants, whether her blouse had sleeves with white lace, or whether she was wearing a black turtleneck with flared sleeves. Can you recall if she was holding a book defensively against the area between her abdomen and her chest, or if she was hunched over her phone, tapping sullenly with roughly cut nails. No, you just remember her as occupied, her posture an outline of unwillingness. Do you remember that man? If he had gold rimmed rounded glasses, or if he was bare eyed and unframed? What if he was wearing contacts, what subjective colour did you assign to his eyes? Were they the same shade on each side, or were they genetically interesting, an A/B test of either eye? You were on a passing train, but you lingered your focus on these two people for as long as feasible. You stared at them for so long that you told yourself that their images would be ingrained even when you closed your eyes and the fluorescent lights of the train finally flickered into a dull flesh-toned darkness. But you don’t remember much about them anymore. You remember that you thought he was beautiful. You remember thinking that she seemed fragile in a way that gets better when more time has passed. You only remember the concepts, not the people. The perceptions you superimpose over their faces, reminding you of other faces you might have made similar passing judgments over. The momentum of the train as it leaves the platform, and these people, behind. It is only the way through which you define things that remains, for a long, long time, against the recollection of anything else.

I no longer fantasise about the things that I can change, only the things that I can’t change. Maybe that won’t make too much sense to you, the way I let reality coat my hands so that I can finally break the things that I believe should be broken, fix the things I left unhealed by the wayside. I use these hands to pry open my own mouth, and reply to the questions that I’d left open-ended for too many years. I only fantasize about the things that this new-found reality of mine still cannot encroach upon. And that is fine, that is the definition of a fantasy anyway. That is a step in the right direction.