alasanlain

[alasanlain]

I can't really let go and it's not your fault

In the span of seven to eight years since I've known you, I developed an obsession with the concept of you. I know we aren't contacting each other anymore by my decision, and it probably might not start anytime soon. But it won't hurt to jot this down in writing so that I know, at least, this exact time, I feel this way.

Four years of proper and genuine relationship is not a short time. In retrospect that is more than the curriculum needed to pass high school. That time is also the earliest someone would graduate a bachelor's degree without attaining cum laude.

In another breath four years is nothing compared to the future you'll have with him. You will have years in the double digits, and our little encounter will be a footnote in your grand book of life. You say that you won't let me go, and you're right, maybe we both are selfish.

Because at this point I still can't let you go. Maybe I'm deluding myself and blaming all my problems nowadays to whatever it is that we had. It could be our abrupt goodbyes, but actually come to think of it, wasn't it set in stone longer than what I know?

I remember you came to me asking me to have a chat somewhere at night. The decision to leave me for someone else might not be made by you, but it was made nonetheless. It was decided long before our last talk. That much I can say.

What made me cling on is your words. You make it seem like what happened was both inevitable and avoidable. But we both know what you meant. You wanted me to stay friends with you, but then at the same time you want to keep your decision.

The best of both worlds involves me being hurt. Normally, I would inevitably agree to this. I don't know, maybe I'm a masochist. Things like these are something I kept in my heart even though I know it's slicing the innards apart.

But this one thing, this one thing. I can't do it. So I acted like that to push you away.

You got it the first half, congratulations, you decide to cut me off. But unlike yours, I own the decision I made without you knowing. That is a victory. How sad.

I don't want to say that I still loved you. That word is reserved for better things. I can't grow unless this thread is untangled, but it seems like time will have to step in on this one.

This is my selfishness. The fruit of one decision I made for myself is still me getting hurt. Admittedly one less than the other, but it still hurts me.

How come that selfishness often benefits other people when they do it, but when it comes to me it just forces me to be impaled on a spike rather than a hot pole?

It's the first of April. April fools, funny joke. Ha ha.

It's also a reminder that I am getting closer to my death. I need to let go of things sooner or later. You are on the list.

Wish You Were Here, Eosolpeun.

[alasanlain]

I wanted to say, "I love you", but I chose not to.

There are so many people in my life that feels like they deserve an "I love you". However, I also feel like the phrase should be sacred, rare, and protected. That is my conflict of the day, I guess.

The problem with the phrase is that it's too vague. We never defined love in a way that encompasses the word fully. But it's also a trait of humans to be vague about things they don't know about.

I have experienced—a rather privilege—many types of love, over the course of my lifetime. Unconditional parental love, fleeting young love, a more serious and future-oriented love. All of these tasted different.

How can a feeling be different but defined the same way?

I also found that one form of love is tied to sexuality. In my case, anyways. Sexuality begets intimacy, and intimacy is the mycelium of love. The soft whispers on rainy nights, the playfights followed by a cuddle, everything.

Oedipus cursed the other type, though. The intimacy is also different for familial love. It is supposed to be different. But the name is the same.

I can picture this working for food items, for instance. Many different food items carry the same name, brand, or definition. But the taste is different.

However, for feelings, it differs. Sadness, for example, has many different words to describe how and what flavor of sadness we experience. Ennui, depression, melancholy, or just plain sad. These are words to indicate sadness in ways that is more descriptive.

You would say "I am feeling a bit depressed" to indicate that your sadness is more of the empty type. People around you will agree to that notion. They will react accordingly.

The same could not be said for the expression of "I love you."

Say the phrase to a lover, one you have been with for years. You two lay in bed, after a deep kiss, searching into each other's retinas. The phrase now carries a burden. A weight of knowledge. Knowledge of how each of your body parts misses the caress of the other.

Say the phrase to a dog now, a family pet. You don't feel the same burden, don't you? I hope not. There is no knowledge besides that you value the company of this lesser being, in your eyes at least.

The phrase is said to many things. Friends, companies, bosses, employees, families, enemies, all ages. Yet each of the word uttered feels different.

You might go to your friend and describe your job and your feeling towards your job as "I feel this job makes me lethargic." Your friend knows exactly what you mean. You don't need to describe further.

You can also say that your job is "lovely", or phrase in a more familiar way for this topic. That you "love" your job. This way, you need to clarify what kind of love.

So, when I say, to my friends that I love them. Is it the same love I feel when I say that to my family? If this is not the case then, why make it the same word?

I don't know. I am complaining about a concept that was written by ancient people, and carried by everyone. Just like most concepts, when you decidedly break it down this way, it just doesn't make sense. It's absurd.

For that reason, I feel a bit torn. Whether to keep this absurdity alive by spewing and frothing about this word to everyone in vicinity. Or keep it as a treasure, shared only to those dare open the chest.

Wish You Were Here, Eosolpeun.

[alasanlain]

I finished college, here's what I learnt.

June, this year, was the final month of college for me. It took me five and a half years to finish the entire curriculum, and during those times I did learn a lot.

No, this won't be a snarky thing where I'll say: nothing valuable was learnt at all during college! Because despite the overwhelming urge of saying that, I think being dismissive of all the good things college has taught me is dishonesty.

For my first year, I thought going into college was a mistake. Everything felt really out of place for me. I felt like I couldn't trust anyone, and that everyone is out for themselves.

I was right, of course, everyone did have their own goals, they are out for themselves. This is because I am no longer bound in the "high school" environment, where the goals were set by the teachers: essentially a higher power. Because of that, I feel lost.

One thing I really held on to from my first year is the allegory of the sea. My senior told me that being in college is like jumping on a large body of water, or the sea. Whether you decide to back out, keep swimming, or stay and drown, you're wet anyhow. Might as well.

That phrase, "might as well", is etched in my heart all the way until graduation.

What I like about the allegory is that it tactfully, and unknowingly, also describe how I felt at that time: lost, not knowing what to do, and facing a huge new reality. That was until third semester rolls in. I think, because of how new I was to the experience, I expected something different. But because the curriculum for new students in my college is very similar to high school, I also have a lingering harmful nostalgia to my days in school.

I remember talking to my parents about college. I said to them that nobody in there (my campus) is worth my time. My seniors only speak in jargons, and my classmates are not friendly at all.

So, first years taught me about despair. It's something I have never truly experienced before. Thankfully, I grit my teeth and told myself that this too, shall pass. That everything is going to be okay tomorrow, and that everyone will wake up the same way.

Truthfully, I would love to return back as a freshman. Experiencing that despair again, one that made me appreciate how melancholic some things can be. I wouldn't change a thing, cringy and all. The things I did during my freshmen years were the building blocks of who I am today.

Once the third semester rolls around, we started to develop our own interests in the specifics. We take the same classes, but it is evident that our pathways are going to separate one day. This is actually a good thing, because now for the first time I actually felt like a college student.

Things were sailing smoothly for now. I learnt little things like scientific writing, organizations, and further time management. My decision of joining an organization was a good one in my opinion. It led me to understand my friends and my seniors more. They are humans after all, not some mythical creature I imagined them to be.

Complex as they are, the more I hang out with them the more I appreciate their existence. I no longer view them as tropes or characters. I think of them as human beings. Flawed, personal, subjective, and beautiful human beings.

We will now move on further to the future, passing through the fourth and fifth semester. Honestly, because there weren't any significant events happening in those two semesters, I feel like I don't need to mention them. I was comfortable, something must happen to shake things up.

Something did happen.

I don't think anything can top the slow burn of the COVID-19 pandemic. It starts slowly, news from all the way over in China, people celebrating the "two-weeks" off campus, making plans with friends on how to spend those off period. But then it hits us all.

Two weeks turns into a month, and a month turns into a semester. I still remember the literal final days of me going to a physical college class as a bachelor. It was a Monday; we were studying Plant Genetics.

The professor ended the lecture by saying his plans of teaching us something later at 13:00 or the practical period of the course, but then after we all went downstairs, he called me. He told me that the dean passed an internal note to cease offline classes for the day and that the morning class we just had is the last class, effective immediately.

I passed this message to my friends, and we were a bit ecstatic. Especially those who are known to skip classes, they were over the moon. Seems like at the time we all view the pandemic as something trivial, something that may be large but will pass as soon as it comes.

Have you ever felt like you're in a loop? Like a dream you're in where, as soon as you wake up, you manage to find yourself in another dream. The desperation you feel at that moment and the want to escape the loop. Imagine that for an entire year.

During the pandemic, I did attend classes, but I have to admit around half of the times I fell asleep. I remember it was always a hot and humid day, and because of that every time I nod off on a class it turns into a full-blown nap.

At first it wasn't a habit, but habits form out of convenience. If an action is done repeatedly enough with no breaks from the inertia, it will become a habit. My habit was sleeping in the morning.

I won't get into a weird tangent where I would condemn morning sleep and what not. But if the previous wish were to be granted, and I were to relive the pandemic again, I would definitely avoid this habit.

See, because sleeping in the morning really makes you feel groggy afterwards. You essentially feel like you're missing out on something, but you have no idea what. This is worse because since it's the pandemic, there really is nothing to do.

All of this culminated in me doing absolutely nothing for an entire year.

At the time I chalked it up to depression. A direct result of confusion and a whole new environment. But doing so for an entire year broke me. Add to that my friends are graduating one by one.

I am not one to hold anything against my friends. I am not envious of them. However, I do feel like it is unfair. Like the sea allegory before, seems like they found their islands earlier than me.

It's possible, maybe, that they have a bit of help here and there. A raft to go with, a ship sailing around them, anything to reach the other side. For me, I felt alone.

Loneliness is powerful. Because humans are social creatures by design, and your brain could be imbalanced enough to feel loneliness and experience it without the knowledge of why. This is what happens to me for two years.

The final stretch of my college life is filled with that feeling. Loneliness. I feel like a pariah because my parents kept asking me about my grades and how I'm doing. This is until I decided to just say fuck it. Might as well.

I tried to sort things up, do my thesis, and everything I needed to do in order to actually finish college. Then it happened. Like wisps of air, breezing like nothing at all.

I graduated.

It wasn't a fanfare; it wasn't much of a celebration. All I did was attend graduation ceremonies and go home. I did take pictures with my family, so that's something. We rarely do that.

Maybe it is special, in its own way. Maybe I feel like it's a breeze because I haven't had time to really let it sink in yet. Maybe it really is nothing at all.

But to be honest, five and a half years is a long time. In that stretch of time, I did a lot of things. Many of them still haven't had their proper "end" yet.

This post is meant to be an effigy I burn to let my college go. The despair I felt in the start, the happiness of the middle, and all the blur of the end. I have finished my bachelor's degree, and I may be allowed to feel a bit more relaxed than before.

Wish You Were Here, Eosolpeun.