cinnnam0nngir16

[cinnnam0nngir16]

When I cut my finger, I immediately wrap a bandaid around it. I don’t let it bleed even a little longer.

Yet there’s a strange exhilaration in watching the bright red seep from the cut, as if the rawness of the wound is a reminder of something deeper. 

It feels almost unnatural to bandage a wound right away, to deny the skin its moment to flare and bleed. As the scar deepens, it feels like you’re sinking into something more profound, something beyond the cut itself, something calling out to you: this sinister feeling, this morbid desire to stop the blood, forget about it, and move on as if nothing happened—until a grain of salt finds the wound, and you flinch from the sharp, gutting pain, a visceral reminder that there's still an open wound on my finger.

I haven’t had the time or the courage to deal with it, to let it bleed until it stops and heals on its own. I’m too much of a coward to let the wound marinate in the open air, to let it breathe and grow. So when a wound heals under the safety of a bandage, is the flesh beneath it hollow?

[cinnnam0nngir16]

Call from the void

In my dream I stood on the edge of a cliff, and it felt like the edge of a sword. I looked down at the raging waves thrusting against the shore. The salty air mauled my face. My eyes lingered on the far crest of the ocean. The horizon, where the sky and sea melded into a seamless, indefinite line, held the only earth I’ll ever live to know. Everything had become linear, shapeless, and a blend of the same hue. 

And then I jumped, a vertical plunge into the water; my mouth gaped as the swooshing wind filled up my throat and lungs. One step to eternal peace. 

A few days ago, I watched a video discussing the science behind people’s love for extreme sports like caving and our shared mortal fear of depths. The Youtuber talked about the power of the alluring feeling of self-destruction that draws humans in, or as many called it, “ the call from the void”. We fear depths because our rationality tells us it is wrong and dangerous to have this forbidden and fatal attraction to self-destruction. It is the same feeling as standing on a tall building,  looking down at the narrow streets and the distant, roaring traffic, and suddenly gaining this uncontrollable impulse to take a leap -- it is the call of the void. It is so sinister because self-destruction feels good. It is a thrill unlike provoking others; it is the satisfaction of knowing that the consequences are borne solely by ourselves—the fear and excitement of embracing uncertainty.

An article written by Boris Kriger went on to expand on the metaphysical and philosophical aspects behind self-destruction; he mentioned:

“Self-destruction has a high degree of rationality, following certain logic. Existence is filled with suffering, boredom, and vulgarity. Any joy and pleasure can be perceived as either a temporary absence of this feeling or an attempt to end it. Death is associated with the cessation of suffering, in any case, with a qualitative change, a transition to another state.”

Self-destruction is followed by logic, our discontent with the world and our crippling desire to transcend into something more by constantly changing everything about ourselves: “improving” our routine and diet, looking for a better job, and rebuilding our mindset completely. And death is the entrance, an ultimate escape to another life, the afterlife, or oblivion, a place where we no longer have to loathe today’s sorrow. Crazy enough, particles constantly collide and annihilate into radiation, creating energy. Physics explains how everything eventually destroys itself in hopes of moulding into something new and becoming a better version of its original form. 

My mortality is insignificant to the spinning earth, human nature, and the darkness of the call of the void. My human nature leaves me no choice but to fight off my rationality and perhaps one day leap off a cliff, a building, or a bridge. Self-destruction is a way for me to cope with these situations that make me anxious and afraid. I feel that I must establish control over these situations and overcome my biggest fears. It is not my fault to idolise photographs of beautiful, thin girls indulging in the pleasure their youth and beauty bring; it is not my fault to starve myself into hallucinations in exchange for a lower number on the scale when I weigh myself; it is not my fault to want to be a better version of me by violently destroying what I internally and externally despised about myself. There is comfort in self-destruction; it gives me certainty and a sense of control. It is the fact that I, as a human, was designed to be drawn to the idea of destroying myself -- the “self” that ties me to doomed humanity and the fixed, cold physics of the expansion of my atoms, particles and cells -- constantly seeking a way out of the labyrinth of self-hatred ever since the moment my mother birthed me, or even further back when I was conceived. The minute I became a physical manifestation of energy, I had no choice but to abide by nature. 

Inevitably, it all goes back to nature. We are constantly harming ourselves with the excuse of improvement in the hope of a better future. We cannot truly set ourselves free from the obstructions we subconsciously set for ourselves. We can never escape the curse of being human, created and destroyed by nature, and the rune that runs in our blood, calling for us from the void. 

[cinnnam0nngir16]

 The air that you breathe 

In a dream, I saw the silhouette of a mountain. It sat like a woman I once knew: it rested on the ocean's edge, near a sunlit wheat field. I chased the clouds that veiled the sky, eager to uncover the true colour of the sun. 

The situation is dire, you said. 

I read the poem you wrote me over and over again. The image of me, the girl you fell in love with, like the men you loved, stirred a strangeness in my stomach and frothed a bitter taste in my mouth. I didn’t recognise her -- the girl who taught you friendship, the girl you thought would never let you go, and the person you wanted to hold close when you felt trivial.

Our lives aren’t parallel anymore, was the last message you sent me. 

When you taught me how stars align to create meaning in the mundane, I finally understood why you came into my life. When you told me that somebody like me could be loved, I learned to cry out for the first time. Not to ask for pity, not to beg, but to let out this howl into the world, a call out to the void --  simply making a statement: I could be loved. I was loved. Love was enough that I did not have to be lonely for the rest of my life, that somebody like you could love me. 

I don’t think there is a line between platonic and romantic love, you would look up from your book and say. Love is love, you added. 

As a small child, I would chew on my pens until the ink exploded, staining my teeth. I would not cry or ask for help; instead, I would shut my mouth and wait for my mother to notice the blackness seeping through my lips. As I grew older, I noticed a pattern in my desire to be comforted while suffering in silence. I felt an irresistible urge to connect with someone who understood me despite my silence. It would soon grow to consume me like an endless pit. 

I often imagined myself stretching my arms out into the open air, searching to grasp onto some tangible, permanent feeling, hoping to be caught by someone who would hold me without hurting me. I could try to understand people and even learn to love someone. I wanted to believe I had the depth to see light in the darkest corners. I wanted to love, be loved, and be freed from something my mind could not comprehend. 

In the poem you wrote me, you said you just let it be, that you are not fearful, and that you just want to enjoy this feeling. You said I was the feeling. 

You said I was like air. When you said I could be loved, you said loving me was as easy as breathing. 

[cinnnam0nngir16]

Why is my body rotting? 

Why is my body rotting? 

When the skin on my left index finger begins to shed and I start picking it

until it bleeds and my flesh opens up like a worm hole 

Why is my body rotting? 

On my face is a bruise from the man that chased me down the street 

outside the pub at 3 AM

where I had too much to drink 

where I buried my pride in somebody’s face

where I forgot about self respect

My parents raised me to be a reasonable young woman 

compassionate, kind, confident, empathetic, gentle,

who knows her self worth and sets boundaries when people come too close

who understands how to be normal:

when to stop drinking, 

when to go home, 

when to say “I love you”.

She is all the things I am not 

Like my rotting body, 

disgust churns in me like a chronic disease 

reflecting in every surface where I see my smudged mascara

It twists in my stomach wherever I go.

Shame clings to me like the fucking devil

“You are not unloveable,

people don’t know how to hold you.”

Why is my body rotting? 

I look it up on google. 

It tells me that it could be the result of bacteria invasion under the skin

An infection

A deathly illness

A sign of cancer and liver failure

It doesn’t tell me if it probes beneath the flesh

from the very centre of my entire being,

Frail and thin

It doesn’t tell me if it was the drunk man putting out his cigarette on my face 

and when I ran 

I ran like I had just grown legs

I wanted to stop crying - my tears burnt the wound 

Maybe if I didn’t loathe what I see when I look in the mirror,

I would not give him the chance

to get close to me, to raise his cigarette to my face 

I would not give anyone the chance to use me 

my body, my emotions, my intensity 

using all these beautiful things about me 

to hurt me

At the art gallery, I read

I don’t want to hurt, I just want to be cradled 

I took a picture of the towering spider sculpture beside it

When I showed it to my friend, 

she said this creature will not cradle you. 

My body is rotting,

and I think I know why. 

[cinnnam0nngir16]

OK, I'll follow you because I'm familiar with what you're writing about. I also dream of becoming a writer, but I don't do anything else for it.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me 💗

Haha! Fair enough! I just enjoy writing, and I mostly just publish on Tumblr because I cannot keep my thoughts to myself. I would love to read your writings too if you are willing to share!

[cinnnam0nngir16]

Hello! Did you write the "Birthday" post? Or is it from some book? I just want to say that the tears flowed harder with each new line. It's amazing. It's something I could never put into words. If it's you, then don't bury your talent, please. You're a genius and you should get a Pulitzer Prize.…

Hey there! I wrote it before my 18th birthday and did a redraft last year. You are so kind. Thank you so so much for the support, I’m tearing up just reading this comment. You don’t understand how much this means to me as someone who loves writing. I love when others resonate with my thoughts. Thank you again and I would love to share more in the future!

[cinnnam0nngir16]

Lines

I wrote you down like the thin lines on my chest. I counted them, altogether thirty-three. I turned to my bedside and reached for a new light that tore away my flesh. 

I brought you to a cemetery, where the gravestones only observed in silence. I did not have a nagging friend beside me, examining you with their excruciating stare, whispering in my ear that you were cold and aloof. I took you to the cemetery, where leaves withered in the rain, and the only sound was the wet mud filthing right onto my calves. I brought you to the church, where the rain was straight and silver, like steel rods plunging into the earth. 

Through my eyes, I thought I knew you. I believed I could see right through you. I thought you were just a scrapbook, pieced together in your crabbed scribbles, unmoved and disposable. I thought your breath smelt nice, though. I felt your laughter in the air, and then you bent your body and ducked towards the gravel road. 

My feet were hanging five feet above the grass. My hands were clammy. I will catch you, you said. But you won’t. Every time I fall, my body weighs me like a tank ship. Every time I fell to the deep end, I could not be resurrected. I do not need to be caught. I do not expect you to catch me. The truth is -- I do not expect anything from you at all. 

But this time doesn’t have to hurt like always. I managed to collect enough optimism to deceive myself once every six months. 

When you leave me behind, I will dive right back in. I will swim again in the immersive darkness until I grasp onto another strand of light. The light ignites me wholly, as if I asked to be trivial, to be dust, to cease to exist. 

It is impossible to find the in-between. 

When I reached for your hand, I clasped onto your warmth. I felt saved. 

I figured I couldn’t stop myself. 

[cinnnam0nngir16]

M

At times, I have heard people say that looking for love is futile. This can’t be true. The skin we were born in isn’t a body of water; the aches we feel are only the frost, not the depths of a harsh winter. If time isn’t the cure for my loneliness, what is it? If the progress isn’t linear, what makes sense of my habitual regression to rage and regrets? Why is it that when the bright yellow wallpaper peels off in my room, I can taste bitterness in my mouth? 

I have had similar dreams where I saw the Empress from the Rider Waite Tarto deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. The Empress didn’t have golden hair or a pomegranate-embroidered gown, nor was she holding a diamond sceptre. Instead, she sat on my bedside and smoothed the wrinkles on my sheets. A strange familiarity in her gaze made my stomach churn. I started to cry like a newborn: tears bolted off my face and merged into a tiny puddle. 

“Stay. Please, stay,” I wanted to say, but I couldn’t unstitch my sewn lips. I tried to avoid her burning gaze, but my eyelids were glued into a naked glare. It made me think of the dead animals I saw on the streets as a child; a compulsion drove me to look at their bloodied fur and lifeless bodies. I absorbed their owners' grief like an engine and learned to tune it into my own. 

In the darkness of my room, a faint blue light cast over the Empress’s figure. She taught me to forgive despair and remain tender. I read to her about the bats and the owl, the Yew Tree and the glassy moon. She did not understand the mild eyes of the moon. “But why doesn’t the moon see any of it?” she asked. But Plath and I both knew; we knew that the moon saw everything and understood the heartache that roamed from silence. We knew that silence was the cause of our deepest suffering. 

In the letter to her mother, Plath wrote, “I write only because there is a voice that will not be still within me.” The unspoken. When these words shatter into letters and wedge into frames of my memories, I have to pick them out of my flesh and let myself bleed a little bit more. To endure the throbbing pain of my mistakes is to repent for my silence. It is to say: I have decided to unravel my troubles and fall victim to the charge of introspection. I am to set myself in perpetual motion, thinking, “I am sorry,” until the day it builds up the courage to swim up my throat. 

Somewhere in real life, my counsellor was scribbling words down on her notepad and asking me questions. 

“Are you close to her?”

In my head was an image of the Empress sitting on my bed. My skin stung when I saw her hesitation to reach for my hand. 

I wanted to tell the counsellor that the truth is, you can never be close enough to someone. You can hold each other tightly, you can clutch their hands and press yourself against their chest, but there remain two pieces of skin and two sets of rib cages that set you apart— you can’t sync up the rhythm of your heartbeat. An indestructible distance exists between people, an interspace that swells into a void within our already isolated body. 

To seek the answer to these questions is to return to my dreams— a realm of fiction where everything has a spiritual meaning and symbolic importance. When I became a stranded island in the Pacific Ocean, the Empress came looking for me as a wandering albatross; when I was a failed rocket ship plummeting through the exosphere, she caught me in a Magellanic spiral; when I was a bishop genuflecting in a cathedral, she came in celestial clouds and brought a piece of heaven to earth. 

In a dream where I was a cannibal rejected by humanity, the Empress found me on the brink of starvation. Holding me in her arms, she said, “I allow you to consume my flesh and drink my blood”. 

The counsellor’s voice swung past the back of my head: “How close is close?” 

What distance exists within the bonding of blood cells, tissues, and fibroblasts? What weight of love must one bear to sacrifice herself for a flesh-eating monster? When diabolical forces are unleashed, who returns to the barren land where her child resides? 

I was once inside my mother’s body. She carried me for forty weeks and sculpted a version of herself: the same knobby knees and quick temper, the same twist in our eyebrows, sharing the same anguish that fueled our desire to venture far from our own mothers. Some scientists believe that sadness is hereditary; it is a curse that fell long before she was mine and I was hers. 

The sadness my mother feels isn’t a fetishisation of my own. She sees it because I am a mirror reflecting her youth. She understands it intimately, having cradled the same emotions thirty years ago. 

“Distance had an extraordinary power,” wrote Virginia Woolf. I remember the day very clearly: at the exit of the airport lounge, amidst white walls and the murmurs of conversations, I turned around and saw my mother standing on the opposite side of the glass. Her hand gestured as if shooing away a child; the arch of her lips mouthed the word “go”. I knew she had forgiven me then. But the silence was choking—a distance spawned from the mere separation of a glass to two thousand kilometres. There is no metric to measure the weight of guilt. 

I have always had this profound loneliness within me. It almost feels clinical, like a dull pain in my chest. Loneliness ravages my possessions: I hold on to nothing but air when I extend my arms; my pillow feels like a piece of paper. I imagine my skin conjuring into a water-like consistency, and I can’t find the strength to fight it. To eradicate the disease of loneliness is to find love: “Love had a thousand shapes.” It seems that finding love is not futile; it found me in the shape of a woman. 

When it comes right down to it, I realise my love for my mother has been muted by my cowardice; it is blighted by the poison of pride. I would find myself in distress, typing in the search bar, do I need to say I love you to mean it, and constantly thinking about how I should have apologised to her at the airport. 

After the day I announced my decision to leave the country, my mother and I started getting into heated arguments about minor things all the time. 

By the time the university offer came through, we had almost stopped speaking to each other entirely. My father congratulated me over the phone and said he would miss his little girl, but I couldn’t help but glance at my mother, hoping for a reaction. While waiting for the plane ticket to download, I noticed that the yellow wallpaper had started to peel off in the living room. Underneath the curled edge was a moulded grey. 

“We won’t have to argue again soon,” she broke the silence. Her voice was frail. 

“I never wanted to,” I snapped at her almost immediately, “you were always picking on me.” 

Instead of continuing to tell me how I should have been more responsible or scolding me for not respecting her, she said nothing. My eyes fell back onto the yellow wallpaper, and my tongue suddenly felt stale and bitter. 

My flight was scheduled to leave at seven in the morning. Having felt agitated and restless for days, I wanted to tell her how terribly I would miss her and how much I loved her, but my tongue got stuck in my throat whenever I tried to speak up. I didn’t want to show her my vulnerability and uncertainty about starting this new life: a new journey I was about to embark on, a path I had chosen. 

The night before my flight, an inevitable argument erupted from our conversation: “Why won’t you just tell me that you’re proud of me and be happy for me?” I screamed at her, fighting back my tears. 

“I am proud of you,” she said, “why do you keep trying to get away from us?”

“No, from YOU,” an evil force compelled me to spit out these words. My head spun. “Because you make me sad. Because you keep trying to make me stay here, and it’s my life.” That night, I prayed to God for the first time in years, begging for my mother’s forgiveness.

“Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent,” said Psalm 4:4. The guilt was thrashing. I have never learnt the language of love, yet I have been spoken to with nothing but tenderness. It dawns on me now that a mother’s forgiveness requires more than a willingness to understand. 

When I hugged her before entering the security checkpoint, I felt like I was holding on to her like a drowning man to a piece of floating wood, gasping for one last breath of air before descending to the ocean's depths. 

I remember a friend asking me what I would want to be in my next life if I could choose. I said I wanted to be a seabird: I wished to stretch my wings and travel to the far side of the ocean. She smiled and told me she wanted to be in a world where her mother lived— whether as her mother’s mother, father, husband or sister — just to be a part of her existence before she was her mother. 

Years ago, when I posed the same question to my mother, she told me she wanted to be a rock— a sturdy, plain, solid lump devoid of emotions and thoughts: an unyielding fullness untouched by the damage of learning happiness, anger and fear, relieved of all burdens inherent in the body of a flesh and bone being. 

I was disappointed by her answer. I expected nothing less than “I would still want to be your mother”. What makes sense of this profound selfishness within me? How is it fair that I wanted to be freed entirely, yet still longed for her to be a part of my existence? 

There is nothing fair about a mother’s love. 

After all, looking for love isn’t futile; it finds me where I exist. The love resides in the very fabric of my body, weaving through my dreams and staying with me in distant lands. The cure for my loneliness comes from within: to confront the silence is to peer beyond the edge of winter and surrender to warmth, letting the light in. 

___________________________________________________________

I call you at a quarter past ten.

It is loud there, you say.

When can you make it home?

I am standing near a gated window,

neon red and yellow,

kiss the rain and await the rapture.

You travel through the whim of time

returning a promise,

beholding the greyest of all skies.

Someone who I never got to know

told you it would be easier to try less and learn to transcend.

In another land of wind,

birds and salted sea,

I find you resting on the shore.

A grain of sand is a tiny rock

withered

down by time’s relentless force.

I plunge my beak to catch a fish

water twirls in a stormy swish.

You blend into the stream,

travelling down the river’s route,

towards the distant ocean,

finally washed ashore on an island,

joining me on the other end of the world.

The rain brushes down my face against the phone. I say,

I’m sorry, mum. I love you.

[cinnnam0nngir16]

Birthday

I had grown to hate birthdays. 

Every year, my birthday carved deep into my skin like a brutal curse; each was a filthy imprint that constantly nagged me to be better, grow up, and change. I strolled along the edge of childhood, tip-toeing on the thin wall between innocence and maturity. 

My eighteenth birthday struck me like a lightning bolt. It was a basket of stones that fell onto my feet while I shrieked and burnt at the stake of womanhood. It watched as I collapsed to the ground and melted into a smear of soot. With my birthday came insomnia, a demon that fed on my memories at night. I watched my room grow into a giant casket, swallowing me entirely. 

I felt claustrophobic as hell. But the problem wasn’t my room; it was me. I felt claustrophobic in my own body. 

So I descended into a frantic search for an answer. An answer within myself: why I sulked and loathed birthdays. I wondered what it was in me that made me restless and cynical. It wasn't until the day I read the line “The past beats inside me like a second heart” in a book called The Sea. I knew what it was then. It was my past that held me terribly tight. 

On my thirteenth birthday, my parents drove me to the restaurant where we used to celebrate my birthdays. We drove around the neighbourhood and past my old house. The entire suburb unfolded like a picture book through the car's rear window; nostalgia stirred the sour air -- I thought I must have rebounded to the beginning of my life. Some memories tasted bitter; they thawed like dark chocolate on my tongue. Streets, buildings, faces I couldn’t forget. Everything once engraved in my bones had grown into new flesh that I knew I couldn’t tear away again. 

I hadn’t gone back since the winter I turned ten. When I was younger, I had always wondered what it meant when my friends talked so excitedly about “when we grow up”. What did it mean to grow up? Was it a slow and gradual process of gaining more consciousness each day? Or was there a day when I reached a specific age and suddenly became more reasonable and practical – like I was rebranded overnight into a new identity? Would people start to perceive me differently? Would I be a stranger to myself? All I knew was that being an adult meant I shouldn’t dwell too much on the past. But I found that I couldn’t -- because the tender memories had begun to crumble and distort into glimpses of darkness. A feeling of betrayal was swelling up inside me; I was devastated. 

In my restless dreams, I was in that house again. I walked through the door and down the wooden stairs to my piano. Distant clinks of my nails touching the keys echoed in the hallway's silence. Light flickered through my half-closed bedroom door on the other side of the corridor. As I stepped inside, hoping for a wisp of familiarity to welcome me in its warm embrace, I winced, aghast at its emptiness. The coldness made me shiver. The bare mattress stared at me in an eerie liveliness. I wanted to tear my skin off and stitch a bandage around the bed to fix the sadness of it. 

The furniture in the room was a collection of white bones that resurfaced after many years. The desk was dusty, without scattered pens, without a lamp, but with a million dents and cuts. At last, I saw my window; the view was a smear of green and blue. I realised what this house meant to me as I stood frozen -- a cage. A cage that once imprisoned me and now came to haunt me as I grew older. It trapped my memories even now, after all these years. Whenever I attempted to flee and run to the future, my yearnings for what I once had clouded my vision, tugged my hair and dragged me backwards.

I woke up drenched in sweat and tears. It was the betrayal of my memories. The past I was always so fond of, memories I so often savoured, a perfect childhood, they shattered into a million fragments that dug painfully into my skin. For the years I had lived there, nothing was left behind but emptiness and my endless confusion as a child. When I left, the room was clean. Someone had rearranged the furniture; there was no linen on the bed, no books on the shelf, and no warmth lingering on the window’s stool. The past was a distant continent, a memory that hung over my head, and a nightmare that sent me to the Underworld. The house had become a void that happiness and new memories could not fill. Slowly, it grew larger and started to take up my entire body. 

I never said a proper goodbye to that house; perhaps I didn’t understand that it did not belong to me forever. I never bid farewell to my childhood. 

As I finally connected the dots between my childhood and the pain of becoming an adult, I navigated a way out of the labyrinth of living; whether living in the moment, the past or the future, it was to forgive and forget. When we were born, our bodies were empty. We made memories along the way, bitter or sweet, that stayed with us as we grew older. But sometimes, some of us lost ourselves because memories could be heavy and weigh us down. And when we let them take up our entire body, we run out of the space reserved for the future. So now, whenever the light dimmed, and I felt my sense of hope slipping away, whenever my hands started to get clammy from fear for the future, I would envision the void in my body. I would acknowledge the bits that represented who I was in the past and make more space for all the new lives I could have in the future.

[cinnnam0nngir16]

Writer

Women surrounded him.

Women with crazy hair

who wore shiny shoes embroidered with rhinestones

in biker jackets, bootcut jeans, and silk blouses

That was so good.

They kept repeating themselves

dragging the oos and giving it a rich twirl on the tongue

And he was generous with his laughs

He swayed and guffawed at their suggestiveness

Wouldn’t we be an intelligent couple! 

His leather boots rattled against the floor,

synchronising with the chatters in the background

They couldn't resist me.

His figure was lean

And he was tall and handsome 

He wore his age like a fine watch

His grey hair was scientifically dishevelled 

designed by god

for writers who smoked joints and drank beers

who fucked young women on weekends

and read their poetry out loud 

On Tuesdays 

By the fire, he blurted out words 

And touched the microphone with his lips

Intimately, blatantly, sensually

Like a conductor he held his fingers out

And stirred lust in the air

The women tucked their hair and held their breaths

And dreaming of the creases on his skin

The smell of his ink

Splashes of coffee on his desk

Splotches of red wine in his bloody sheets

He whiffled and hummed

His eyes drifted upon faces

hunting for a quiet freshness in the crowd

It was the sultry heat that stripped off my dress

Come-hither

Lure me with the sweetness of your loins 

Give me all your loving 

In return for my words in stanzas and enjambments

Let me beguile you with a promise so dear 

“Never date a writer,”

My mother told me when I was younger.

[cinnnam0nngir16]

A Sensual Agony

Violin and Candlestick by Georges Braque, 1910

[cinnnam0nngir16]

September

I’ve been reading a lot. It’s a sort of escape, I suppose.

I have this strange connection with characters in almost every book I read. I can easily pick up on the traits the characters and I share, some sort of empathic connection. I think it is easier to establish these close connections with book characters than with real people -- it is probably because I cannot read everyone’s mind, and this frustrates me. I have an insatiable desire to know everything; it depresses me every time I realise my mind and knowledge is horribly limited. I wish to read thoughts like a clear map. I wish to know everything I could possibly know and think of. I wish to know what he meant when he held my gaze for longer than he should; I wish to know what was left unsaid in our conversation, lingering in the air, building up this tension that haunts me for days after; I wish to know what my dream meant last night; was it a sign? Was it the closure I longed for? I wish my desire for the unknown wouldn’t bother me so much, working my brain like an old engine, keeping me up all night, tossing and turning. I wish my mind would quiet down and stop replaying every conversation I had during the day, the painful remarks I did not need to hear again from the little voice in my head. 

“Are you starting to think about him all the time?” Laurence asked me in front of the Taco truck last Thursday. 

“I didn’t mean to make you upset,” my mother's message read, “We think you should prioritise your studies more.”

“Maybe try applying for a job at the museum,” Zamiri responded to my rants almost immediately, “or a remote job. So you could stay in bed all day.”

The problem is I lack the strength to do anything physically. I wish I could have small talk with people in my head without actually opening my mouth or looking at them in the eyes. I do not want to get out of bed. I also really miss the rage I once had. When I used to get angry, I would get these horrible violent urges. I would want to smash a glass panel through someone’s head, punch someone in the nose, or kick someone’s bike. I used to fantasise about jumping in front of a train and scarring the train driver and innocent witnesses for life. Now I figured I just had to swallow everything down like pills and wait for them to digest in my liver. I also think I have liver issues. 

I feel so excruciatingly lonely. 

Like, not even with people, I have friends. I think it has more to do with a disorientation of some sort in regard to my sense of self. I constantly feel like I am running out of time and that time has become a physical object like water, and I am just wasting it. I have this constant nagging thought that everything I do is meaningless, and it makes me feel cynical, bitter and self-conscious. 

I feel so isolated from the world, unusually detached from reality. But at the same time, there is this feeling of suffocation when I check my schedule, assignment dates and time in general. I feel like I cannot take a deep breath, or I will die instantly from a spasm or running out of air. 

I have this deep-seated anxiety. I don't know whether the love I’ve been given is too much to take or if I'm deserving of it at all. I used to feel somewhat safe being in my body, surrounded by my own thoughts. But I am a bit terrified of myself now: the tears just fall off my face without warning, without a dramatic effect, like in movies. Everything has grown so anti-climatic, and colours are so washed down. University is a repetition of me doing the same routine, living in fear of not learning anything despite paying a ridiculous amount of money; exploiting my parents’ faith in my ability to finish the degree. 

The weird thing is, I don’t feel empty at all like I used to. On the contrary, I feel so full, like a solid state of matter, a brick, or a stone wall, like my chest cavity and rib cage are filled with heaviness, weighing me down. I cannot take a deep breath. 

I’ve grown to fantasise about being unreasonable; it gives me a sense of comfort to imagine snapping at the girl smiling and asking me ‘how are you’ at the lecture, and a dreadful satisfaction from imagining being cruel to people who are kind to me. I like to imagine myself being honest with people -- “I think you are annoying, and you are in my space”, “Leave me alone”, “I hate this lecture. It is bullshit”. I like to imagine myself having conflicts and arguing with people, to be able to tell them that they are upsetting me, that they are wrong, and that I refuse to think the way they expect me to. I imagine myself saying “no” to people and disappointing them by telling them I no longer care about what they think of me. My parents would say, "Isn’t this what you wanted?” and I’d start the next sentence with "no" and “I want”. 

But I struggle to see what I really want. I want everything. I want to drop out of university and go backpacking in Morocco; I want to change my major to English and visual arts; I want to go volunteering on a stranded island in Greece; I want to get married right now to a finance guy who is about twice my age and be well-off and living in a white mansion; I want to put together a portfolio and get a tattoo apprenticeship. And I want nothing at all. I want time to be non-linear; I want to split into many bodies, pause moments, and live in them like the people in video clips -- clips that preserve me in a specific time frame forever. But then I’d get bored, and life would be repetitive again, and happiness, thrill, or excitement would lose meaning. And I’d not know what I want again. 

People used to tell me that university would be the best years of my life. But that’s certainly not the case, or I’d rather die right now. 

[cinnnam0nngir16]

The ultimate love is cannibalistic.

In religions and throughout history, the consumption of human flesh has almost always been deemed as evil, inhumane and repulsive. However, some ancient religions show respect and love by eating the deceased. Perhaps in some way, it is not only for preventing the rotting process of the body but that in devouring the dead -- which, in explicit detail through eating their cells, fibres, muscles and blood vessels, they “enter” the consumers’ physical form and eventually become “one” with the devourer. That way, they are honoured and remembered forever. Their physical form has been reduced to intangible spiritual elevation and energy; they don't cease to exist but transcend into other beings externally and internally. Like eating beef, the joining of cells, the nutrition, and the protein within their flesh help others grow and gain strength. Through the complex process of digestion and absorption, the becoming of “one” is completed. 

“If I’m turning in your stomach and making you feel sick.”

The thought of eating your loved one -- despite being morally awful and unimaginable(and most unlawful), something about it is so raw, intense and morbidly fascinating. It almost feels too intimate. “I allow you to consume my flesh and drink my blood”. What weight of love does one have to bear to state this? What lamb would willingly sacrifice itself for a starving lion? It is so grisly, gruesome and wicked. And how could one exceed such intimacy and closeness by any means when nothing could separate the bond that is tighter than the cord of blood cells, components and organic compounds? Cannibalistic love is devotion. It is beyond our comprehension of intimacy and bonding, sex and pleasure. When you eat someone, you absorb their energy. You become “one”. 

The truth is, you can never get close enough to someone. Even if you are holding each other tightly, clasping their arms and pressing them against your skin, your hearts won't beat at the same time; and there remain two pieces of skin and two rib cages that set your hearts apart. An indestructible distance exists between people; it is both physical and mental. It is an interspace that grows and expands into a void in this cold, isolated world. Words, emotions, sex, success, nothing could fill this void within us. 

I was once inside my mother’s body. I am a piece of flesh she shed. She carried me for forty weeks; she gave me a beating heart—every part of me she created: my eyes, fingers, hair. My flesh belongs to her, and the same blood flows in our veins. My closeness with my mother cannot be replicated with another soul. I know I will always be like a mirror to my mother: I resemble the freckles on her nose, I talk in the same voice, and our eyebrows twist in the same way when we get angry. I remind her of her youth, of her nagging pains. Perhaps the “oneness” is also about carrying someone within you, holding a part of someone and resembling them, acting like a mirror, a reflection: carrying the same passion in reading, sharing the same taste in film, wanting the same things in life. When we love, we desire to shorten the distance between us that is physically impossible to rid of; we exchange body and soul just to be closer to one another, more intimate, more similar, more like “one”. 

[cinnnam0nngir16]

My understanding of the philosophy behind self-destruction

I stood on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the raging waves thrusting against the shore. The saltiness of the air mauled my face; my eyes lingered on the far crest of the ocean. Lines and shapes blurred between the sky and the only earth I’ll ever live to know. Everything had become linear, shapeless and a blend of the same hue. 

And I plunged, sharp and almost vertical; my mouth gaped as the swooshing wind filled my throat and lungs.

I had overcome fear by jumping off a cliff. 

Then I drowned in my sleep. 

A few days ago, I watched a video explaining the extreme sport of caving and the mortal fear of depths. The Youtuber said it was because of the alluring feeling of self-destruction that draws humans, or as many called it“ the call from the void”. We fear depths because our rationality tells us it is wrong and dangerous to have this forbidden and fatal attraction to self-destruction. It is the same feeling as standing in a tall building and looking down at the narrow streets and the roaring traffic that seems so distant, and you suddenly gain this uncontrollable impulse to leap -- it is the call of the void. It is so sinister because self-destruction feels good; it is the type of thrill that differs from provoking your siblings; it is the satisfaction of being aware of the consequences only inflicted upon ourselves—the fear and excitement about uncertainty.

An article written by Boris Kriger went on to expand on the metaphysical and philosophical aspects behind self-destruction; he mentioned:

“Self-destruction has a high degree of rationality, following certain logic. Existence is filled with suffering, boredom, and vulgarity. Any joy and pleasure can be perceived as either a temporary absence of this feeling or an attempt to end it. Death is associated with the cessation of suffering, in any case, with a qualitative change, a transition to another state.”

Self-destruction is followed by logic, our discontent with the world and our crippling desire to transcend into something more by constantly changing everything about ourselves: “improving” our routine and diet, looking for a better job, and rebuilding our mindset completely. And death is the entrance, an ultimate escape to another life, the afterlife, or oblivion, a place where we no longer have to loathe today’s sorrow. Crazy enough, particles constantly collide and annihilate into radiation, creating energy. Physics explains how everything eventually destroys itself in hopes of moulding into something new and becoming a better version of its original form. 

My mortality is insignificant to the spinning earth, human nature, and the darkness of the call of the void. My human nature leaves me no choice but to fight off my rationality and perhaps one day leap off a cliff, a building, or a bridge. Self-destruction is a way for me to cope with these situations that make me anxious and afraid. I feel that I must establish control over these situations and dominate my biggest fears. It is not my fault to idolise photographs of beautiful, thin girls indulging in the pleasure their youth and beauty bring; it is not my fault to starve myself into hallucinations in exchange for a lower number on the scale when I weigh myself; it is not my fault to want to be a better version of me by violently destroying what I internally and externally despised about myself. There is comfort in self-destruction; it gives me certainty and a sense of control. It is the fact that I, as a human, was designed to be drawn to the idea of destroying myself -- the “self” that ties me to doomed humanity and the fixed, cold physics of the expansion of my atoms, particles and cells -- constantly seeking a way out of the labyrinth of self-hatred ever since the moment my mother birthed me, or even further back when I was conceived. The minute I had become a physical manifestation of energy, I had no choice but to abide by nature. Inevitably, it all goes back to nature. We are constantly harming ourselves with the excuse of improvement in the hope of a better future. We cannot truly set ourselves free from the obstructions we subconsciously set for ourselves. We can never escape the curse of being human, created and destroyed by nature, and the rune that runs in our blood, calling for us from the void. 

[cinnnam0nngir16]

Mad girl’s love song

I’ll write you a love poem

About art and time 

Ignite me with the fire of your loins

Keep me faithful to God

I am praying and dancing down a nave in a cathedral 

I am not asking for forgiveness

Shed tears and surrender to art

Cassat and Renoir

Monet and Cézanne

The muted palette is covered by a haze

Mass, shape, volume, light, shadow and colour

An order created by the illusion of permanence 

The dilation of pupils rendered by the chaos of senselessness

Bolder, braver, the brush stroke -- harsher, more violence 

Drag your palm across the canvas 

I am fraile

My morals, my lack of sophistication, my cowardice

I am weary

My pulse is beneath my skin

This intangible feeling 

Sailing on a boat, oscillating between relentless waves

Your beauty is sealed in a tube of paint 

Blurred by the outline of a distant shore

Lost within the distortion of time and space 

I wish to compose you into a poem

But words are like cheap wine

It washes down your throat, the sourness lingers on your tongue 

Not strong enough

Not memorable enough

Not painful enough

Therefore I give in to nature

In an attempt to arrest the passage of time

Through the blending of shades under my paintbrush

Abstraction, harmony, edge, pattern, repetition, and a final wash

Your glassy eyes are the darkest hue of purple

Beaming in the dark, looking out of the window

I have finally kept you with me

For the rest of my time, till the destruction of civilisation, for eternity.

Quietly, you watch me from across the room

Sitting on an easel, waiting for the universe to collapse

Into a million fragments of our past

You hanged on my wall

Lopsided, lonely and in lamentation

I am not afraid of loving you

I am only afraid of losing you

I am afraid of the erosion of time 

The inevitable decay of you, the day the canvas starts to go brown

And your face warps into glimpses of darkness

I must be brave

Nature will destroy us all

But I am here, you are with me

Soon I grow old

All the beauty I once had faded into years of nothingness

My face wrinkles like a piece of scrunched up paper

A dusted canvas, moulded and shellacked yellow

Time I could not stop 

Though art survives through time, I could not stop time in its fleetingness

In a distance, waves crawl and hither toward the shore

In a distance, the far side of the sea is the darkest hue of blue

Seabirds chirp and wind roars in my ear

You must have grown old

We have to give in to existence

Where time withers your skin and softens your bones

Somewhere far from this body of water

A mad girl is humming the tunes of a gentle love song

Picasso and Van Gogh

Gauguin and Seurat

The muted palette is covered by a haze

Mass, shape, volume, light, shadow and colour

He made a deal with the devil

An allusion to Shakespear

The leaping image of a love sonnet, the eternal beauty

In the realm between heaven and hell

Youth only exists in poetry

And art

For love is a longing for mortality

We have to give in to nature

She made a deal with the devil

[cinnnam0nngir16]

untitled (wrote this when I was 16)

For the longest time I thought 

I didn’t have a mind of my own.

Through stories told, verses read, songs sang,

They laughed at me with cold indifference--

Wrecked, demolished, burnt down my home

And shoved bitter words down my throat. 

They drenched me in guilt and terrible shame.

My body drained of blood, my pride

Soaked in an odorous pond. 

They pushed me

Off my seat, my celestial clouds

Eyed me

Up and down, head to my toenails.

Oh, hush! Child. 

They were mortified by my ugly scars

And dwelled in my senses all along.

I knew they were God then.

So I had seven more reasons to lie 

About my ghastly hair, rotten eyes. For years 

I’ve tried to tie up the loose ends

And get them off my back --

A shackle of my own shadowed mind.

They chewed and spat out 

Pieces of the name I’ve left behind.

The sourness corroded my elbow and spine. 

Now my dearest friend:

The jar that I shattered,

The can that I struck,

The cuts fell into rhythm and constructed

The thin lines on my heart.

I prayed and begged for forgiveness 

By the almighty God. The moon,

It was sullen. They played and laughed --

Over my warm body,

Stomping on the soft grass of a warm graveyard.

I fell asleep 

To the sound of leaves crackling under my feet. 

[cinnnam0nngir16]

I just gave birth to a dead baby.

She was a part of me, mutilated, coated with dark red blood and thick lining. She was a shed of my uterus, a solid piece of my flesh, my cells and my body. She carried a part of me that could never grow back.

I dumped it in the toilet and washed my hands again and again like a faithful Christian. My head started to spin.

Then my nose started to bleed. I could’ve sworn my legs were bleeding too. I watched as large droplets of blood got diluted in the shower and went down the drain.

I couldn’t find the wound.