25 Feb 15 - Strings of memories

I dreamt of you again today.

I don’t know if it’s because of the construction site next to me that i never get a proper sleep or it’s just some unanswered feelings at the bottom of my heart. I don’t have dreams that i could remember wholly this often. Usually it’s gone by the second i opened my eyes in the morning.

But this morning i can feel myself lying on my bed. Unconsciously, i roll around in my fluffy blanket while at the same time feel my presence in the other parallel world. I was standing in a giant size twin building with a robot-like modern design that makes the building look like pieces of metal melted together. In between two buildings is a weak wooden tube that lie across a very busy street. Cars pass so fast you can’t see their existences. They are just shades of light, glittering in a deep dark world with no light and sound. The sky has no moon. 

The road that cut between the twin buildings is endless. It’s a straight line that extended infinitely almost like a rubber band strapped to the earth surface. Other than that, there’s nothing but borderless darkness. 

 I think it was a university complex. The first building which happens to be the one i am standing in is the station side. Using the wooden tube connecting the two buildings together, you can cross the street of light and go to the other side. It’s strange considering all the other parts of the buildings are metal, but the only things that connects them is a small little wooden tube that’s only wide enough for a person to walk in.

I stare at people, walking and talking. Inside of the building is almost like a beehive, sophisticated maze-like design and a buzz everywhere. I feel no surprise. It’s as if i am one of those people in this building. It’s as if walking towards the wooden tube bridge is just part of my daily life. 

I wanted to cross the bridge to the other side for no reason. I climbed the tiny stair and found myself inside the tube. It’s divided into 2 parts. Upper part is a walkway that is the usual route for commuters, and lower part is just a blank space. I walked on the lower one. No one was there. 

There were food dishes attached to the ceiling which basically is the floor of the upper part. Fried rice, sausages and some ice-cream. I scoop some fried rice out with curiosity. It’s edible but it won’t drop down unless you scoop it out.

You were standing at a big empty hall at the end of the other side of this tube. This building is a bit less crowded. The atmosphere was almost like there’s fog and smoke clinging on to the air. Things are very grey.

“Let’s go watch movie” you told me after i walked toward you. You were wearing your red Uniqlo turtle neck and the one and only blue scarf you own. Your hands are filled with books and a tiny reused snack box which i’m pretty sure has a satellite or some GPS chip inside. Your smile was the most warming thing in the place, just like usual. Everything feel so normal as if we are parts of this weird iced cold metal town that never existed.

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, nor the rest of the bizarre sets of event in this dream, but I remember we walked together through the wooden tube, back to the station building where the cinema is. This is the first time i see my dream self up close. The girl walking and talking to you was only as tall as your shoulder. She looks like a better looking, anime-ish me. With her hair tied up messily and her tiny body, she's beautiful without even making efforts. In every dream except the last one that we were in McDonald’s cafe, i have never look like the real me.

We talked until we reached the cinema. And my dream ended as i walked through the cinema door that leads to a giant room filled with towers of red chairs. I turned into Robin from How i met your mother and you were gone, disappeared like you were never there. My transition between two dreams was pretty smooth I would say. I walked inside, apparently I am joining Ted’s stand up comedy. I was late, Ted mocked me, and i went to sit next to Barney.

I opened my eyes after Barney turned to talk to me. The morning arrived in the mist of confusion. My dream today was probably a set of strings of memories knitted together. Probably i miss you. And probably i played too much Kingdom Hearts.

21 Feb 15 - A part of me

Since when does being at home make me feel like i’m on holiday. Through the transparent curtain of my giant bedroom, lies flowers and trees. Green glasses spread across the front yard with little birds flying around. It has been ages since i last heard a bird sings. Some details in life, we never really remember.

My life used to be more refreshing. And I used to have more space. Since i fall in love with living in a cube inside the skyscraper forest, i never look back. But nothing beats waking up to a fresh morning with a cup of black coffee and warm light sneaking through curtains. Though the fact that my room is always air-coned make the whole i love nature thing pretty much fake, i still appreciate a little bit of nature. Never are things nice at an extreme level.

I took some parts of the room with me. Everywhere i go. Just so the cube i am renting in the city feel a bit more like home, i attached a photo of him on the wall. Every photos of him i put on any kind of walls, always look like a foreign object that ruins the atmosphere. But that foreign object is my object. It’s what make any kind of place mine.

My feeling towards him has evaporate through time. But that string will never vanish. It's invisible and it’s as light as feather, almost a none existent object. But it’s always there. And i love for it to be there.

Now i see him more like an imaginary friend who i talk to during hard time. I told him secrets that i never expose to anyone. I took a guy from reality and i turn him into something else. I don’t care anymore as to what he does in real life, but he lasts forever in my memory, in a form of some kind of saviour. 

Probably we all have that kind of function in our brain, the cope-with-sadness function, but i just turn that function into a character, that basically look like him.

I found myself distanced from him when life is good. I talk to him only in desperate time. I don’t know if it make myself more desperate considering i am talking to a poster on a wall, but at least it help me notice that whenever i talk to him and cry, i have sink to the lowest of the low.

Lately i haven’t been talking to him though. There’s someone else who i love to share my secrets with. And this time he talks back with a shining smile that will  give your heart a pump of fresh air. I can always feel a sense of security  hidden in that warming vibes when you smile. “It will be alright”, that’s the feeling.

Home is the most comfortable place for body and soul. Who knows, probably, i might have found something that feel more like home than him. 

19 Feb 15 - Iced cold cage

I quit online farming officially as of today. Or at least i put my farm on hiatus for now. I stare at my laptop screen with a blank mind. Rather than saying “I have nothing to do”, it’s more appropriate to say “I want to do nothing”. 

My fingers are so heavy. Every alphabets i typed require more efforts. It’s like i’m defying gravity.

Left alone in a room made cold by air conditioner, i am drowning in silence. My life in my hometown is what i usually described as the "princess in golden cage” life,  nicely pampered but left alone in an infinite extension of nothingness. The nothingness only princesses on top of the tower could feel, because they are too well pampered. 

With something to do all the time, i don’t think about life as much as i do when i’m stuck in the golden cage. Being fed and taken care of feel nice, but since all my basic needs are fulfilled, i can only yearn for more unnecessary things that i do not need. There’s someone somewhere in this world yearning for just food or a chance to live and here i am sitting here thinking that my life sucks while i basically have everything. First world problem. A girl who has too much.

I wish i yearn for less. I wish i need nothing. And so i don’t have to keep on searching.

But i can’t erase this feeling of my mind.

“I feel sorry for him, poor guy” said my anonymous dear friend while we were chatting yesterday. “You can’t even cook, he needs to earn sh*t load of money to hire a good cook and a cleaner” I feel sorry for you too even though i know you don’t mind. I am a princess. And you could kill me so easily by breaking my credit card into half. That’s how fragile i am. And i know it to the bottom of my heart that i try my best not to expose myself to the outside world, because i know i will die. 

And the golden cage is actually a double-sided blade.

Fairytale's princesses were willing to leave their cages, that’s probably why they are not real. In real life, leaving your comfort zone is never easy. Especially when it’s really really comfortable. There’s no reason to torture yourself unless you really needed to.

The golden cage is a big pair of magnifying glasses. From the view of people inside, the hardship and the danger of the outside world are enlarged by many scales. So even though princess Natsu knows she is capable of surviving in the outside world and might be even more successful than people who are already on the outside, she will not leave her cage.

However, it's iced cold up here in this small little cage, high up in the sky of ecstasy. 

Eventually, one day i have to jump down. 

Jump down. And work my way up. Just to know i could choose to fly the way i want with the person i chose. So this time i earn my own happiness. And it's not being fed to me.

18 Feb 15 - Timewheel

Mom woke me up at 7.30 today. It’s Chinese new year eve. I dragged myself out of bed and sat in the car hugging my big black coffee bottle until i reached home. My dad was standing in the front yard carrying plates full of duck and chicken. The sun is not too bright so my mood stay stable. I jumped out of the car and my two giant dogs jumped at me. Tiger seems happy to see me but he was more calm than he used to be. Even my little Turbo has aged. When i throw stuff for him to run and catch, he just walk to get them and walk back.

The caffeine kicked in a bit after i ran around with my dogs for a while. Home always feel like home even though some bits have changed through time. The tree in front of the house died and dad replaced it with a small tank with lotus floating in it. And when i’m away mom decided to install a small little waterfall to enhance her own luck. It was weird at first but i got used to it pretty fast.

The world flows by like river flows when my brain is not fully awaken. The next thing i remember was myself standing in front of my grandpa’s photo. It has been a while, 8 years to be exact, since he passed away. It feels like a blink of an eye.

“a love that lasts 10 years huh, i wonder how that feel like, does it even exist” is what i usually think when i watch romantic movies or read about someone love stories that their loved one passed away and they were never able to get over it for decades. 10 years. That sounds like a very long time for a 20 years old girl. That’s like half a life. How could memory lasts that long? i can’t even remember what i had for breakfast yesterday, how am i supposed to maintain those memory of those who departed to the other world.

Then i stared at grandpa faded photo today, and i feel a slight bit of his existence. It was like a cold drop of water, dripped slowly onto my infinite pool of feeling. Just a slight touch and it faded away. Leaving a sense of breeze behind.

I can still remember his voice, echoing in my head when he called me. His fainted smile and the sparkling shine in his eyes when his grandchildren surrounded him. And the last time he used that shaking voice to call me, was almost a decade ago.

And then i knew it. We never really remember all those stupid things like our breakfasts. Or not even what we said to the security guard at the lobby of our apartment just 5 minutes ago. Because that never pass through our hearts, but all of our loved ones did.

I cannot remember him but i can still feel him. That’s probably why i always feel a tension in my heart as i teared up during every Chinese new year, when i pray for him. And that’s probably why love can lasts for more than a decade, even though you’re just clinging on to scraps of leftovers and faded memories. Feeling just cannot be undo. 

Somehow i realised just today, that i am capable of truly loving someone, and i will love someone, for a long long time to come.

16 Feb 15 - Unnecessary

I can always feel the time passed by when you’re around. It flows through me like a cold autumn wind that leave a hint of the breeze behind. So fast, the time flies. I wish i could catch a glimpse but it just keep on slipping through my fingers. 

I wish the world pauses, for the moment you share with me.

Before i start typing this, i spent 1 hour on my SUV. Driving between my house and the nearest train station in loop and parked from time to time. I have an appointment which is not that memorable so i rather not talk about it. And the guy i supposed to meet should arrive at the station by 11. But because he doesn’t live in Thailand and he doesn’t have a hand phone, all i could do was wait in my car because the station doesn't have parking lot. 1 hour passed, no one came. And that 1 hour i spent being miserable alone on a very hot SUV parking on the side of the road, was very long.

Everything was still. The heat wave surrounding my car was blurring everything in my eyesight. There was minimal air ventilation. The air become heavy and stiff as it pressed onto my body and soul. The air stops flowing, so does the time.

Never does the time passed by so slow, when you are around.

Tortured moment goes by slowly, happiness passes by so fast. I feel the unfairness of the world as i stare at the road through the heat wave. In a tropical land where there’s only one season which is summer, you can only feel the breeze when happiness is around. Other than that, it will be just your burning soul and the miserable heat wave. 

I miss the happiness you gave me, all of the sudden.

I think i am too kind, like you used to say. I might be tough and harsh on the outside, but i have a kind heart. Too kind it do me bad than good. While i was sitting in my car, a merchant who was selling t-shirts on the pedestrian pavement starred at me, he was probably wondering who i’m waiting for. And i asked myself the same question, why am i still waiting for this guy that i know nothing about. I’m too kind to just leave him there, phoneless and have no idea what’s going on. And probably i’m just afraid of hurting his feeling if i don’t wait. But who cares? normal people would have left because they don’t care for people who don’t care for them. And this relationship is totally not worth saving. But still, Natsu, the indecisive girl, still sat there, trying to save the unnecessary relationship and try not to hurt people feeling. and then again, she unnecessarily handed the time her happiness in trade for other unnecessary people’s happiness.

There’s a lot of unnecessary there. Maybe i should start by focusing on the 'necessary' people around me, rather than those stupid friends on Facebook. 

The person who cares the least is the happiest. I should make that my motto.

14 Feb 15 - Floating clouds

I found a chair with an armrest after all. My typing skill gone up 2 level after the existence of armrest. I am typing this in the morning of valentine’s day, with some soy milk and bread as breakfast on the dining table and the sounds of construction going on in my back. Just like usual. 

I’m getting more comfortable with this place day by day. Now I’m used to mom’s endless detective series watching and started to feel indifference about it. During Summer break last year, these series haunted me to the point where its existence made me feel more homey than mom’s. I hope things are not that bad this year.

I dreamt of you again. The quality of my dream was about an LCD television. It’s somewhat blurred and mild in color. But the feeling it gave me, was so real i felt like its my memory. We were with a group of people, which i cannot remember at all when i woke up, you are the only person i could remember. And we were dining at a place called The Mac Journey, a brand new lifestyle coffee shop run by McDonald’s in an old department store with very low ceiling and vintage brown walls. The whole thing was vintage only because it is really old, not like they intentionally built it that way. The department store was more like a ruin of a shooting star that reached no where.

I was searching for table-for-six. I do not know why i needed to. All of the big tables were filled with a person guarding that table for their friends. Then, when i was trying to plan what to do next when we don’t have table in my head, my imaginary friend tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘We already got one, there’. And he pointed to a big crappy table near the entrance that people often overlooked. There was a man in a blue knitted jacket and a knitted cap sitting there playing with his phone. And as i approaches the table to take a closer look, i knew it was you.

You don’t own that blue knitted jacket, i know all of your clothes judging from how few you owned. You have a similar one but in beige and you always wear it with a vertical striped blue scarf which… you are wearing now too. 

By the time i finished analysing your top, you were already staring at me. Your tiny little eyes curved into a half moon shape while you give me those warming smile of yours. I just smile. That happens everytime you give me a warm loving smile that makes my heart floats like it’s diving in the clouds. We might be standing in a crappy cafe trying to fight for table so we can eat crappy franchise food, but that smile of yours, always lighten my heart.

We have a small chat and you hold my hand when we pick food from the menu over the cashier's head. As usual. As if nothing had changed. As if we are not 1179 km apart. As if you were the first thing i see when i opened my eyes this morning.

As if…

13 Feb 15 - Armrest

I’m sitting on the dining table eating my breakfast, operating my online farm and browsing the internet. I’m not use to this house yet. There’s nothing mine here. Mom said it’s ok to camp out on the dining table and make it my own territory. But still something feel out of place. Surrounding me are my foundations, blushes and cosmetics that i just popped out of my suitcases. Scattered and covered the whole table. My life is a mess..probably because my thing is a mess. 

I always have music on when i’m alone because i want to create a pleasant atmosphere for myself. The building next door is under construction and it’s noisy all the time. Well… Actually almost ALL of the buildings and houses around our apartment are being re-built and turned into some community malls. I have watched this area grown from nothingness to too-many-things-ness. Our apartment is among the oldest in the area that still stands until today. Every time i re-visited this place after spending sometime abroad, something changes. And when i got used to the new shops and buildings, it changed once again. Probably that’s why it never feels like home. Or maybe i shouldn’t be settling myself down to a collective pack of building and people, maybe i should make the change in space and time, my home.

The internet here sucks. I’m playing The piano guys on Youtube and it keep on stucking like a stuttering person. My mood is stuttering along with the music and the crappy chair without armrest that i’m sitting in. It’s so hard to type anything at all on the dining table. People seems to overlook some easy detail like armrest, the height of the table and such things. Many times, i have encountered places that chose design over practicality. Probably they didn’t even choose design, but they just don’t know that practicality exists. Seriously, what’s the point of installing unmovable chairs in a classroom if your students can’t do group work properly. (That happened in my university) I don’t know if i’m the only one to ever think of something like this. People said i think too much, which i know from the bottom of my heart that it’s totally true. But i just can’t stop. I wish i knew how to stop myself from paying attention to all these trivial things.

Suddenly... i feel like listening to Wankelmut and Emma Louise’s “My Head Is A Jungle”.

Love,

Natsu

10 Feb 15 - Airplane

Funny how i actually decided to write something just as you suggested. I’m feeling really crappy now, sitting next to a guy who stinks with all the Jack Daniel’s he had drunk. Economy class is a crappy place. The uneasiness of the plane atmosphere and the tiny space that’s smaller than the width of my suitcase are pressing my mind. As i’m typing this i am watching Rurouni Kenshin, a trilogy Samurai movie that is full of blood, dead bodies and swords fight. But the crappyness of the plane had made me insane to the point where i can miss you so much even though the music in my ears is a samurai song. Or probably its just me watching too much Samurai. I haven’t stop even a minute after i start boarding the plane.

I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I don’t think i ever have this kind of feeling before. It’s like you are haunting me. Kenshin reminded me of you. The bad guy in Kenshin’s movie, Kenshin’s friend, basically everyone started to turn into you. It’s almost as if i’m hallucinating.  I can still remember your scent every time i close my eyes. I can remember your smile, it shines so vibrantly as if everything just happened a second ago. Bitter sweet…hmm i think i understand that word a little bit more as the sweetness of your memory clings to my sense and the bitterness of the fact that its not real eats my heart bits by bits. 

I am still watching Kenshin as i’m typing. I think i’m overload with Samurai shit and the pain from my muscle ache is killing me. I f-ing hate planes. I do not have enough space and the retarded guy next to me always take up spaces on the armrest. I seriously wish you were here. At least to share the miserable moments with me. 

Love,

Natsu