24.04
Today, I am cooped up in bed, writing to you. I am reading The Other Side by Jennifer Higgie, face down in the sheets. I can feel the cold creeping up the tips of my fingers. I am eager to relax by doing fifty things at once.
I am at the part in Higgie’s book where she talks about visiting the statue of Nausicaa on the Isle of Amorgos.
“She usually can’t stand on her own accord, so she was possibly made to be held.”
In certain pictures, she is pictured as headless and more weathered, which leads me to think that the current statue perched on the rocky outcrop is a copy. However, after reading deeper, I see that the statue was never replaced in recent years but had degraded significantly. Her face had completely eroded, exposing the rusted metal within her structure. A long line of rust paints her chest a bloodied brown—almost as if she has been beheaded.
Higgie goes on, laying out the statue’s history:
“Although the Cycladic period stretched for around 2,000 years from 3300 BCE, nothing is known of its religion or what the 1,500 or so versions of the figure represent: was her self embrace a form of protection, a symbol of nurturing or self-containment? Although we tend to think of ancient sculpture as gleaming white, the marble would have, in fact, been painted with mineral-based pigments: azurite for blue and iron ores, or cinnabar, for red. She would have blazed with colour.”
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26.04
It’s been two days since I picked up that book1. My mind is on hiatus, and I fear that my body is beginning to admit that I still have things to work on. The sudden realisation that my life from now will become a door in my childhood house I cannot close no matter how hard I want to. Moving back, finishing my degree and getting a job means surrendering my childhood room to the ghost of my girlhood. Being a grown-up means becoming too big for the old comforts of having other people tell you what to do all the time. Even if you didn’t like it back then, the need to have anyone and everyone tell you how to do everything and anything feels like a gash we are all trying to hide from each other.
Why do friends advise friends, why do people who have never been religious before seek god for the first time, and why do lovers end up eating each other up from the inside; we are all looking for the empty authoritarian phantom that existed within the psyche of our child minds—some greater order to follow or rebel against when need be. Now, stepping out of that fight for the very first time, the urge to turn the knife on myself becomes irresistible.
Loneliness seems to permeate the landscape of all twenty-becoming-somethings. We spend so much time in our own minds, looking for someone to tell us otherwise. I say we, but I can’t be certain this will apply to anyone. I have only managed to disclose my emotional turmoil to very few people since high school. I have only managed to make a few friends since living alone. The struggle against loneliness is a secret all adults seem to keep away from children, not realising that one day, even their child will have to grow into their big, lonely shoes. When you no longer see people every day and get forced to socialise, it becomes very easy to slip through the cracks and end up with isolation you did not prepare yourself for.
It is almost summer here, and yet the weather is cheating. There was a snow warning in April, and winds were as strong as in December. At least there is the sun now and then. But despite April’s precocious ways, this year, its prolonged coldness betrays a loneliness that the sun cannot cover-up. I am clearly projecting, but in a horrible way; I hope this is true for you, too.
I cannot shake an awful sense of disintegration, and I feel it now more than ever. I am pondering how to avoid making this piece so awfully bleak, yet nothing really comes to mind. In a way, there is beauty in this quiet breaking down. I know at the end of it, only the most important parts of me will be spared. And the rest, I find, will build me into something hopefully more complete. I seem to be in the winter of myself. Which is why, despite everything, it seems like my heart can’t be warmed. I know that eventually, this will pass, but in the meantime, there is much to be said about the crucial dance of isolation and contemplation.
Anything in excess will kill you. Drink too much water, and your cells will split themselves. I cannot count how many times I have made myself even more upset in my own isolation—yet there are times when I feel the most rested only through being alone. I think it boils down to this: silence will help you solve an external problem but will not stifle any emotion you feel within you. I read somewhere that emotions are born as a reaction to the world. They are the base motivators that fuel your fight or flight. If that is true, why do we end up harming ourselves by hindering their expressions? There is a strange power that comes with feeling your feelings. The force of every emotion you’ve ever held back is often stronger than you may think. A bout of sadness stifled for too long manifests itself in automatic tears, excessive crying over an insignificant thing, finding you cannot stop yourself because it has broken through, with its peak so high, you take hours to ride the wave out.
This stifling is, unfortunately, a learnt thing. I will not be getting into those details- there are plenty of self-help books and therapizing do-gooders who will tell you much about repression.
The statue of my childhood stands in a lake of emotion, where the water has whittled it down to just rusted chrome. There is no marbled torso blood-brown—the once-girl is a monument of my shadows.
After much consideration and conversation with a dear friend, I have come to the conclusion that there is no use in dreaming up ghosts where there are none. Spirits, feelings, tears, and phantoms are best left to their devices. The warmth we offer with our attention and goodwill they cannot even receive, no matter how hard they ask for it. The past and the beings who inhabit it are only as strong as the presence we allow them to have in our present.
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why they call it the present.”
-Master Oogway
I hope you make the most of today's gift.
-swan
By this, I mean it has been left untouched on my nightstand, and I have been awfully distracted by the world.
i really enjoyed reading this