Sunday, February 26, 2006 // 12:07 AM

i think. people have stopped being a big part of my life. i think. i need to take the time to sit down and rethink things, what matters to me. what does matter to me. i don't know anymore, i don't know if i really have changed. this is the only youth i get, and i'm tired, actually. of wasting and waiting and waiting to live. of holding my breath to jump another hurdle. when do i start living, really? the hurdles will always be there, they will come up, one after the other. and before i know it i'm thirty, and confused, and trying to drown out a mid-life crisis. with things to do or substance abuse.

a few months ago i would really have willingly trashed my a levels. i wish i could be convinced of that now, because despite how deep down in my heart i find myself left with the conclusion of its pointlessness, i can't get away from the idea of its importance. what did i do when i was a teenager, uh, i studied for my a levels. get me out of here, get me out of this endless ambition meaning nothing, meaning nothing. i'm trying to think about what the heck is important to me, and i'm not sure if getting out of here is really all the point. i really was the happiest when it felt like there was a point to my doing things, when i felt like i was helping people. i'm not naturally an altruistic person. experiencing God really did make me want to be a better person, really did make me want to share that much happiness. geez, where did that all go, what has changed, since, since.

i was looking at the pictures of my wall, and thinking about how i have probably been happier than my memory tells me. i'm smiling in a lot of photos and i look at that girl and wonder who the heck is she. i associate a big chunk of my life to being tortured, self tortued or self inflicted or whatever shit that may be argued, i certainly dont think of things as being happy. angsty baby. seventeen was probably my happiest year. so maybe i'm overly negative, or maybe it was just that period of time, i think i felt very numb to a lot of things. including all those good times represented on my wall. there are actually very few memories that still make me smile to recall them, now. dancing after life skills camp in sec 4 counts as one of them. so does the return trip from the sea expedition during obs, when shijun said i could take a rest from paddling and just look at the water, if i wanted to. cos i told her that i thought it was so, so, so pretty. and it was, anyway, i have pictures up on my wall that take my breath away not of picture postcard perfectness, but because i was there, at those moments, and i remember them, how i remember them. i think. a lot of my good experiences were tainted by a lot of restlessness. leaving only a few precious seconds, precious moments pure. i keep. i keep waiting to live, and sometimes i wonder whether this is a reasonable desire, or whether it is this attitude of wanting, in general, that keeps me so adamantly unsatisfied.

and i haven't really talked to anyone for a really long time. okay that's not true, i had a pretty long conversation with grace on thursday. but i don't know, really, it feels like. like i don't know anybody, anymore. like i haven't known anybody for the longest time. i think the best conversations i've had involved some sort of prettiness, like. a gorgeous sky, or someone strumming a guitar in the background. i remember. lying outside the clubhouse after daryl/ding/amanda's farewell party type thing, playing with wax, talking to sebbie. i remember staying up til four the last time i stayed over at terence's house, reading oyster boy and talking to terence while he strummed the guitar. very softly. that was back when he had just learnt how to play the guitar, nothing to show off about, even if he had wanted to. i remember sitting at the playground with dennis the weekend before he left, talking, thinking. i remember sitting at the back of ding's car one evening after frisbee, corrianne may in the background, telling him how i wanted things to last forever, and him saying you'll never know what the world out there is holding out to you. during those times, with the assurance that those times might last: i don't CARE what the big wide world is holding out to me anymore. i'm happy, i'm contented, and people fly all over the world and fill their eyes with gorgeousness enough to be happy but not contented. contentment is a tricky little devil. i refuse to believe you are a guest that cannot be invited to stay, for longer than you had intended.

i really do want to be quiet. i still don't think my personality, personified, is a noisy person. i really do want a time to dream, a time to lose myself in something so effortless gorgeous. i am a lot of things that i've stopped actively being, and now, and now. i think i'd like to be myself again, i'd like to find out what the heck that really means. things like that are not a given.