distant dreams

uncertainty. better at midnight.

There is a strange comfort in feeling insecure. In being uncertain about the majority of an hour. It is comparable to a warm summer night, when your head aches a little from both the drowsiness and humidity. A light coating of sweat on your back, the sudden lightweight feel that takes over your arms and legs. As if they were not yours to begin with but borrowed, from another time in your past. You know you still exist, a speck of the universe physically undeniable on your bed, but you question the reasons that remain stubbornly undiscovered beneath.

Roll forward. Your spine is curved, the moonlight hitting the bridge of your nose before cutting straight across the pale violet sheets. In these moments, you are painted only by a watery calm, and the thick ungiving silence. Sense will return with the light. Here, you are safe to dream, to wander, to be dangerous to yourself before the dawn.

I imagine that is how my insecurities feel on occasion. Safely constant, and hidden behind other less severe flaws. Gradually, I learn to naturally categorise some of them as Comedic, Relatable, Ubiquitous. The ones that lie underneath, carefully tucked in like the feet of a baby into their first pair of socks, are Dark  -Unstable  -Reactionary. Born from regret and self-criticism.

It is good to reconnect. To let go of changes and return centuries later and see how much people have grown. Change is a forgiving but indecisive creature. It cannot decide for the most part, what parts it wants and what parts it needs. So to cope with the passing of time, Change grabs what it can in its indignant fists and thunders onwards. It is why our skin have silvered scars, our bones still echo fractures, and our minds stretch and bend. Change is the human reaction to time itself, simultaneously adapting and protesting.

My day so far has been enjoyable. I saw six more of my friends from my school days, an era that peaked and ebbed and is now fortunately past. It can be summed up as food, arcade, and bubble tea. I might get addicted to this non-demanding nostalgia. This comfort in familiarity unexpectedly offered and just as shockingly retracted from my grasp. Memories are nothing without Change, this defiant indecipherable presence that weighs on conversations and laughter. Inside jokes and camera-shy eyes. Perhaps I am writing to rid myself of this warmth, to displace all of this through the clean clicking sounds of my typing, the evenly spaced lines over a blank canvas.

Continuously refreshing, at a much faster pace than I am humanly capable of following. Both my screen, and the people around me. What do I have to do for you to like me? What does it take in order to make you comfortable around me? My words, my past, my attempt at jokes, my laughter. I carry them and wear it like a consolation prize around my neck. The chain itches whenever I speak. It is a pulsing wriggling thing when I go in for hugs. My old demons have long left, having cleared up their belongings ready for the next batch to take form. I am, as of now, just an unoccupied office desk. I search for something that has not been invented yet, hoping I would be the one to discover it, to claim it for my own. Instead I only meet against countless echoes of myself in other people. This is what I mean by the comfort of uncertainty. It is always safe to presume there is an unachievable margin. There is always something more.

I get ideas once I lie down intending to sleep. My mind begins to raise havoc, melodies repeat incessantly until my forehead is burning, and my whole being would like to leave this body behind so that I can go to work a second time. To function in a second life coloured obsidian, aquamarine, accountable only to indifferent stars. Always, I know I cannot remain. So I roll to my side and close my eyes, staying still under the cooled covers and threat of routine until my mind relents and rests. It is during midnight and the hours that follow shortly after, when I feel like a better, more confident individual. When I can be surer of Change's whims. When I am truly alone with my own thoughts. A precious, precarious state to reside within. Disrupted with so much as a needle-width sliver of sun, of outside sound. 

Then my skin, my bones, my mind  - they all change once again to face the light.

Looking back, I had no idea where I was going to take these oddly titled chapters. A temptation to start over, to delete and edit, washed over me. I think I will keep them as they are regardless. There are enough beginnings to deal with, to sustain and maintain. I will allow Change a chance to do its work. These chapters and how they are written, the words I choose to use and the events I choose to share. All this a tribute to the little part of Change that belongs to me alone. Somehow, it has to be appreciated. My traumas, my scars, my values. I will not allow them to go ignored. They will find their source and turn towards them for growth, these sunflowers that took root in the hollows where my organs should be.