Blunt

Midface

So. A short break from all the nonsense I've been spouting for over five years.

I wrote the first chapter way back in 2015, when times were not much simpler but writing was a viable outlet for all my cries, my rage, my butterflies. I had storms, I had downpours, I had floods that fill the blank corners of my school notebook with words so unfathomable I have a hard time deciphering them now. And wattpad was the hip thing with as much anonymity as the rest of the internet; I could write the stupidest things ever and no one would bat an eye, because, well, there was nothing to see. So this book—or at least this anthology—came to be.

As the first chapter, Copper Field was my attempt to write an experience I felt intimate with everyday; back then I had to take the train to commute between two cities, spending well over an hour to get to school. I was fifteen, just a few months shy from sixteen. I had just changed schools that summer. The familiar faces around me are replaced by unrecognizable blurs of cheers and jeers from people whose culture was far from understandable to my innocent mind; and it only made it harder for me to assimilate with the standards of my new school, where everyone is either good looking and smart or just plain smart. I had faced a heartbreak before I changed schools, and my confidence plummeted further than I thought was possible, breaking through the pits of my stomach and rotting inside like an infected ulcer ready to burst anytime.

I desperately tried to cling to both worlds—one where my old self resided, although hurt and rejected by my ownself, and one where my new self kept trying to fit into the mold which the new environment moulded for me—and ignored the possibility that I might just be tending to an unhealing wound that kept reopening. I watered on withered crops in hope of passing the water droplets as the healthy gleam of life.

The feeling of guilt to both worlds continued to the second story, a fight between two maidens who stood on neither sides of the world yet their belief clashes. And it continued on, and on, and on, and I wasn't sure anymore if all I really wanted was to say sorry to myself or if I was trying to find an wxcuse to accept the apology. Words that I wanted to hear and words that I wanted to say, all seemed to merge together, melded by the same fingers quickly tapping on the overheated screen. Maybe I had felt guilty for blaming myself. Maybe I blamed myself for feeling guilty.

Slowly, just as the words merged together, the two worlds came to be one within my grasp, and I found myself more motivated to write things that made me think of other possible outcomes—what if an apocalypse had left me alone and stranded? What if I became less of me, but more of him or her? What if I just ditch my current self for the nth time and live with a new me? All those kinds of questions swirled in my head as I treaded the abstractly laid tightropes between the two worlds. I had come into acceptance within denial. And when doubt snaked its way inside, then and again, nightmares of void and inexplicable eeriness made their way down my sleeping mind to the tips of my fingers, and thus was born short poems that I could only best describe as what happened and not happened within those dreams. Long sentences and meaningful words lose their importance when it came to describing my dreams. They lack luster and nuance when I spell them out loud, and I wonder now if that was because my tongue never hungrily devour literature the way some people do.

All the what ifs and had beens turn me to feel a little bit more in my day to day life, in which loneliness accompanied me across cities. I became more open about what I really felt at the moment, and I candidly wrote pieces about things I cannot candidly do in real life—What is a prime example, and I still love the short prose until now—and in those short bursts of explosive inspirations, I became more and more daring to face the merged worlds. I was not a challenger yet, but I had begun to strategize, and it helped me to keep track of my aim.

But what was my aim? I was still wandering without directions in a pathless world. I still am.

Perhaps by writing more chapters, more addition of my spiralling thoughts, within another five years I will have achieved my goal. I will have found my aim. A meaningful end to the desperate ramblings, and I intend to see it through, as much as I don't have the control to do so. Perhaps, really.