these sunshine days

It’s been such a good day today, I just feel I have to share it. The kind of day that, if caught in a picture would be of someone with the sun on their face, smiling softly at it, quietly, peacefully. Maybe because spring is here, or because I find the days I enjoy the most are those in which Freddie is happiest (which is to be taken in a completely positive view; not that Freddie is unhappy most days, or that we're unhappy at the same time). That makes me wonder how I’m going to calibrate my days when I’m away. Maybe some random Tuesday months away I will decide Freddie is having a good day and smile and feel at ease. Maybe someday in November when it’s raining in Cardiff and I can’t help but smile even though my socks are getting wet and I remember April 28th as I sat in the garden and Freddie bobbed away saying something like ‘are you sure you’re surest than sure, yar, in the land of sure you awr?’ even as we lost sigh of each other, and I also continued to mutter to myself, giggling.
That’s one thing I don’t like about changing schools. Right before I go I have people so close to me I feel there’s barely any space between us but when I’m thrown into a new environment everybody is miles away in their own little world and I’m alone in my island with no one to share my coconut juice with. I have far too much coconut juice for one person, and if not shared will drown me surely.
Also, in Freddie'scar, we were blasting jazz out of lowered windows and sometimes people looked at us and I thought about how to them we were just a momentary noise before we were taken away by tires on roads, and wasn’t that a good metaphor for human life? You walk past people and you may take no notice of them at all -silence to you- or you may catch a strand of a lyric or a warbling note from their existence, like Freddie and me in the car, strangers to ears that had never heard us. But there are other times when you know a person so well you know almost all their song by heart, like Freddie’s twisted, temperamental, healing soliloquy, or Cecil's song that crescendos away from a tepid, demure realm and into something that would charm any snake. Claire’s twirling, deceptive dance and Alex’s sweet yet cunning sound. Tori’s personal, friendly allure of notes and Methini’s detailed, intricate sound that is almost shy to the ear whilst Helen’s loud, crashing orchestras can’t help but make me smile.
Ah, if only life were a musical. To be able to burst into song when we wanted (and I almost did today, though replaced what would have obviously been a masterpiece of a song by asking Rachel to sing, which concluded in a cheery, ‘we’re all going on a, summer holiday!’) To be able to, when you are feeling at your worst, fall to your knees and utter such a deep, moving, howling sound that it would start raining the second it left your throat, the kind of rain that is so hard and overwhelming you wonder how it will ever stop.

‘[My chair is like an electric chair, I often muse, sparking thoughts within me. I think about history, because the future is obnoxious and impossible. Think of all the people in it, all of them, even the ones that no one thinks to remember. Or contemplate philosophy as if it were hard candy on my tongue, the kind that makes your teeth ache if you try to crack. Think of all the things everybody thinks about; nothingness, the afterlife, consumer rates, time, meaning, pointlessness, being. Fear and sex and pain. I think until I’m filled with it, until I can’t go forward because thinking about the very start, or the end of all things, is impossible.]’

As I was thinking this in the car I wondered if thoughts unuttered ever affected anybody except the thinker. And yes ok they do if those thoughts affect the thinker’s actions, but sometimes I feel that thoughts have an energy of their own, that reverberate out of all of us and if we had a sixth sense we could feel the shape and mood of those thoughts. Which a lot of people might find disturbing, but I found oddly comfortable because though I don’t want people knowing what’s going on in my head (I need at least a place which is mine, the reason I like dreams so much) it’s nice to think that those thoughts are influencing something.
Which reminds me for some reason of how when I make a conscious decision on something small...such as what to have for lunch or something, I always think, ‘in another realm, I chose the other option,’ and that invariably leads me to think if it would have made any difference in the long run and then just to prove that all my decisions have consequences I act differently and oddly in retaliation of that decision. For example, if I chose a cheese and tomato sandwich instead of an omelette one, I would run around the kitchen instead of walk, and brush my teeth for a minute longer, or quickly think of an idea for a story or a picture or a metaphor that may affect, like a snowball, some other development in life. And so that sandwich is much more than a sandwich and decisions are made to be counted...
My god I’m in love with the Atonement soundtrack. Some cloudy day when I’m feeling what I call ‘placeless anxiety’ I would love to make myself a nest of those notes, of the way Damien Rice whispers in ‘cheers darlin’, the way it snows in Edward Scissorhands, the way Garneau cried in Halloween, the way Cat Power runruns and just sink into it, close my eyes and sink, sink, sink.
I don’t want to die but when I do, it would be a lot better if Elegy for Dunkirk were playing and that high, solitary string that sometimes peeks was the very last I hear and for a moment I could remember these types of days and, even if I’m in terrible pain, smile, if only a little.

What is the very last song you want to hear?

The Great Nothing

I’ve been reading so much War Literature lately, which I used to hate, that I’m starting to compare this world with theirs, because it really does seem like a completely different dimension. Most of the writers say that the world would never be the same, after that. And it wasn’t, of course, but I think they meant it in a different way (it would never heal, we would never forget). After all that, all that killing, all that horror, all those people with shell-shock, all those people who mourned, all those people who watched and feared and felt it and here I am, in my house, so complacent and safe, reading about it as if it were some fictional event that didn’t ruin people.
I mean, there is a war going on right now, but it’s not like the Great War, though it seems ridiculous to scale and judge wars, really...
But, despite that, the people I encounter every day, it’s like war doesn’t exist to us. All these teenagers complaining, it’s so...so pathetic. Am I being too harsh? I don’t really know a lot, I’m young, and in my world most of the time, but bloody hell...it’s like today is the generation of nothingness. Like we’re caught in limbo. The incredible advancement in technology, with the invention of internet and TVs and DVDs seems to just have passed. We’re not quite in the bulk of the environmental bettering, only at the edge of realising that we have to do something fast. Even our stupid war seems to be fighting for nothing at all. It’s so mocked, so ridiculous looking, with Bush’s face plastered as its icon. No revolutions, no great records, the majority of people idolising bulimics and drug-addicts and scandals. We are a generation of cowards, hiding behind computer screens and blog-spots instead of conversations.
When I read about the war it’s like they, as horrible as it was, realised what they were. The war stripped them of everything; every froth-corrupted lung, every uncut wire, every piece of shell shock bared them open until they discovered what they were, the animal before human. I guess that’s what’s bothering me. The people back in 1918 were so in pain because they had been stripped bare, because the wounds were left on a surface that could not heal. And us, we have so many layers we don’t know which ones are ours and which ones aren’t. We don’t know what lies beneath. Too much make-up, too many things we dare to say on the web and not out loud, too many times when we are too socially aware to do what we think is right until I wonder if we can truly know what we are, in this world we have created of artificial colouring, preservatives, synthetics, fake materials, pseudo pills and temporary jobs. Do we have any real principles?
I’m not promoting war, at all. Obviously. It’s not that I want a war to teach us who we are. What they found at the end of those layers wasn’t beautiful or great at all. I’m just saying that we don’t, we don’t know. I just don’t know how we can all be so accepting of this falseness when it makes me so sick.

And though the sunset is orange and pink and red, red, red, the light that filters through the window is white and transparent and normal, as if telling of a war that couldn’t touch us.
Somehow, that didn’t make me feel better at all.

Walking

Exactly four in the morning right now and I just took my dog out for a walk. My mind seemed to be thinking in fragments, or in some chain I couldn’t or didn’t want to control. Like how the moon, as I listened to Cat Power’s ‘In This Hole’, looked so tired and worn and how it made me feel sad looking at it, in that vague shape of ¾ full (or ¼ empty if that’s how you think) and coloured in a rusty, contaminated silver. The sky didn’t have many stars but as I looked up at them I thought about how maybe it was a little odd that instead of hoping to see a shooting star I hope to see one die. Just to look up one day and see one suddenly disappear, millennia of burning extinguished in a gasp. It would have happened years ago but it would still be amazing, and I would note down the date and celebrate the life of a star every year.
And then for some reason I thought about The Matrix and how most of the time I would say that I would take the pill that takes you to reality, even if it is much uglier, because it would be pathetic and weak not to. But at times like that, when I’m just looking at the sky, and how there is a twisting, glittering path of silver across the sea from the moon to me, I think about how it wouldn’t matter if I were in a matrix or in someone’s dream or experiment because I only care, in that basis, about my experiences and what they mean to me, even if to something else they are artificial and inconsequential.
I thought about how I wished I saw people doing more significant beautiful things, like dancing when they wanted or laughing loudly or giving postcards to strangers when they looked like they needed something uplifting.
I thought about the smartest thing and best question I’ve ever heard, ‘what will be the last song you hear before you die?’ and how it seems so impossible that there will be a last song and if you could choose it, what would it be? And your last thought, what will that be?
I didn’t get to say goodbye, or
It was worth it, or
See you later.
I thought about how there were so few people out or awake now and how it seemed a little ridiculous that everybody had simply accepted from birth that even on holidays they should go to sleep at certain hours and be awake at others. How the world had consented that four in the morning was not an hour to be out walking your dog. I remembered how when I say that I woke up at 2:30 in the afternoon people almost always laugh as if I had said something completely ludicrous to the point of mocking and often say how I’m wasting the day away. And even if I say that I make it up in the night, and in the long run I’m probably awake more hours than you, they always smile half smugly as if to say ‘yeah but come on, at least I don’t waste daylight’.
That lead me to think about how unaccepting people are. I thought this with no bitterness, but an odd sort of acceptance, which I guess is ironic. I guess it’s our way to survive. We don’t have astute noses to wiff people out, or sharp ears, or trained eyes. We have to judge some other way, so we take in all those pieces of social statuses and meld them together and put the human in question in a box. Of course we are too complicated to have simple boxes like ‘edible’ or ‘dangerous’ but instead have a million other boxes like ‘chav’ or ‘slut’ and how stupid we are by being so arrogant as to think we can stick people in boxes. And I think if anybody could rid themselves of all those boxes and threads then they would become the person I would admire the most.
I thought about what inanimate things would say if they could think and talk. Like a wooden table saying ‘I miss being a tree’ or the sea telling about all the things it has seen and maybe ‘please stop contaminating me.’
Man, it’s already 4:42. That reminds me of something I read today, someone throwing clocks off a roof to see time fly. But I guess it’s a little like that. Throwing time off a roof, and never being quick enough to catch it at the bottom. Though it doesn’t really matter as long as it dents the pavement a little.
But anyway, I guess I’ve vented enough. It’s funny to think that if I hadn’t done this post no one but me would have known of those thoughts evereverever.
Hopefully, anyway.
:3