still

been bustling about doing so many things – literally have not had a moment to rest or pause and think this whole term – and have had some really happy moments as well. it’s been fun and feels like what michaelmas of fresher year should have been like. trying so many different things and having all these little adventures that i don’t even bother recounting in detail anymore. let the pictures do the talking. this must be what living in the moment feels like, i find myself thinking constantly. rekindling the friendship with so many old friends and getting to know so many new people has all been a rather exhilarating process, but also nauseating when i sit by myself in a quiet space and make the jarring realisation that my heart is not whole. a bit like a roller-coaster ride, really. but, as with all things, roller-coaster rides too will come to an end and i will step off and back into the plodding stability of real life feeling dizzy but relieved. or that’s what i’m hoping, haha.

i think about us and I think about what we’ve become, and I feel this overwhelming sadness. that song by jason mraz that i always like to play when i pummel lightly on your shoulders. we were a beautiful mess, I’d like to think. what changed, what happened? there is that true but trite answer that zooey deschanel likes to give with a casual flick of her hair. still, i don’t understand. why – how – did we reach the stage where I had to purge the love out of myself? does it get to you the way it clenches my gut and makes me want to cry but the tears refuse to fall? or does it help that you remember less, and the details of what we were got lost in your eagerness to dissociate yourself from this stage of your life? i hear about the things that have been happening in your life and i wonder, in the past couple of weeks, if you’d really needed someone and i wish i could have been there for you the way i always was in those moments. i need you to know that i walked away not because i didn’t understand. i understood, i understood perfectly. but i walked away to protect myself, to save the parts of me that hadn’t yet been broken. at the end of the day, the little girl was forced to acknowledge that she had forgotten what it feels like to not have her finger tips perpetually stinging from the hedgehog’s pricks. and also, to protect you from the person you were becoming around me…power corrupts even the most principled of men.

in other news, am so grateful that I’ve found a little soulmate recently, all because I needed someone to live with next year. such serendipity (:

nostalgia

this time last year, i toasted marshmallows and fed them to you one by one, stayed back for a few more days just so i could be with you as you sat for your exams, attempted to iron those white shirts that we got from Primark – ‘it’s ok, we’ll get a maid in the future’ – , spent your first post-exam halcyon day with you (can’t remember what we did now although I remember it started with a big misunderstanding), and a few hours before I was due to fly off, we cuddled in that lovely room overlooking a beautiful Keble quad, and I played the sims on my phone and made a mini you – ‘is that REALLY what I wear?’ – and a mini me – ‘hey her clothes are nicer than what you normally wear –  and then you took the coach with me to heathrow and we got an over-enthusiastic passerby to snap a photo of us, and shared a goodbye kiss that had to be brief even though we wouldn’t be seeing each other for a month because I was nearly late for my flight.

you were there, through it all.

walking around brasenose sometimes feels strange. remember that awkward valentine’s day, when we parted ways right outside my jcr….you insisted on hugging – ‘because that’s what friends do, right? They hug’ – and afterwards I tried to stop myself from crying as I ran up the stairs to my room with a heavy heart and a confused mind.

Hehehe I love my housemates

Me: Hey guys, let’s go for grad trip next year!
S: Yeah sure
H: I thought Johnny suggested Africa
Me: OKAY let’s go to Africa!!
H: You wanna go to Africa with us?? We’ll have to put you through a training programme…man you’d better go do your surgery and then come to us for training…I don’t want to have you eaten up by a lion in Africa. How’re we gonna answer to your REAL mother if that happens?
Me: Hahahahah huh, who’s my fake mother?
H: ME, apparently!