Sunday

i still think about it

October 5, 2025

saturdays are satisfying after a week of socially draining work. but today is a sunday and out of boredom i try to test the waters of my heart, seeping myself into hackneyed reminders of past hurts and wistful assumptions and being dismayed to find that while the hurts have faded, muted, the fact that i care has not. long giving up on the prospect that i'll one day move past it in its entirety, i ripped open the floodgates and let all the new information of this parallel universe embodied by a parallel person and its baseless assumptions overtake me. i still care; only a little. i still care; sometimes. i fluctuate between caring too much and hating too much that i care, between desperation and dismissiveness, reaching for the edge that can't be held, like the surface of a summer lake or brittle bubble.

you're the independent young kiki from kiki's delivery service. you're three timezones away from home but you don't want, don't need to be home right now. outside, the chickens bark at each other. you look around you. postcards to professors and a handknit scarf you bought down the street in a little store run by an old woman named Denise; the store is closing in a week. a bag of potato chips, half eaten; a bag of chocolate hello panda cookies, mostly eaten; the weight of indecision, whether to eat out or eat in. photos on the wall. the same ones you had all four years of college, of high school friends before we all graduated and dispersed ourselves in the random places we are lurk. you think about people you swore not to think about and you still think about them exactly because you try not to. this morning you wake up from a terrifying dream of intimate trauma that has never happened to you and you wake up with mixed feelings: 1/3 pleasure, 1/3 fear, 1/3 confusion on who the other represented. the blue vintage print is still wrapped in plastic and you like to keep it that way. the diary of anne frank, still half-finished, a bookmark slotted in her quotidian days in hiding. maybe you wish you had the chance to read more diaries, that of other people, that of mundane lives, throughout a person's twenties, throughout the concomitant brokenness and instability and isolation.

you describe yourself as a scholar because you like to think, and because you like to think, you like to overthink, and because because because, you study these past hurts like a specimen in your new research endeavors, analyzing as if you majored in psychology (you did not). to be a scholar means to cite all the sources of pity and resentment and fear, quoting the traces of longing in movie reviews and writings and poems. to be an artist means to translate thought into a work designed to generate thought; you are the source and the scholar and the art and the artist, or at least you try to convince yourself that you are everything you think you are in order to feel some semblance of a wholeness. yet you make your life an act for the ghosts who survey you from afar and equate excellence with lovability. you cannot perform a seance. you cannot convince them of your worth.

it is only sunday i feel this way, thankfully, because saturday is restful and weekdays are sociable. i'm still well-equipped and satisfied with where i am, though the inevitability of these thoughts, left and right, is undeniable.