Reach.

The moon rises, paling horizons and vast cities, bringing its own kind of surrealism to the world.

With me, it is just the same. 

I cannot bring myself to be a party goer. I cannot bring myself to be a wage-slave. I cannot bring myself to the levels of some of my peers, where their priorities range from inevitable alcoholism to fraudulent dreams. Call me stubborn, call me a hermit, but like the moon, I shine, or pale, to certain groups of humans. 

The world flows and etches itself in time, but I still stick to my own rules, refusing to change. Perhaps my life has been nothing more than a battered stage, and I am tired of acting, tired of changing and tired of putting my trust on humans whose lives have been figured and secured for them the moment they are born. I do not have the luxury of the fortunate ones, where friendships and kinship are both one and the same. 

The moon changes the tides of the sea, and the hearts of the living. I am, however, not the moon that all of you have been seeking. I destroy and disrupt lives of every human and living thing I come in contact with, a burning star that keeps on shining and flaring itself through the night.

Reaching out to me? You might as well be reaching out to the moons above.

I am dead inside, and no stars would shine upon my walking carcass.

opus

Am I lonely, or am I insane?

Am I alright, or am I inept?

Am I sure, or am I dead?

Every single day feels like a continuous loop that plays by itself without any consequences. I am living in a world with no one but myself to talk to, a mirror that mirrors my words with a wry smile. I hide myself beneath the soft pillows of my earphones, drowning out voices of beyond,  for I know what lies there will be my own demise. My own bare self exposed to the outside world to see, with nothing left but brittle bones and a heavy soul.

If anything, I describe this feeling as... Loneliness. Yes. Lonely. I am never alone, do not get me wrong. Humans surround me like vultures circling near a carcass, wagering inserting their opinions and life values into my already bruised mind, and constantly cajole me with the wonders of life. Despite all the positivities in my life, all these vultures whose intentions have never been evil at best, I feel like I am facing the world alone. Alone, in a sea of darkness, their wings flapping wildly but with no visible view of these creatures. I see only myself, standing in the streets, the crossroads that dictate my life, and the roads lead to nowhere but down. Down. Down into the realms of worldly, almost zen-like tranquility that it scares me.

The peace is comforting, but the silence is not. I cannot listen to anyone but myself, and I cannot bear to. No one is serious, no one is real, and I am the only living vulture that stays on the ground, pecking on the sands of time and flying to the one colored rainbow of the future. Rest? Listen? Talk? Communicate? How am I supposed to do all that when I am alone?

When I am lonely?

echoes of everyday

Whenever I step out of my house, I cower in fear.

The shields would need to drop, and my face had to morph itself into a kind, condescending smile, my manners shaped into a heart shaped form towards all living things. The nameless faces that walked past me would look up, scan me from top to bottom for mere seconds while already forming an opinion in the process, and proceed to leave my world forever, leaving me to ponder on his or her thoughts on my deformities and my insecurities.

The world churns and manages to spin itself year after year, and I still cannot find myself assimilating to societal norms of, well, being normal. Being happy despite of all the negatives, with plastic smiles and pre-recorded laughs ringing through hallways and into their already weary heart. I managed to keep myself out of the cycle, but yet as the world turns bright and dark everyday, my thoughts are filled with nothing but absolute silence, and absolute chaos.

I can lie to myself, yet I lie to others all the time.

The small talks, the hellos and byes,  and the preverbial need to be known amongst my already dwindling social relationships with humans I call 'friends'. I am no one, and no one has been me all these while. No one bats an eye if I am to jump off the roof today, or to intoxicate myself with copious amounts of alcohol until my mind can barely stand by itself. No one cares. No one knows. No one wants to know. Every human, every living being in this world, can grief over a stray dog being hit by a careless (or carelessly driven)  driver and yet, they cannot see me. I am here, a physical being attached to every fibre of my soul, and my lies, my tears are for nought. No one knocks on my door and properly asks me how I am. They would wave at me and say goodbye, a notion that all would do whenever they think it is the end of this needlessly productive relationship.

My needs never being put on the top of anyone's pyramid, I wander around in the wilderness, attempting to search for a foothold. I lied, I condescended, I fooled myself into thinking that I am myself, myself is me, and everyone else is a big pile of dung that should be fed to the withering plants. When the lies and the condescending stop, with ringing of the smiles and laughters in the midst of my mind's own betrayal, they see me for who I am, and hated it. Hated it. No one likes an honest man who could proudly say that ABBA is the absolute worst thing that could happen in the world, or that 'evil' people like Hitler or Stalin are just a manifestation of the deepest of human conscience. No one cares, and if I am to list a hundred reasons why Green Day is a terribly constructed band, they leave, or scratch their heads in unison like monkeys on a driveway. I am done, I am sick and done of this verbal and nonverbal folly that corrals itself into a vice grip whenever human decencies are being put on a plate and judge. If you want me to be alone and lonely, then so be it. If you wish me dead, so be it. If you wish me to be surrounded by nothingness and despair, so be it.

In the end, there are no surprises here. The world spins itself diligently, and me into a cocoon filled with fragments of a broken soul, a mere manifestation of what I used to be, of what a human should be. I am, I could be, I should be-

Dead and alive.

regret (part one)

Regrets form a very thick layer around the souls of everyone, a thin veneer that shapes itself, morphs and enchains itself with how you live, and how you expect yourself to live. 

To be honest, my life is full of it. Small, dotty regrets that slowly fragments itself into small, tiny pieces that may seem insignificant, but one step into these fragments will make you bleed, a sign of how vulnerable we can all be. I am never much of a man to speak openly about these wounds, these scars that still hurt and itches, but today, just for today, I want to really talk about the one wound that sticks, and still haunts me till today.

I was 15 then. Ripe and still allowing myself to prance around more often than I should, I was a nuisance to everyone and anyone around me. I was growing out of my love for Maroon 5 and delving into Led Zeppelin and Pearl Jam, and basketball was considered my first and sole love affair at the time. 

In order to further spend more time with the love of my life, I frequently skipped remedial classes, and even detention in order to sweat in the basketball court. My life at the time was in a slippery slope due to the inevitable divorce between my mum and stepfather, and I cannot tell you how much basketball had helped me move away from the pain and loss. The love was (and is) all-consuming, and the fact that-

'Andy, could I see you a moment?'

The man who spoke those words in a commanding manner pushed himself out of the classroom. He was sitting in a wheelchair, well groomed and well mannered, with one of his eyebrows being pushed upwards. 

My A-Maths teacher, Mr Leong.

I smiled, and could only put up my best poker face at the time. A detention was inevitable, for I have skipped his remedial class the day before. He smiled back, perhaps ominously, and of course put me into the slip slop misery that was detention, and expected me to see him by 3pm. As you might expect from a chronic delinquent like myself, I skipped that, and proceeded to play basketball outside my school.

I did not know how he felt about me skipping his detention, however, for he passed away the week after.

Mr Leong possibly never sat in a wheelchair before 2009. He was not charismatic, nor was he the best looking teacher in Singapore. He was, however, hardworking, and had a soft spot for students. I never had his classes before that particular year, but his good intentions and teaching methods was well known among students. When I was 14, he was a tall, young adult, and always eager to share easier methods to solve math equations, a notion that I would have greatly appreciated if I was interested in Mathematics in the first place.

By the time I was 15, Mr Leong was already in a wheelchair, and he was perhaps a little too scrawny for comfort.

Jokes were made about him, naturally. One of the more famous ones was 'do not look down on him!', and my friends and I would laugh about him. I was pretty sure he heard these nasty things we all said about him, but he never wavered, and continue to water us down with Mathematics, and kept a smile on his face almost all the time.

The revelation took a moment to digest. A little part of me did not really care as much as I should have, and a big part of me was just genuinely shocked. What happened? Why did he pass away so quickly? Did he hold a grudge against me when he ventured beyond the human realm? Could there be extra detention for me?

Luckily for me, maturity settled in, and I went from genuine shock to genuine regret and shame. One of the more respectable teachers I ever had passed away, and the only thought he had of me was me supposedly ditching him for two measly hours of throwing an orange ball into an orange hoop!

I never skipped any classes in my secondary school ever since.

Why did I talk about Mr Leong all of the sudden? I do not know. There is only a handful of people in my life outside of secondary school who knew about this, and I never wanted to share about this. Why now, you may ask? Why bother posting a story about regret, about pain and loss in a different manner as opposed to your other darker, more compelling posts?

Maybe it is because I am genuinely regretting my actions, or maybe because I am just reminiscing the past. I guess the real answer would be the fact that he is one of the few people who actually believed in me. Truly. Unwavering trust that builds the bridge between teacher and student, a sequence that even I cannot achieve towards other teachers/lecturers nowadays.

A friendship.

To Mr Leong, I am sorry. Truly sorry, for missing your detention, or calling you mean names when you were still in this world. I may not be one of the best students you ever taught, but rest assured that you are one of the few teachers that I truly still remember, and respect.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

pop

I am slipping.

As I stand before my death overtakes my already weary body, my own words being defiled as the world decided to turn its back towards me, I can only do nothing but to stare back into its eyes, full of nothingness and dread.

My life is rigged with explosive conversations and the whispers of an atom bomb. Every single event that occurs in my life seemed to be rigged with mines of the mind, the leeches of emotion that latches onto you once you decide to step over. Funny thing is, I never once stepped over the lines, and has always prided myself into the notion of giving little care. However, my heart is not my mind, and thus, with heavy contradictions to my beliefs, I stepped over, and found that there is a new horizon that shone itself upon me as I crossed to the other side.

Death.

Death of friendships. Death of trust. Death of lust. Death of all emotions. A spectrum of what I once was is now locked up in its cage, a rusty one that could shake off its flakes of copper around the floor. I am thoroughly lost in this world of mine, and as I struggle to go back into the world of ignorance, the line extends itself even further. I am stuck. Stuck in this world that devours glory, fame, passion and love.

Perhaps all I needed to do is to draw a new line, to revert back to the world of not caring, of not believing, of not submerging myself into pools of doubts and hypocrisy. I am a walking atlas that points itself in the wrong direction, and I have been walking miles and miles towards it, unyielding, unrelenting. I have set myself onto this path of destruction, and Death beckons me yet again, a solid being that warms my dampened soul.

An eternal life of me worried over events that has never occurred yet has already begun. The cynic in me is laughing at this notion, this sudden change of the direction in my life, and yet here I am, typing this, unwilling to give myself into this cesspool of decay and corruption.

Ha! Maybe I am different after all. Different.

An indifference.

vice.

I want to sleep.

Genuinely sleep. With thick, soft blankets pressed against my worn body as my mind wafts towards dreams beyond my own restraints. I want to be free, to call for freedom from all these worrisome thoughts from my head. There has been many things that has changed ever since I last properly wrote in this wall I call home, and I wish there are things that I could change, that I could-

Be myself again.

I am twenty one this year, nearing the age of twenty two. Funny thing is, I feel like I am a fifty year old man, and deservedly so. I have no desire to follow these lofty thoughts that people call dreams, nor do I have the need to prove myself better than the others in life. I have achieved a sense of nonchalance, a behavior that should not be present in such a young body that is me. However, I feel rusty, as thought my hands have hefted heavy amounts of sand for the past twenty two years, thus creating this comfortably numb feeling, so much so that I almost never feel the need to lift them up and surrender to the imminent wave that is creeping towards my way. The wave of notions, the rifts that replicate itself once every few seconds, and torrents of crafty thoughts that seep through my veins like water into soil, immolating itself with its touch and taunting as I stare powerlessly at my own creation.

Reality check.

Am I the same person that I was two to three years ago, laughing with the winds and howling when the moon shone upon me? Perhaps not. I am an old soul, with my smile being mere fragments of a distant past, a sore reminder of who I used to be, and what I could have been if I had been a tad bit logical and emotional. I am now a man (ha!) with a hollow mind, grafting thoughts of the pasts and the 'ifs', and the cycle will repeat itself every once few seconds.

I find myself to be immune to be less receiving of jokes nowadays, and to have been more appreciative towards human kindness, whether it be intentional or by obligation. I may have lived a little bit lesser than many fifty year old men or women out there, but I felt like I have seen it all. All the pain. All the sorrow. All the horror.

All.

I can no longer find it easy to forge an emotion. Perhaps I have used all of it to forge human relations, and fighting hard to make these relationships stick. Friendships, love, family... All these has made me more of a human than I ever thought I could be, but they are also the cause of my dying heart and desire. I have fought, and fought enough. I am torn, broken and forcibly ripped apart by these emotions, and I am tired. Just tired of the vague smiles, the weak fist bumps and the smirks. I am done. With all this, I have reached a conclusion, the one that wraps these warping thoughts into a sentence.

No one loves me, and neither do I.

No one.

being human

To love and to be loved are both very earthly acts of notions that defines us as humans, a higher form of species that sets us apart from our mammal counterparts.

To be accepted, however, is an universal notion on how any and every living thing perceives itself and the act of trust in a being.

I admit that I am never the person that I always perceive that I am. I am not smart, neither am I 'cool' nor robust in emotions. I am weak, a soul in need of a new host and a mind that is so fragile, a single thought could break it, leaving it in small, prickly pieces that no one would want to pick up. 

Defamation, altercations,  alternations... Every single thing that I did, every act that I am about to do is never rational, because life is not rational. Life is an never ending pool of self reflection, and what I see is that of a spineless cur, a villain that has no motives, but rather to seek and destroy anything he or she sees just because the almighty Life told him or her so.

I am not perfection. In fact, as any normal human would explain to you in various different ways, no one is never, ever perfect. 

So why do you view me as a model of stereotyped imperfection?

I do not get it, and perhaps I never will. Maybe I am devoid of emotions, after all. 

Maybe.