Drowning

And you sink deeper and deeper until it is impossible to sink any further,  yet it is still not the bottom.

Your lungs burn. Your vision blurs and darken at the edges.  You wish for a blank slate,  a second chance to do everything differently. But as you feel fire burn in your lungs as you push your last breaths out,  and see darkness encroach your vision,  you know. You know that second chances are myths told by people in denial. 

You feel heaviness in your limbs. You feel the cold water prickle your skin. And as you feel like you’re burning and freezing at the same time, you succumb to the darkness.

Blank Space

She felt empty. A kind of hollowness that one wouldn’t know how to fill. It was an abyss, an endless void. She have no idea what she wants, no idea what to fill the void with.

Her days were dictated by her boredom, of listelessly chasing things that would give her a temporary high. Even just a flare of any emotion was enough for her, even though she knows that it would just sputter and die and leave her emptier than before.

It frustrated her, but she don’t know what else to do about the emptiness.

She flirted with danger, with death or just anybody really.  She smiled, jumped off cliffs and batted her eyelashes, anything just to get her body to produce the hormones she needed just to feel something. Anything.

There were times where it got too bad. Times when her emptiness becomes suffocating that even pain looked like salvation. She dabbled in pain; a blade on her skin, a punch on the wall. It would leave her knuckles bleeding and her skin a garish mix of red and white lines, but it calmed her. It was almost cathartic.

She tried falling in love, or at least forcing herself to pretend that she is falling in love. It was pathetic, she thought. The emptiness inside her was too encompassing that pretending to have an emotion that is also as overwelming is just an exercise in futility. It didn’t end well, he told her she was too mechanical, too cold and too perfect, like a Stepford wife; a vacuous shell made up of shiny synthetic materials.

She feels lost.  Trapped in the darkness that is slowly consuming her. And she would probably won’t be able to escape.

On writing

I can’t remember wanting to write. I was content with reading. Ever since I was a child, I was content with devouring (figuratively) anything with words. Be it Archie comics, the back of shampoo bottles, Nancy Drew, or some random encyclopedia entry, I must read it.

I was a very talkative child, and an honest (to a fault) one. I never had a problems with words, moreso in expressing them, I was pretty brash. I never had the urge to transfer things on paper, I actually hated writing as a child. I believed that if I can say it, why bother writing it down.

I remember hating composition when I was in grade school, it was because it will take me too long to finish because I would obsess over the appropriateness of the words and the grammatical rules. I never had the patience for it.

I remember being a copy reader for the school paper, I was chosen because I read a lot and was a bit conscious about grammar. I hated it for I never had the patience for facts. I only read the comic section of the newspaper. So whenever I lost during competitions I feel bad, then just shrug it off because I never liked what I was doing anyway. Then I started to envy my friends who are in feature writing, because it seems more fun to spin a story of your own than picking at someone else’s for mistakes then fretfully hoping that you still get the meaning intact. I started wondering about writing then.

Then at highschool I started writing fan fictions. I was infatuated with a friend so I started writing fan fictions as an outlet for those feelings. I never imagined us in those scenarios, but I- ok fine maybe I did a little bit but all those scenarios with us usually ends in break up and bitterness while my fictional characters get a happy ending (sometimes).

I also tried to dabble in poetry, and I sucked. I never had the patience to rhyme and fit words in the correct measure. I wasn’t too keen on symbolism either. So I abandoned it and stuck to prose.

I probably wrote a lot at that time, but never posted them all. I only let some of my friends read it, looking for feedback. They told me it was good, but I felt it was rubbish, so most of them are either unfinished or forgotten.

When I was in college, my father died. I did not know how to deal with my grief. I don’t like people pitying me, so talking to them about it is not an option. That was when I started keeping a journal. I sometimes write about myself in third person, describing my anguish in such a dramatic detail that I end up laughing. It was cathartic for me. I noticed then that my writing was darker than it used to be. I used the words “morose,” “darkness” and “quagmire” to describe my moods, and I probably exhausted all the synonyms for sad. It helped a lot, I can be weepy all I want without my notebook offering me lukewarm platitudes and pathetic reassurances that everything would be alright. I just needed someone to listen, and writing gave me just that.

That happened a few years ago. This blog now is somewhat my journal where I can pour all my thoughts without being judged. I know this is a public domain, and that people will be able to read it but I am using a pseudonym and there are slim chances that people would actually read all the crap I’m spouting in this blog.

Anyway, bottomline. Writing used to be something I hate, now it has become my salvation, my lifeline.