chu_totoro (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chu_totoro) wrote2012-12-31 10:43 pm
chu_totoro) wrote2012-12-31 10:43 pm
new year's eve
a night of celebration. in two hours it will be the end of 2012, and we can never go back.
i was talking to a dear friend of mine today about how the holidays felt so strange this year, how i lose all sense of time at home and how it felt too normal to be christmas, too normal to be new years. we used to celebrate, i told him, when i was little we had christmas trees and presents and every year we would start a fire in the fireplace in the living room and watch something festive, like pirates, which my brother was sick of because i always wanted to watch the same thing -
and then i started to cry because my brother was dead and i suddenly realized what was different this year, why everything felt so mundane. holiday had always been about family to me, that time of the year when my siblings came home and we sat around the fire and read books or played games and watched movies, but honestly my sister never cared that much and my dad has asthma, and my brother was the only one who got as excited as me about the fire. he was the one who always ordered me to go get wood from the backyard (because he hated getting wet) and poked enthusiastically at the embers with metal tongs, he was the one whom i'd always drag into starting the fire with me, and i'd failed to notice for two years in a row because last year i was in barcelona, and the year before that, taiwan.
you can't run forever.
tonight people are celebrating all over the country (have already, i'm sure, over in the east). fireworks are going off, toasts, champagne glasses. but tonight i wish to grieve.
there is something healthy, i find, about grieving. our society feeds us a lot of bullshit that leads people to think tears are bad and we should, for some reason, be incessantly happy, but no one has the right to say that until they've felt the terrifying emptiness of having no feelings at all except for that tiny, curious little voice that buzzes in your ear, "where did everything go?"
i know now what it means to want to be alone. there is no one else that can come inside my box right now because no one else was there. maybe adam would understand if he were here and i was gone, but he's not here either. in another forty years, maybe even i won't be able to share in this feeling any longer.
i remember feeling this way in high school, wondering why does everything seem so dull and colorless, what has happened to me? and then seeing, by chance, a photo online, and suddenly remembering all the lively presences that had graduated, all the people you once spoke to and laughed that had since graduated and somehow, in the busyness of day-to-day life, faded more and more from your memory until it was almost like they were never there. it wasn't you, after all. the world had changed and you hadn't realized.
my brother's death has inspired me. it has inspired me to treasure my life, to spend more time with the living, to live each day with love and i hope that i may never forget that, though my flighty mind fades fast.
rest in peace, adam.
edit: 寫完心血來潮興沖沖跑到後院去挑木材,卻發現架子上除了一個水盆空空如也.征征地站了一會兒,難道把老木架的木頭剝下來給生火嗎?還是算了.意興索然的回進家門,皮包一丟.熱可可也不用去買了.
edit2: lol so you know i'm too much of an optimist to actually believe in that last statement, so i again 興沖沖地 drag了 mi madre down to safeway for milk and hot cocoa at 11pm, only to find that they TOO were closed!
#newyearsfail
it helped me stay awake long enough to wish everyone happy new year, though :)
i was talking to a dear friend of mine today about how the holidays felt so strange this year, how i lose all sense of time at home and how it felt too normal to be christmas, too normal to be new years. we used to celebrate, i told him, when i was little we had christmas trees and presents and every year we would start a fire in the fireplace in the living room and watch something festive, like pirates, which my brother was sick of because i always wanted to watch the same thing -
and then i started to cry because my brother was dead and i suddenly realized what was different this year, why everything felt so mundane. holiday had always been about family to me, that time of the year when my siblings came home and we sat around the fire and read books or played games and watched movies, but honestly my sister never cared that much and my dad has asthma, and my brother was the only one who got as excited as me about the fire. he was the one who always ordered me to go get wood from the backyard (because he hated getting wet) and poked enthusiastically at the embers with metal tongs, he was the one whom i'd always drag into starting the fire with me, and i'd failed to notice for two years in a row because last year i was in barcelona, and the year before that, taiwan.
you can't run forever.
tonight people are celebrating all over the country (have already, i'm sure, over in the east). fireworks are going off, toasts, champagne glasses. but tonight i wish to grieve.
there is something healthy, i find, about grieving. our society feeds us a lot of bullshit that leads people to think tears are bad and we should, for some reason, be incessantly happy, but no one has the right to say that until they've felt the terrifying emptiness of having no feelings at all except for that tiny, curious little voice that buzzes in your ear, "where did everything go?"
i know now what it means to want to be alone. there is no one else that can come inside my box right now because no one else was there. maybe adam would understand if he were here and i was gone, but he's not here either. in another forty years, maybe even i won't be able to share in this feeling any longer.
i remember feeling this way in high school, wondering why does everything seem so dull and colorless, what has happened to me? and then seeing, by chance, a photo online, and suddenly remembering all the lively presences that had graduated, all the people you once spoke to and laughed that had since graduated and somehow, in the busyness of day-to-day life, faded more and more from your memory until it was almost like they were never there. it wasn't you, after all. the world had changed and you hadn't realized.
my brother's death has inspired me. it has inspired me to treasure my life, to spend more time with the living, to live each day with love and i hope that i may never forget that, though my flighty mind fades fast.
rest in peace, adam.
edit: 寫完心血來潮興沖沖跑到後院去挑木材,卻發現架子上除了一個水盆空空如也.征征地站了一會兒,難道把老木架的木頭剝下來給生火嗎?還是算了.意興索然的回進家門,皮包一丟.熱可可也不用去買了.
edit2: lol so you know i'm too much of an optimist to actually believe in that last statement, so i again 興沖沖地 drag了 mi madre down to safeway for milk and hot cocoa at 11pm, only to find that they TOO were closed!
#newyearsfail
it helped me stay awake long enough to wish everyone happy new year, though :)