29.1.09 -- Inspired By
Reflections…
“No one can live alone.”
I’ve always asked myself why the people around me bothered with human relationships so much. As a child I remember never having many close bonds with anyone, perhaps, though, me being me – the antisocial.
I knew so little about friendship, I don’t think I even felt love or compassion for anyone or thing then; not genuinely, anyway. Of course, I also remembered I truly didn’t care. To the past me, friends were a waste of time. As if those superb grades under my belt didn’t support my beliefs. I cared none if anyone wanted to attach themselves to me in that buddy-buddy manner – hey, if they wanted to be friends then I was willing to let them assume me one, and if they just plain didn’t bother with me, well, likewise. Perhaps they were after my smarts, hoping some of it’d rub off on them. Looking back on my deranged childhood I sometimes wonder how or why I held such non-cordial feelings towards those around me. It wasn’t as if everyone was that way. I especially wondered if I even cared for those who shared the same blood – mother, father, brother, sister…
Did they even matter?
Everyone seemed so close-knit then, gathering so very often, no, too often it was honestly tiresome. If they left me would I cry? If they hated me would I be sad? It scares me sometimes when I think back to those days. The days when nothing in this world was truly significant to me and I just wanted to lay down in the quiet of some unknown sanctuary and disappear – spirited away to some foreign land in my dreams where I lived the kind of life I wanted as my reality. Was I even human?
Then the world around me started to change; people changed and went away. It was then when I realized I could feel at least one thing – I could feel loneliness. It was all just too fast.
As the growing trail of modernization seeped into society, views and perspectives so alien before were brought before us – before me. I was no longer the epitome of perfection people wanted; I was merely a mindless puppet that willed to serve and be told what to do. Is it normal for people to want to be told what to do? To be told how to live their lives?
With modernization came change, and those around me grasped it with open arms, leaping joyfully at its arrival and welcomed its eternal stay – the ability to express individuality. Human relationships became fundamental for survival in the new world. People opened up to different ideas; uniqueness instead of uniformity and looked pass the similar but embraced the rarities.
But what happens when you don’t know who you are?
What if you’ve molded yourself into society’s ‘perfect’ puppet before its change and can’t move on? Where do you go from there?
“Darkness lives in every heart.”
Today…
The darkness from that past still looms, smaller and behind an irremovable mask of false optimism but still it looms, lurks in the depths of one’s being. Now I cannot be sure of myself - of my feelings. I still wonder if what I feel for those around me is heartfelt or not – do I really hate someone when I say I do? Do I really love someone when I say I do? Expressing the emotions I feel frankly to others will, in my case, be a lifelong challenge. There are times when I wonder if I even feel the emotion of which I am trying to convey and if I am even conveying it. Knowing I have yet to have a true best-friend in all my 18 years I’ve learnt to doubt the affirmative side to that possibility.
To those I know will remain in my life for as long as they breathe, I ask again and again if one of them were to stop if I would feel sad enough to tear. To me, the answer remains unchanged, but it’s not like I’ve had any real-life experience to test it with. Then again, maybe it’s best not knowing – not knowing how inhuman I might be.
“I can’t even imagine coming to school everyday if it weren’t for friends.”
It's funny how these quotes have carved themselves into my silly recollections; it is perhaps funnier that I never had to imagine that, having lived it as my reality. I know these words have scarred me; the profundity of their initial-inflicted wounds, perhaps terminal. These are not angst or hurt or regrets. These are simply observations of a lonely girl’s past.
The rest is still unwritten...
