It’s funny how now my life seems to have compartmentalised itself into these boxes. When I am looking at one I am afraid to open the other ones for fear of what I know I would find inside. Things jump out at me often, like right now I am getting ready to leave for Sydney again and there is a great amount of resistance; “Why are you leaving, girl?” I am not sure. This box is an amazing one filled with great things and memories and people that I know whatever I have on the other side will never be able to replace. Fragments of last October, countless conversations with close friends, claw at my conscience. Whatever it is you need to prove has been proven; If you’re not happy then it’s not worth it; I know you love it there and I’m glad you are happy but I’m not; I don’t want you to go back to Australia with a heavy heart; I admire your ambition; and from EE: Your friends are here. But no, this is what I want, I insist, I cannot live otherwise.
On the other hand the other box is also an amazing one, centered around something that I can’t turn away from – the seduction of infinite possibilities. Of course it is as much a fear. It’s a game of trading one for the other and in the last year I’ve done it three times and each time I face the same nagging feeling I used to get reading game books: What if I made the wrong move? Will number 5 take me down the rabbit hole? Should I have rolled again? Fuck it’s time to turn the page.. I hold my breath until I get off the plane. Things always right themselves when I am immersed in what is familiar, then it doesn’t seem so bad after all. It’s all terribly emotionally draining. But time has this way of making you forget what it is you insist on holding on to. I’ve said goodbye to so many things that at this rate nothing material matters anymore. Everything is disposable and replaceable. I am cool with never seeing these photo albums again. Memories are up here, I would say. But even those decay and over time I am left with fuzzy recollection of the moments that shaped my life: Do you remember when we used to sit under this tree on top of this hill and talk about our futures? No. What did I say? Do you remember when you said one day you would go someplace really far away and I asked what you were running from and you said, I’m not running from anything I’m chasing a dream? No. Are you sure that was me? Hey I wasn’t that far off back then. But I don’t remember who it was that said those things, only what was said.
Last year, things somehow got a little complicated when TR made a reappearance. It started out a little strange: he had just been through relationship hell and needed a shoulder and I had one handy. I’d met someone and in return TR would listen to me gush. Over some time, and in retrospect I really should have seen it coming, TR made me revisit a past that was both happy and miserable. It has always been that way with us. There is never more of either, pleasure and pain come in equal parts. I was left feeling quite deflated because in the end I was wrong, there was only deception and lies, and everything that was once there only existed in some other universe that has been so far removed from reality that I wonder what made me think I could go there again. Maybe I am a sucker for punishment, but now it is over and done with and it takes a fair amount of will to not look back in anger. I told myself I couldn’t and I wasn’t. But I came back to KL angry, angry that something else I was holding on to was made to take a backseat just as I was getting into gear. Essentially I had to make a choice, and I had chosen the wrong one, and like the stubborn idiot that I am I told myself not to apologise for it and live with the consequences. And I did. Until I was back here and in this one moment where the other one was staring me back in my face I felt exactly how heart-wrenching it can be not to have trusted your instincts. Ouch. Have I not made that same mistake once before and why have I not seem to have learnt anything from it? Have my closest friends not warned me that there will be bloodshed, and most of it mine? Yet they were there in the aftermath, pulling me together because I couldn’t. It was 2006 redux, and realisation came in the form of giant, lazy tears.
But that was last year.
Thank God for last year. Last year was probably the best thing to happen to me last year. Hah. The trick is, I am told, not to make new year resolutions but to make year end conclusions. Mine is, evidently, that I should always, always trust my fucking gut.
Which brings me to right now, and what is tearing me apart – from the time I set foot in KL this has been building up to a point where I have to acknowledge it: Something is telling me I should stay. I tell myself I’ve done it a million times before but I don’t manage to convince myself. And that same something is filling me with dread that when I get off the next plane, my life will not realign itself, that I will find myself holding the wrong box filled with the wrong life and the wrong priorities and the wrong decisions to make. What then?
So for the first time ever, I find myself at crossroads, staring at this hastily-drawn haphazard map a younger me has sketched out and I’m not sure which end faces North. But either way the only move is forward.
To 3.0 :)
