Daily Note

Có bao nhiêu người đã đi qua thương nhớ mà quên được nhau?

Finally, found the poetry book that I've been looking for.

Daily Note

I have given up on reading and writing poems long time ago. "Because they are so cheesy", was my reason, and I am no longer a die-hard fan of romantic stuff. But for some reason, lately there are so many incidents that spark my interest in poetry again. I was attending an "obligatory" poetry slam event for my organization and one of the performers was so good that I thought to myself: "Man, if a guy I date writes and recites to me a poem with such passion, I would fall head and heels in love with him". A few weeks after I read a review about a poetry book written by a Vietnamese author. The words are so simple but for some reason I had this urge to read them. I looked and looked at the book store for hours but couldn't find it and was so disappointed. Gonna continue looking for it while I'm at home. 

Today, I encountered this. 

I was watching a Korean drama and had to stop in the middle to look for the poem that the main character was reciting. The poem was written by Nazim Hikmet, a Turkist poet and novelist. Honestly, I have never heard of his name before, but the poem recited sounded oddly familiar. It goes like this: 

The most magnificent poem is the one yet to be written. 
The most beautiful song is the one yet to be sung. 
The most beautiful ocean is the one we have not yet seen
Our most glorious days are the days we have yet to live.
And the most beautiful things I would like to tell you,
I have not yet told.

Such a suitable poem for the new year, don't you think?

I deserve to be irreplaceable

No matter how tough and strong I always appear in front of everyone, I know that I actually have a softer side more than anyone else. Just that I am always better at being in denial about my softness, I guess. For some reason though, I feel like people actually realize this side of me even more easily than I want to admit. Darn it.

That must be why I like Christmas more than anyone else. Well, I always tell people that it is because I love the decorations, and the sweets. Although, to think about it, I probably like the heart-felt, warm feelings that everything about Christmas gives me. I enjoy shopping, wrapping presents, baking dessert, decorating the house, and just love the feeling of being warmed by the simplest thing. I honestly am such an easy to entertain person. Even the smallest things make me happy.

A few days before Christmas, I "secretly" watch Love Actually. I have always been denial and tried to avoid watching the movie since everyone is so crazy about it. Yep, I hate following the crowd and doing things that everyone does. However, I was sad and the movie made me happy. Didn't really like all of the stories but some stories really made me smile. Despite any reviews and posts from Thought Catalog, I loved the story boards that Mark made.

With any luck, by next year - I'll be going out with one of these girls - (shows pictures of beautiful supermodels) - But for now, let me say - Without hope or agenda - Just because it's Christmas - And at Christmas you tell the truth - To me, you are perfect - And my wasted heart will love you - Until you look like this - (shows a picture of a mummy) - Merry Christmas.

Not all love story ends with a happy ending, and not all lovers end up together. That doesn't make it any less love than others, right? It is Christmas, and because it's Christmas, I'll tell the truth to my heart content. 

I am not sure if I can say that this year has been a rough year for me mentally. I have enjoyed myself and have been less stressed than any other year since I have started college, well, maybe except for the semester when I was abroad. I cared so little about things that it actually scared me. Me, the perfectionist, have become so casual about everything that I could hardly recognize myself. 

All business asides, I struggled, to make myself happy. I realized things that I have been doing wrong, but realizing things, and say things, and putting them into action, are two different things. I miss him, every day. No matter how many times I have told people I am over him, I am not. No matter how many times I told myself to be strong, I am not. No matter how many guys I have been with to make myself feel less lonely, I am not. It is killing me inside to admit how much I care about him, and about the little relationship that we had. I want to believe that he feels the same way, but to be honest, that has always been my illusion. What I want to believe and reality is so different that it hurts my heart to admit. I cried, and cried, until I have no tears left to cry for myself. 

To think about it though, I no longer think of myself as being pathetic, or weak. I have the right to be this way because I have always been strong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with me having feelings for a person, no matter how the person turns out to be. I don't have to be strong all the time, do I? 

A new  year has come, and my feelings for him still remain. I don't hate him though, because the memories, and the things that he has done for me are still there. Even though he doesn't think about me that way anymore, at some point during the two years that we were together, he must have done everything thinking about me, and caring about me. Even if 90% of all his words were lies, 10% of his action must have been real. For that, I will always thank him. I am such a naive person, no? Oh well, that's how I am. 

What I can say right now is that I am getting more and more used to being without him. And little by little I start to believe that there has to be someone out there who cares about me. All the guys out there, even if they are looking for nothing good, at least they think about me every time they send me a message, at least they want to talk to me and keep me company when I want them to. There is no reason for me to let the past hold me back and prevent me from recognizing and appreciating everything that others do for me, right? 

So, guys in the past, thank you for everything you have done for me. I may be thinking about you, and remembering things we did together and being sad about it for a little while, but that doesn't mean I will let you hold me back. It's a new year and it is time for me to look for something new. 

See, this is why I hate Christmas, New Year and all the romantic movies. They make me believe in relationships. They make me think that maybe after all, I don't want to be by myself all the time. Maybe after all, I want someone to be by my side? I believe I deserve all the attention and care that I am worth of, after all. Just like Chanel has said In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different, I will always be different and show everyone that even if you have cast me aside, there is no one that can replace me in this world, ever. And I will make sure of that. 

Well, I guess that is something I will have to wait until the next year to see. 

Not another "love" story

It’s odd how every year seems to go faster as you get older. Here I am, almost a year later feeling blind sighted by the entire 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8765 hours, 525,600 minutes, and 31,556 seconds that made up this year. Amazing how you become a blip in someones life after they meant the world to you.

Sometimes I consider myself a bridge. I’ll meet a new guy and sometimes the very first time we’ll speak I’ll hear the sentence “you’re different than any other girl I’ve talked to before”. Something along those lines always seems to arise often in the course of the friendship, relationship, or simply conversation. It’s something I should be thankful for, a compliment, as some would say. But I’m tired of hearing it.

It’s not that I want someone to tell me that I’m exactly the same as the last girl they were with, or all my tendencies and quirks are that of similar people’s personalities. It’s that my ''relationships'', if I can even call them that, end for the same reason, not on bad terms, but simply general relationship problems. The reason for calling myself a bridge is because after they tell me for their first time that “I’m different than any other girl they’ve ever dated”, very soon after they find another girl, so similar to me in so many ways, and then stay with her for what feels like forever. I’m tired of that, when does someone lead me to a guy who stays with me?

After seeing this happen to me for the third time I sat and thought for hours, I thought about love and hate, and how they are indeed the strongest emotions, but they really are more similar than they are different.

I keep teetering between hate and love for the situation. They can be mistaken so often, but I never thought about it in that way before. I hate love, sometimes I wish I never fell in love, because I feel it’s an emotion that gives the human race something to strive for. The ultimate euphoria. It feels good only for a little, but takes work to keep up. So what’s the point? We work hard to get this feeling that everyone is dying to have and some people don’t even achieve. Even if you do it bites you in the ass on the way out. A final “goodbye” or what have you. Hate, on the other hand doesn’t do that. No one wants it and it doesn’t hurt you as much as love does. Hate burns people’s faces, love burns away dignity, pride, respect, trust. Hate doesn’t forgive, but it can forget. Love doesn’t forget, so it’s always there hurting you, tearing you apart, but love forgives.

I just needed to get this out there, I was then thinking about breaking up. How you’re never really fully over someone. When one person drops out of a ''relationship'' for whatever reason, the other is left out to dry. You’re out of sunlight, the wind isn’t blowing, and you’re on the ground. It’ll take forever to dry. So you don’t let go until someone else picks you up, pins you on the clothesline to feel the breeze and the sunlight.

I’m young, and just recently realize that I am also awful at getting over people. But I’m tired of dwelling. He’s my friend, a very good one at that. We liked each other, a lot. He has other girls now, but I'm sure he still likes me. He likes me as a friend, and cares about me. He's not the first one and he won't be the last one.

 I’m young, I’m flirty, I’m spontaneous, I’m goofy, I’m passionate, I’m determined, I’m strong, I surround myself with amazing friends, I have opinions, beliefs, ideas, thoughts, dreams, hates, loves, but for the past 3 years I’ve lost parts of myself every time I’m a bridge. This time I’m tired. No matter how many times I cry, how many times I scream and yell, how many times I don’t talk to people, it will still be there. It happened. I knew it was coming. So I guess it’s my turn to live.

As I rushed out of the house this morning trying to get to lab on time before I get in trouble, a tiny snow flake landed on my scarf. And that was all it took for me to pause. When is it almost winter already? In the midst of crazy life and millions other things, I have totally let autumn go by unnoticed.

I remember walking through the cemetery to work every other morning, thinking how beautiful all the leaves were, and made a mental note to myself to either bring my camera, or come here during the weekend and sketch. Those things never happened. Just like many other plans that I told myself I would finish and never did. Since when have I started a life of all talk, and no action ...?

My life has been mediocre. Classes, work, homework, all-nighters, exams, papers, Sigmas, meetings, occasional drunken nights, and more than occasional drunken encounters with various guys. When I look back on the past 2 months, I recall nothing. My life has been so unmemorable and uneventful that I can't even remember anything significant. And here I thought senior year of college was supposed to be the best year of your life. It is no different than my previous years, if not more sressful having to constantly carry the thought of graduation on my shoulders. Everything that my friends and I talk about are how we are so lost in life we have no idea we want to do after graduation. Midnight conversations, early morning conversations, odd-hour conversations, it's all about life, and choices. I feel like I'm wasting my time but then I have no idea what else I could do to make my life more meaningful.

I feel like I'm just floating aimlessly in this universe, without a sense of where I am, or even what I am. I m being influenced by all these forces that I lose all control. More than often, I wonder what I am doing amd what the purpose of my existence is.

I am lost, and alone. Thus, I try to not feel lost, and alone. I am even more of an attention-seeker than I have ever been. I contant look for reassurance that people acknolwedge my existence, and that they need to pay attention to it. That's why my life is such a mess. Honestly, I feel like I know the reason behind all of these lunatic moments and behaviors. Although I may just be in denial.

I don't think I ever get over it. And it left such a huge impact in my life that I am struggling and trying so many things trying to get back to my old self, and to gain back the control I used to have. I would be doing really well, before I slip. And everytime I slip, it takes me twice the effort to get back up again. I try to grab on anything on my way, but nothing is sturdy enough. It is so frustrating that I don't even want to think about it anymore.

"If a guy treat you like crap, genuinely he means to treat you like crap" - He's not that into you
I wish that I can just blindly believe this.

I just want to make another escape to some place new in the world. I miss South Africa. I miss Vietnam. I need to get away to somewhere to get rid of this suffocating feeling.

Christmas is coming. Maybe by the time New Year comes, everything will be better.

Moving on?

When things end, the first thing you hear is all of this really inspirational talk about “moving on.” Everyone suddenly becomes a walking motivational poster, telling you all about how you need to learn to forgive and forget, how time goes forwards and not backwards, and how we have to keep our heads up. Time passes relentlessly, and we are supposed to imitate it in our persistance. Things happen, and then they end, and we accept it.

But in practice, few things are harder to execute. The world continues spinning, yes, and those around you may forget about what happened, but that doesn’t mean it suddenly disappears from your rear-view mirror. Everything around us — every restaurant we eat in, every street we walk down, every movie we watch — becomes marked with the person we were when we did those things. Each relationship can be a sort of fingerprint, completely unique in its detail and entirely constructed of mutual memories and experiences. Sure, things end and you go back to being alone, but it’s not as though you suddenly become the person you were beforehand. Things have changed, you have changed, and there is no amount of forced forgetting that is going to make things be exactly as they were before.

I have often felt as though so much of my emotional life has been spent trying to “move on” from things that seem no more escapable than my own skin. Sure, I can ignore them, I can stop giving them the life that they need to occupy significant amounts of space in my daily routine, but I can’t just pretend they didn’t happen. And it has started to feel as though “move on” is in and of itself a misnomer. There is no moment at which you leave the things that happened to you and the people you love in a small pile on the side of the road and continue on without them. It is more a slow acceptance, if anything. One day, the presence of your past is like a thousand needles pricking you over every inch of your skin; the next, you have become so acquainted with the sting that you hardly notice the needles at all.

But we are still being touched by that past, all over, constantly. We are taught that this is a bad thing, that the parts of our lives we no longer acknowledge can just be shed like a heavy winter coat and moved on from. It’s hard not to feel like a failure when you find yourself incapable of simply packing up an old love and storing it away in the attic, never to consider outside of the occasional, wistful half-smile. People don’t work like that. Time may move in a completely linear fashion, but our lives are spread around it like a spider web, wrapping around each other and intersecting at inconvenient and difficult moments. There are people from whom you will never fully untangle yourself, but you will learn to live with their memory.

The challenge, it seems, should be just that — to accept our past, and integrate it into our lives in a constructive way. We are all full of ghosts, people and cities we no longer visit but within whom we felt incredibly alive, and there is no reason to pretend they never existed. I wish I could hold those ghosts closer even, telling them that I forgive them for any indiscretion I may have at one point tried to scrub away with a ball of steel wool. Because trying to erase someone completely only makes their presence in your life more pointed — they are an intruder, they are violating your emotional restraining order and reminding you you cannot escape them.

I don’t want to move on. I don’t want to leave my past in small increments behind me. I want to take something from every experience, good or bad, and find it useful in some tiny way. I don’t want the process of recovery from an ending to feel like a hill I have to climb, one that has a distinct beginning and end. I don’t need a thousand voices telling me to “get over it,” as though I could even if I wanted to. Most of all, I don’t want to fear every new love and every new adventure because I imagine that, if it doesn’t work out how I wanted it to, I will have to pretend it never happened at all. 

Read more at http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/how-do-you-move-on/#iY2stsTaj1gSPGIK.99