Drip, Goes Time

Somewhere in the room below mine, someone is listening to Hokkien pop songs and suddenly, I have a strange urge to bellow a loud and cheery 'hello!' but somehow in the crevice of my exhausted mind, I think that that would be rather socially unacceptable.

It disconcerts me that it is only the third week of school because somehow there is already an oddly old familiarity to the routine. There is something significant about unrecognizable and indistinguishable faces slowly becoming familiar ones.

And yet, there are still traces of surrealism because I can't quite reconcile the (relative) permanence of the situation in my mind. It both reassures and scares me that I will spend four years in this routine; the reassurance from the fact that there is an established routine and that the macabre uncertainty is sufficiently over and the fear, from the realization of how easily we get used to things;

the thought that we are willing to give up and forget what we thought we would fight for in exchange for the comfort of a routine pattern.

I don't want to be merely settling, I want to have reason to believe that I am much more of a person than that. I did think that I could turn matyred resignation into contentment but sometimes I think I'm not really sure what the difference is anymore. Of course it can be reasoned out, intellectually and rationally. But that rarely works, mostly because I doubt I am inclined to function that way.

I figured that by deciding what was important to me and making a committment to it, there would be some sort of meaning and purpose that I could use to justify everything else. But the truth is, and I am ashamed to confess it, that the niggling notion of practicality remains. True, it is tucked away. But it remains, nonetheless. And in the face of everything else, it's even harder to ignore it. I think what's worse than being weak is thinking that you're strong and realizing that you're actually not when it's too late. I always thought that I was never one to conform but with the often sad benefit of hindsight, I've come to realize that that was precisely what I was doing with my life: conforming to expectations. Not entirely mindlessly, but sufficiently so.

I don't want this year to just be another change in the numbers on the calendar, quantifying the moments that have passed and the ones to come; a cacophony of days where each might as well be other.

Because I think, and I want to think, that it could be so much more if only I were brave enough to make it such.

And the music has stopped.