singing

Karaoke. Sitting around in the living room. Beer and friends.

There’s an amazing energy here. I can’t help but smile.

We may not be aware of it, but with all the songs sung together (some that we didn’t even realize we knew every word to) our souls are connected.

Listening to A and E singing a duet. They’ve been together over a year now. They’re both really good singers. It makes you see how much in love they are, watching them have fun with it. The happiness in their voices is unmistakable.

I love seeing couples looking lovingly into each other’s eyes when they’re not even aware of it. Not staring, not being all lovey dovey and sickening just happening to look at each other… you can almost see a cloud around them, binding them together despite its being insubstantial.

The cloud is gone in a second, but you know that the bond is there, you can feel it in the way they share the mic.

Envy. I don’t want to call it that. I am truly happy that they have each other. It’s a beautiful thing to have, that bond.

You know how something really good happens to you, you hope that everyone gets to feel that feeling?

I think that’s how it feels for them. Maybe they don’t even know it right now. They’re probably used to it already. But it’s that kind of feeling, it’s that good.

And I want to feel it.

Envy. That, but not that. Like I said, I don’t want to call it that.

Maybe I’m bitter. But I’m not. I’m happy for them… but.

Maybe it’s thinking again that it’ll make life better, easier to take, if I had someone to sing with.

I hate that it’s seems to be such a thing to me, that it affects me so much, albeit not too often.

It’s a nice thing, I think, to want to have someone you can sing with. But to want it so much that you can’t think straight, that can’t be right.

It should be on a list, but it shouldn’t be the priority.

I think I’m growing more and more bitter about the fact that I’m even thinking about this. This can’t be good.

I think I’m going to go sing.

story

She worked with him. Probably on the same team. It may have been inevitable that they would grow close.

Who knows when he’d begun to feel differently about her? Who knows when he’d realized she was more special to him than all the other coworkers they hung out with so much? What mattered was that he did and that he told her so.

And she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She wasn’t sure for many months.

Until she almost was. Until all it took was one thing to make her sure.

Why did it have to be leukemia?

—

Epilogue:

It took him a few months after he was diagnosed.

In the months that followed, she found comfort and understanding in his very best friend. And his best friend, in her. And so they have, for three years now.

It seems this is how he would have wanted it to be.

slowly

Regarding the previous post, I was told, “I think it’s wonderful that you are giving yourself that gift lately.”

Amid all the self-doubt and apprehension about not being “properly” employed, it’s easy to forget that maybe this is the pace I’m supposed to be keeping for this course.

I need to really believe that I’ll come out better if I don’t rush and worry too much. There are piles of things to do, but they’re surely diminishing, how ever slowly.

I may not be proud of having spent an hour on YouTube watching Yaris commercials, but I am proud of having made two dishes of baked spaghetti, washed, dried and folded laundry, and done some work for a freelance client. I accomplished something today.

And that’s something to be thankful for, how ever slowly.

a ramble on falling in love

I can’t say I know a lot about love. I can’t say for sure if I’ve ever been in love.

There was a time that everything anyone would say about love would make me go, “Aww…” and I would ache for someone to love… or I would ache for that someone I thought maybe I loved. I find it all so very silly to think of my teenage self thinking about love and thinking that I knew something about it.

There’s the notion. I’m still a bit of a romantic. I still dream about having someone to spend the rest of my life with… to grow old with… I really like that line. I always think about old couples sitting on the porch in their rockers, content just to be next to each other.

The notion still makes me long to have someone, though I know that I don’t need anyone to complete me, though I’m not sure I can hold on to a good relationship for very long. The notion is that falling in love is something I need.

One problem is how I can’t seem to tell. Again, it’s silly to think about how obsessive I can get about people I don’t even know. No, it’s not silly, it’s more creepy than silly. In truth, I’m “falling in love” every other week. It makes me feel stupid and painfully immature, sometimes. Every other time, I just ignore it.

So I go on walking this weird winding twisty line of irregular thickness, between eagerness to be part of a pair and fear of commitment.

(Oh how I wish I were coherent)

“Falling in love” …I wonder what it would be like to let go of inhibitions and truly fall in love left and right. Not to the point of polygamy or infidelity, not romantic love because that would be too complicated.

But to fall in love, even just a little, with virtually every person you meet.

(This has taken an interesting and wholly unexpected turn.)

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

But now I’m thinking again about the love that I sometimes think isn’t meant for me. I think sometimes that the world would be better off if I remained single for life. Just because. I guess it really doesn’t matter right now, but I still think it.

I also think about how wonderful it would be to find that someone that you can’t help but fall in love with all over again, every single day. I believe love like that exists.

Love, love, love… Haha… what my mind is really saying is “boys boys boys”…

Hahaha… high school all over again.

Sometimes I really do feel (and I’d already thought about typing this earlier, but I got distracted) that having a boyfriend would be the solution to everything. It’s hilarious because I can’t think of any single particular thing that would be solved if I had a boyfriend.

Maybe if he was a gazillionaire.

But yeah. It’s funny how the mind works.

It’s not in the general interest of myself to implode on account of a senseless idea that a man would solve all my problems… but it is in the interest of the charismatic and sporadically influential parts of me.

—

It was this quote that made me think…

“Fall in love. Every fucking chance you get!”

I said to myself, “Yeah, why fight it? Why the H would you want to keep yourself from falling in love?”

At the time, I couldn’t think of any good reason.

But if you’re already with someone… ?

Wellllll that’s really not a problem I have right now, is it?

Of course there’s the possibility that they may not feel the same way… what then? What if you’d already fallen?

Maybe if you love them completely then it’ll be easier? No… if you love them completely, any pain will be worth having given them love. Still, this is all theory.

I’m just rambling/babbling, as usual.

silence and stimulation

I’m a natural multi-tasker. Not to say that I’m good at it; I just can’t help it. I can really be quite horrible at it: forgetting what I was doing first and starting new things (like this, actually).

Because it’s natural for me to be doing several things at once, I crave extra stimulation while doing something that doesn’t occupy most of my senses. I feel the need to be occupied with something else, while doing something tedious or routine.

Last night, I had pretty much decided to have a friend on speaker phone while driving home. Otherwise, I probably would have music playing. I seem to drive safer when I’m slightly distracted.

However, when I did start driving, I had a thought to not call my friend just yet, and drive in silence.

I ended up driving all the way without any other noise in the car except my talking out loud to myself. I can’t really say how awesome it was (not that I was talking to myself, that’s “normal” for me) but it was.

This may sound like I’m discovering air for the first time, but it means a lot to me because of that need I always seem to have for something else.

Then, I had dinner when I got home, with my dad and bro doing other stuff in the same room. I kept getting restless while eating, feeling like I wasn’t doing enough, so I kept wanting to turn the TV on. But I didn’t.

I was going back and forth, loading and reloading the washer and the dryer, anyway, so I really didn’t need that extra thing to hold my attention. So it was all good.

Then an interesting thing happened. I had a bit of decent conversation with my dad. It wasn’t about anything important, but we hardly really ever talk about stuff other than what’s for dinner, why’d I leave the tap dripping in the bathroom, stuff like that. It was nice.

So there was fresh laundry to fold after dinner (which ended pretty quickly due to lack of distraction from the telly, thank you.) and I had already been thinking about what I would watch.

But then, for some reason, I didn’t watch anything. Maybe because I was texting back and forth with a couple people already. I know, I was still multi-tasking, but it was great to kind of stare into space in between texts, while folding.

—

I’m gradually trying to simplify my life, I think. Trying to focus on what really means a lot to me and trimming off the stuff that I could (surprisingly) easily live without.

It’s slow and I get distracted and I get frustrated by the sheer amount of stuff that still needs to be done in my personal life, coupled by a restlessness about the state of the world in general.

I like the silence, I really do, but sometimes my senses think otherwise. Still, I think I’ll get a lot more done, here in the silence, at least for now.