Rainy Sunday in a Café

6.55pm 10 August 2008, @ Café Grumpy

Try as I do, I cannot write something meant for public eyes and still remain detached enough in my writing to be like some of my friends who are better and more successful writers. They state their realities, discuss their actions, and accept the outcomes, whether these please them or not. Topics I consider too personal for publication are presented with no more than a shrug of their shoulders: c'est la vie. I envy the ease with which they allow the words to flow, and the freedom from fear of criticism. Whoever is spending enough time to read through these blocks of text obviously has a reason to, so if he finds it to be a waste of time, he can readily leave the page. Yet, understanding all this, I cannot write without backspacing, without hemming and hawing over each word and its delicate connotations. Rustiness. I can punch out dozens of unfriendly work-related emails within an hour, yet I cannot write what I am feeling and why I am feeling it half as easily.

Perhaps, it is because I do not know myself that well anymore. In the years after college, time has become so precious that none of it is spent on self-reflection anymore. The more important things suck it all up: proving myself at work, finding snippets of the day to spend with my boyfriend, sleeping. It's not hard to find myself greatly changed, but it was surprising. The things that once consumed my days do not once make an appearance in my days now. During finals, I used to dream in Latin, and depending on the testing schedule, in Chinese. It was crucial to know why this tense, this voice, this mood were used in this ode, and now, it is similarly crucial to understand why this tone, this manner, these words were used by a work colleague. Transferred into real life, what was once grand and poetically nuanced becomes petty.

So as I pull down all that I had once elevated to such great heights, something inside me is increasingly frantic to find a way out.