Long Longing

I am turning thirty soon, but I feel like I don’t know anything about myself.

Sometimes I exist as if I am still an eighteen years old, bright-eyed, hopeful version of myself. Someone who expects the world will cater to her needs and her expectations, even though her feelings have been set ablaze by the very people who should have taken care of it. Someone whose first proper date consisted of going to London zoo, enjoying £1.5 Hyde Park ice cream, watching old men fighting in the middle of nowhere cinema, traveling to the next city just to experience their Pizza Hut, and walking around Cambridge Botanical Garden. Sometimes I still carry her naivety and hopefulness towards the world and whatever The Universe can offer.

A few handful of times I exist in the rage of my ten years old self. Old enough to understand better, but young enough to always feel helpless. Five years too late for redemption. Five years too late for everything to be irreversible. Five years too long for the loneliness she carry. Five years is a long time to cultivate self-deprecation, rage, and sadness. Five years of wondering when everything could get better. Five years of five years old me trying to breathe. And those five years stacked themselves up into this almost thirty years version of her, trying to decipher why after multiples of five years, she still feels the same ancient rage, sadness, anger, self-deprecation, and loneliness.

Whenever I truly feel the highs and lows of emotions, however, I always revert into 2017 version of myself. A giddy, excited, wanton person that only exist in her own writing. A young woman whose first taste of actual (and factual) romance is fed by the hands of her favourite type. By the mysterious, tall, bespectacled of a man who grows the most gorgeous beards. Someone who let her rest on his back, even if it only lasted for a short while. Even only for a quarter of a night. Someone who reminded her that impossible things do exist, and our bubble of impossibility did in fact exist for a night. Unfortunately though, his warmth went hand in hand with his very own manmade coldness, dropping her whenever he fancied. Someone that left her confused, bereft, devoid of those breadcrumbs of giddiness and happiness. Someone that one-sidedly defined their connection.

I wouldn’t lie by saying that I’m not intrinsically intertwined with the version of myself when she was with her four years long romantic partner. This current partnerless version of myself retains the life lessons that her previous paramour had deliberately, subtly, unconsciously taught her. The very same paramour that shared the same eons and decades of longing for stability and peace—though the means of getting said stability and peace varied contrastingly between the both of us. I learned quite long after our inevitable separation that perhaps our ten years old versions saw each other and fell in love. Growing up, we learned how to recognise bruises on other people’s minds and souls; maybe seeing other battered and bruised person whose been hurting since they were young made us fall in love what with our edges and vices always clashed passionately. But we burned and we mourned our mutual disembarking.

The other times, I exist in autopilot. Offering myself up more and more to the world, as if it is a form of giving back to how great God has treated me for the past three decades. Over time, I let other people take more and more and more. As if materialistic ventures are not enough, they take more of my energy, time, patience, and kindness. Is it still exploitation if I let other people take them?

The baseline of all the versions of myself is the fact that I will always be a student and a writer. I always bleed out stories, some of which have their own home to live in real world. But, I also ache so badly to be understood. To be learnt. To have someone see all these versions and still decide to stay. This long longing to find home in this temporary pitstop. An inescapable feeling of want, desire, and need. I ache to be cared for so that I could finally rest, easily, without worry, peacefully.

I long to be myself in this world. To be someone that exist without the naturally embedded title next to my name.