i am used to always getting used to something, I have to sometimes stop and think that this is my life, this is the state of things, and just enjoy it. i am used to my cat that is my cat and my friends who are my friends and the garden that is mine and the face in the mirror. the thing is it is easy to slip into ungratefulness when you’re living the ordinary. I am scared of when things get too easy, too familiar, too stationary, but it isn’t fear that comes from fear, as I have been too hastily labelling everything lately. It is a plain dislike, of which I cannot comfortably speak without trying endlessly to over-explain it. But I find joy in the simplicity of life the older I get, which I understand isn’t a revolutionary sentiment. I love the midnight rambles and morning texts and the thought of plane tickets I haven’t quite booked yet, I am still surprised when my friends know me like they do, and they joke about my mood or temperament, likes and dislikes, as if my existence and nature is a certain fact at all. I am scared of labels and of knowing things, so I over-know what I can, and over-obscure what i can’t. i am a rare breed of self-assured and confused. i am a rare breed of mother’s love and ego overgrown and, still, a stutter over every tenth word, only because i care about semantics (and maybe that is mothers love). It isnt groundbreaking to appreciate my brother on the phone in the kitchen, or the exact direction of the breeze on my patio on a june evening, or the sound of a stranger’s compliment, or the unique feeling of being a teenage girl in her room, but it is altering for me. I paint in large strokes, i am a hasty artist, a hasty live-r, a knuckle-cracker, a compulsive writer, a paranoid child, a night owl, always late, and unsure, and debating with myself and with you before you’ve even asked, im a list obsesser, a fire sign, a skeptic, a soulmate, a believer, a late-night texter. i learnt to ride a bike and im still traumatised by it; i had a dream when i was five and i still talk about it; i had a thought about twenty minutes ago and im still searching for it; i had a dream but i woke up and lost it. above all i am so so confused. in my over-ambitious, ugly, large strokes, and my uneven, ever-changing handwriting (the ‘M’s stolen from a childhood friend, the scrawl a gift from my doctor father, the ‘L’s looping to give me hope), in my endless sentences and convoluted manner, this is the best way i can paint myself. this is the most honest i will ever be, here with you, reader, on a page (or less romantically, on my laptop), when i write about writing, when i write to write, when i write to know what it is im writing about. when the self fulfilled prophecy has yet to be fulfilled. that is why i would feel useless without my words, without my glamorised way of thinking. it’s never really about the ordinary thing, i am obsessed with context, and i would stop to read the life story of every waiter, stranger, bus driver, if i could. until my life picks up pace, i will fixate on the tea in my mug and the single cherry hanging from the fence-lining trees and the cat hair on my t shirt. i hope you know now why i must comment on gratitude like it is a new phenomenon, because the ‘small-ness’ of it is novel to me. i deal in the ‘small-ness’ of words and the choice to pay attention to detail (which, ironically, never is actually a choice, but rather an uncontrollable urge to grab the thing, intimate the thing, pull apart the thing), but never in the casual ‘small-ness’ of life. I dont know if i really live anymore, or if i just think about living. either way, i am finding peace in ‘thank you’s and assured sighs and small smiles and lines breaking and the feeling that perhaps i can be a big-stroke girl in a bob ross painting.
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