warning: unabashed cheesiness ahead
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when i think of her, i am afraid to speak, afraid to move. it is not embarrassment, not doubt, not anxiety; it is fear. fear like fear before God, pure bewilderment at a feeling so strong you feel any earthly language forged to describe it would immediately fall short of it. and yet I almost have no choice. the impossibility of expressing this feeling is overwhelmed by a need to share and prolong it, to breathe it out on paper and give it form.
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love, i always thought, was just like so many other human vices: a deluge of chemicals, neurons, and atoms in my head. now, that belief is confused and denied, a confusion i adore and revel in. perhaps, for some, love is nothing; just, as i once thought, another emotion. for them, i feel pity and compassion - not because they are necessarily right or wrong, for i know i too am ignorant of whatever truth may exist in the world. i only know this: love is what you make of it.
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and what her and i have made of it...i never really know. it does not make me happy, it does not make me sad; it is something that embraces both joy and sorrow and goes beyond them. the endless cliches and jargon i grew up listening to about "love beyond description" now take on new significance. as with all beautiful things in life, it is something only understood once experienced, because it truly is beyond our ability to communicate.
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how five brief days could so quickly change everything is far beyond me. i had just managed to convince myself to accept the fact that i'd never meet someone like her. i am completely awed that God took notice of us and brought us together. our meeting could hardly seem anything but fate, our time together like perfect choreography. five brief days suddenly overshadowed my entire life, as every expectation and every hope seemed to perfectly coincide with every outcome and every realization. i felt as if the world and everything in it was conspiring towards our meeting, and we were helpless before an incredible and inevitable fate.
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the deeper a love becomes, the rarer it is. sometimes i feel as though we must be alone in our love, that no one else in history has been there. and yet i know this love has always existed, and always will...i know it has followed us through time, tracing its path from soul, to soul, to soul.
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i will never be able to truly say or write how much i love her. what is time? it feels at once like yesterday and a thousand years past. what is distance? i feel our separation as strongly as i do our closeness. what cannot be measured, cannot be calculated, or rationalized, or categorized...only this is truly worth of description, simply because it is beyond it. to put words to love is like love itself: I experience what i know to be impossible, feel what i believe none else have felt.
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now, i wait for the day when i can finally see her again. it is not an arduous or torturous or sad wait; there is no distress there, only joy. i am far too thankful for our brief, chance meeting, for an opportunity like none other. I do not see my life, this world, or this city, as one that lacks her. our love suffuses my vision, accompanying me every minute like faint music.
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they say time is the great destroyer, that with time, everything will fade. i am not foolish enough to believe even love can outlast or transcend death. and yet, all i know of time, all i need to know of time, is that mine on this earth will be short and fleeting. our love need not last to infinity, only our lifetimes. and this is more than enough, simply because we have our love, and little else matters...
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i did warn you...

on how to be nice
i'm rather wary of making this entry, because it's basic premise (ie, i am nice) is a rather pretentious assumption. there are times when i think it's true, and times when i don't. for this spiel, it's necessary to assume that for the time-being, i think it's true. also, i do not walk around all day feeling contempt for everyone. but it will happen, and this is a pretty important issue, so i want to write about it.
onward.
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something i've always wondered about is hidden motives. it's pretty obvious what i mean by that, if you're thinking in terms of thought before action. like when you think to do something nice because you'll get something for it, then you do it. that's easy to see, and somewhat easy to avoid. the bigger problem for me isn't motives that are hidden from other people, but hidden from myself. like how do i know that a subconscious part of me isn't motivating me to do something nice so that i can feel good about myself, or so that i'll get something out of it?
of course...if you use that kind of logic, the problem is that you're just worrying about things you'll never know about. plus, the fear of subconscious is really a whole 'nother topic...
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something that actually bothers me more is hidden motives that exist as thought after action. basically, pride. i guess it's a pretty obvious gray area...where do you draw the line between self-appreciation and pride? it can't be good to not have any self-esteem. see, if i do something nice spontaneously ... that's good, there's no hidden motivation that drove me to do it. i did it because i wanted to help someone, right? but it's impossible to take conscious action and then not be aware that you've done it afterwards. and, most of the time, you'll also be aware that you've done something nice, by whatever standard you happen to have. and then you look around you, and realize that on the whole, other people are fairly not nice. or even if not that, you'll just feel good that you did something nice. and this inevitably elevates you above something...because by doing something good, it implies there's something that's not so good, or worse. so how do you avoid being proud?
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which brings me to something i just thought of today. what i've always thought in the past, is that we all ought to remember that things like 'being nice' are completely relative. it helps keep us in perspective. i try to think of things i do not in comparison to people around me, but instead to some much higher and impossible standard. so maybe i'm nice compared to...that guy over there. but could i be nicer? yes, much moreso. so really, i'm not nice. problem solved, right? unfortunately, it's impossible (or at least, undesirable for most people) to avoid human contact completely, and especially in this case. because why would i be having this problem if i didn't have anyone to be nice/not nice to?
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so sure, maybe compared to Jesus, or some similar standard, i'm not nice...so no reason to be proud. but if you just walk around for a day, you're surrounded by constant reminders of just how many assholes there really are. i'm not saying that i think myself better than everyone...far from it. but i don't deny that at times i can't help but feel contempt for certain people. everytime i find myself saying, "man, that guy's such an asshole"...it's contempt. most of us don't think of it that way, but it is. the sad thing is, this is a very normal and accepted attitude. 'loving your enemy' is now considered weird and alien, and if you do it you're considered a sap.
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i think the Bible probably gives the best advice here. feel no contempt, only pity and compassion. i guess that's what Christianity and Bhuddism both would say (the two religions i feel the most affinity for), and i agree with that wholeheartedly. i guess it's something i should try for more.
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something i would have asked in the past, is pity not just a nice word for contempt? but, this will sound cheesy, and this is one of those things you'll really only understand if you've been there, after i met tasha, i no longer believed that. because the way our love changed everything...it really just makes you wish other people could see it, could see the world the same way. it's sad, really, which i guess is how compassion starts.

wow. it's been way too long since i've written here. life has been so stagnant lately. i don't feel like i'm changing at all anymore. i hope after exams something, anything, happens. i feel like i've been sitting in the same spot for ages. sigh. thank you skye for indirectly inspiring me to write again. anyways, onward.
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it seems lately that everyone around me is having problems, and i can't do anything. i always want to help people, but i really don't know how. what i've found is, that the further down you fall, the more it really depends on yourself to help yourself back up. i have a friend who's refusing contact with anyone. i want to help her so much, but i can't. i hope she'll be ok.
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anyways, i decided from the start that i'd try to keep this journal about ideas and such, rather than things that happen every day. for the latter, it won't really matter in a few years anyways, will it?
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so...i was thinking about beauty. of course, not physical beauty. the word beauty has been pretty important to me ever since...well i don't remember anymore, but ever since i started associating it with more than just nice-looking things. it probably started with me reading prozac nation, or possibly watching american beauty. anyhow, i was thinking today about it because we were discussing art in philosophy class. when most people say 'beauty', they think about happy things, don't they? like sunlight pouring through redwoods overhead, or cicada birds crying in the night, or some such 'beautiful' scene. sure, i still think of things like that as beautiful...but beauty is now a word i associate with so much more. that's what i mean by having a beautiful pair of eyes and seeing the world through them. it doesn't mean seeing things as actually 'beautiful' in the sense of nice-looking paintings or scenes, or just more vivid colours or something.
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there have always been happy, and sad, right? lately i've found that very often i'm intensely in a moment, but yet i'm not happy, nor sad. like the other day i was suddenly reminded of tasha by something, and i nearly started crying. i wasn't happy. but i wasn't sad. i guess the best western equivalent i can think of is 'bittersweet', like those moments in movies when a protagonist is crying with joy. but it's not nearly the same, really. a moment like the one i'm thinking of is neither happy nor sad, just beautiful. it's an emotion that's really very real, but i don't think there's a word for.
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that's really a very sad limitation of language. it's difficult for us to experience or think of things that we don't have words for, or can't easily combine other words into. i'm quite surprised that my mind didn't categorize whatever this emotion is. anyways, that's a whole 'nother rant, maybe for another day. getting back to beauty.
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i think happiness and sadness are both great, and actually fairly equal in that they are opposites...yet beauty is sort of outside them. moments of beauty are those in which everything is just so incredibly infused with intensity...when you don't know if you should be happy or sad...when you feel you can't take anymore, but will anyways. actually, until just now, i didn't realize the significance of the words of that guy in american beauty when he was describing the dancing plastic bag scene...because i nearly just typed almost the same thing he said. i remember he said something to the effect of, 'sometimes there's just so much beauty in the world, i just feel like my heart will burst from it all'. and i think now that what he meant was pretty similar to what i'm trying to say. it's not about being happy, or being sad, it's just about intensity, and passion.
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whenever i write tasha, i notice something peculiar about how memories of us work, compared to regular memories. we've both mentioned how whenever we write, it just captures how we feel at that moment, and yet if we read over our old e-mails, it's nowhere near to experiencing the same feelings. if, for example, i'm looking at pictures of a trip to europe from many years ago...i can remember quite clearly how i felt...i remember being happy and excited, things like that. and if i read things i wrote a year ago, i can still remember to a good degree how depressed i felt, and the thought processes i went to. respectively, these memories are happy, and sad. my feelings for tasha, i feel, would be best described as beautiful.
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which brings me to the point i originally intended to make (though i seem to have by now made several). beauty may be above happiness and sadness, but by it's very nature it pays an unfortunate price: it's really quite impossible to remember. sure, you can remember what happened, and all the physical details of an event, things like that. but as far as the emotion goes, it's impossible to again catch even a glimpse of it. i think beauty is one of those things that, like love, is always the same, because it is always changing. so really, it can only be experienced and felt in the first and last moment at which you feel it. which is kind of sad, because it's so hard to come by...
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that has all sorts of implications...like it's really impossible for me to tell someone what real 'beauty' is. if you've experienced happiness, you know what sadness is. just like if you've touched something hot, you know what cold is. it's just something less hot. but if you've experienced joy and sorrow, it does not even give you a hint as to what beauty is...
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anyways, i just wanted to write about my idea of beauty. like i said, it's an important idea to me. beautiful eyes, beautiful world.