Do not go gentle into that good night

"Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

- Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

Human beings are bizarre and anomalous creatures. We desire change at an inherent and perhaps even primal level, yet we simultaneously abhor and rebuff the very thing we crave.

Perhaps this is because, at our essence, we prefer to embrace comfort in the face of the unknown. We would rather avert our gaze than stare down, way beyond the precipice, into the endless void below.

I have always regarded myself as the type of person who constantly asks, "Do I dare disturb the universe?", and without hesitating, replies emphatically with a resounding "But of course".

Yet, is it really so despicable to turn toward comfort rather than espouse uncharted territories, particularly in our weakest moments, those of fear? Or is that the time in which we are required to delve into those unexplored depths with the most reckless abandon?

That is the unwavering, and likely unsolvable problem, I suppose. That is, the impenetrable question of the human essence, of how to define it, of how to negotiate it.

There is no definitive answer. The human condition is fluid and constantly manipulated by forces both exterior and interior to it. We can only decide how we wish to navigate our existence.

The rest is just ashes in the wind.

Love & light,
M xx

Night Film

“Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?” 

― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

I felt my life was mostly the live action epitome of existentialism - existentialism incarnate - with fragmented bursts of normalcy. My reality a single extended exhalation. I felt frustrated, angry, anxious, confused, but mostly, sad.

After a fitful night spent thrashing around between the suffocating sheets unable to embrace the solace of sleep, I finally managed to fall into a disturbed and restless slumber long after the sun had risen. 

I awoke less than an hour later, unsettled, an aching sense of discontent lingering like stale smoke around my shoulders and collar bones. These nightmares are frequent and unyielding.

Love & light,

M xx

Waiting for Godot

“Estragon: I can't go on like this.

Vladimir: That's what you think.” 

- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Over the past year and a half I have written sporadically. Wine soaked proclamations of love. Hopeless pleas of regret, sorrow, and irreversible anguish. Wallowing in misanthropic delusions my only solace. Tiny self-indulgent scriptures reserved only for me, to desperately clutch onto in self-inflicted moments of turmoil. Yet little of worth has been spilt from my quill.

Being creatively stifled has had an inherently crippling effect on me. I move through the world in a subdued state. Life passes me by in a swirl of muted colours that mirrors my jaundiced perception of reality. I have been completely stunted, entirely incapable of creative expression. A hollow shell of a human being trying to make sense of a nonsensical paradigm. Grappling for the energy to merely carry out the motions.

I fear I have become inexorably maudlin. Like a sad clown on the worst kind of summers day. Balmy and suffocating. The Great Pagliacci. Past his prime. Melted soft serve dripping down his pudgy fingers and wrists onto his chubby lap. Jaded and alone on the isolating path to self-destruction. 

To be entirely truthful, I have no idea where I am going. I am not where I expected to be at this point in my life. But really, who can predict these things. 

I tried picking up Bukowski but he only served to reaffirm my melancholy. The truth is, I am not entirely sure that we are ever capable of truly figuring it out. So we sit, drinking our cheap Scotch and sucking on our Marlboros, hoping for some inkling of enlightenment. 

But honestly, enlightenment is a lot like Godot. We can sit and wait and wax lyrical about our own conceptions of what it might be, but, like Godot, it repeatedly fails to arrive. The play ends, the house lights turn off and we are left in the dark, alone, no closer to to enlightenment than we were before. 

To prophesize that it is all doom and gloom, though, would be an insult to the truth. What other point to life is there than to grab onto the fragments of happiness that are flung our way and hold onto them with the utmost vehemence? Like a child unwilling to part with its favourite toy.

It only takes one person to alter our perceptions of reality, to banish the darkness and expose the cracks of light beyond the abyss, albeit in rare and infrequent effusions. If you happen to stumble across this person, do not let them go. You might not find another like them again.

Love & light,

M xx

there will be no trace that one was once two after I fade into you

I was once told that I am a tragic romantic, to which I protested with the utmost vehemence, utterly and inherently adverse to any and all articulations of myself as any version of an amorous fool. Yet, perhaps, as I twirl through the violent wind at that time of the night when a blanket of deathly silence covers the earth during the depth of a balmy and unrelenting summer, imploring him to follow me, chase me, consume me, I cannot help but wonder if the aforementioned description of me is entirely untrue.

The whiskey has muddled my mind and all I remember is uttering "Until we meet again" as I pull the door closed behind me, upholding the promise we made to never say "goodbye". Sitting alone in the uninhabitable dark after he has delivered me at home, the warmth of the golden liquid coursing through my veins, I am haunted by the feeling of his lips pressing against mine. The cool concrete of the long-forgotten basketball court against my skin, the faded graffiti etching itself into my back. Desperate caresses stolen under a cloak of inquisitive stars. The culmination of months of forbidden longing and illicit fantasies. The inevitable air of uncertainty looming ominously over our heads like a cartoon storm cloud, because we both know that our time together will be both tumultuous and fleeting.

"Have we inadvertently become the cliche we both detest with such loathing?" He asks me as we spin around on the aging, maudlin Round-a-Bout, the only reminder that this overgrown patch of grass was ever a play park. Presently it is haunted by the echoes of forgotten promises and sticky ice-cream stained fingers on a tranquil summer afternoon. The shrill cries of the laughter of children are nothing more than a faint residual memory filtering through the too-long blades of grass. We had spent the night flirting despairingly with a warm bottle of Jack Daniels he had secreted away in a hidden compartment in the dashboard of his car, expressing our malaise and unbridled abhorrence toward those prosaic and mediocre people who are shackled by the most banal characteristics of the platitudinous commercialized ideas of romantic love, vowing never to resemble them.  

I jump off the still moving Round-a-Bout and seize the cool metal with both hands to draw the ride to a halt as soon as he was close enough to face me. I remember the way the wind whipped through my hair as I held his face in my hands, afraid to let go, terrified at the thought of holding on. I tell him that it doesn't matter because in that moment we are limitless, cosmic, paraphrasing a line I had once read in a novel. All at once, in a most fortuitous and prodigious manner, I have the distinct impression that I am a character passing through an airport terminal and meeting eyes with a devastatingly alluring stranger in a Tolstoy novel. It feels a lot like serendipity. When I tell him this much he simply smiles and, cradling my face in his hands, kisses me. And suddenly, I am afraid that all we have left is borrowed time and stolen embraces. 

I told him that one day I would write about him, and now I suppose I have. 

Love & light, 

M xx 

A Portrait of a Woman as a Young Girl

Last night I dreamed that I was running through a forest. I looked down and realized that I was naked. I was confused by the serenity of my surroundings because my heart was pounding with fear. I had the feeling I was being chased. I glanced behind me and noticed an ominous shadow in my wake. I ran until I reached the bank of a rapidly flowing river. I spun around to face my shadowy opponent but I was only surrounded by trees and flowers and the soothing sound of the animated water below me. The distinctive aroma of cherry blossom suddenly occupied my olfactory senses. I looked across the river and saw a tall, pregnant woman staring back at me. "Am I dead?" I screamed, but the words caught in my throat and I was acutely aware that I could no longer speak. The woman smiled at me and dived into the water. I awoke expecting to find her beside me but I was alone. 

Love & light, 

M xx 

I Lost Myself on a Cool Damp Night

Sometimes I feel like my life is nothing more than a vague imitation of a badly written postmodern novel. Disjointed. Fragmented. Unfinished. I am floating around in a sea of grey, waiting for the epilogue that never comes. Some cliched indie film about a young ingenue suffering through an existential crisis. The not-so-enigmatic anti-heroine. A supporting character in her own narrative. A tragic victim of my neurosis. A thinly veiled portrayal of my poorly disguised desperation for a happy ending that is as tangible as a wisp of smoke.

Long hours spent on the dance floor tying to re-live my misspent youth. Is this what passes for music nowadays? Or is my repulsion just an indication that I have become jaded? These people are like the undead, wafting past one another, looking but not really seeing, speaking but not really listening, silently judging as they repeat their carefully constructed swaying ad nauseum. I have the gnawing suspicion that I should feel excited to be here but I am incapable of summoning the appropriate level of joie de vivre. I surrender and let the chaotic amalgam encircle me. I close my eyes and let the vibrations carry me.

The morning after the night before. Smudged mascara and the stench of stale cigarette smoke linger on my hair and under my fingernails. Re-watching old reruns of That 70's Show and pretending I don't exist. The canned laughter is my own. Stolen embraces in deserted stairwells. Juvenile wishes made under touching tree branches. I am anxious that all I will leave behind when I'm gone is the vague scent of Very Cherry lip balm and regret.

Love & light,
M xx

Jumping Jack Flash

There are a lot of really crappy things that come with being an insomniac - the long hours spent angry and frustrated, tired but unable to sleep, and defeat - finally giving up and watching crappy late night TV - like a zombie, not really taking anything in. But there is one thing that, I, as a sleep-deprived neurotic, am privy to that most (well-rested) people aren't. 4am is the best time of the day. Just before the sun rises, when the world is still asleep and everything is completely still. There is a sort of eerie calm that washes over the world at this hour. It is almost like being suspended in a perfect moment in time that is completely unaware of past, future or even itself. And then you get to watch and hear the world wake up - which in the moment feels so magical that you almost can't believe it happens every 24 hours. First, the birds start to chirp, stretch their wings and shake their feathers. Second, the sky starts to lighten, so slowly at first that, unless you are really paying attention, you don't even notice it happening. Then begins the gentle hum of traffic in the distance, front doors swinging open and the voices of people starting their day. And just like that, it is as if that perfect moment of solitude never existed. That's why 4am is my favorite time of the day.

Love & light,
M xx

P.S.: Lovely photographs courtesy of my lovely dad :)

The Graduate

In the build up to Graduation Day I was haunted by mental images of me tripping and falling while walking across the stage. I could just picture myself sprawled in front of the Vice Chancellor and all the deans with my dress over my head. Now, this wasn't my first rodeo and my undergraduate graduation last year went by without a hitch, BUT my fears were completely validated because my track record for embarrassing myself at important events is pretty impressive. Allow me to illustrate with three stand out examples.

1.) When I was in primary school I sang in the choir. I was tall for my age (although I seem to have stopped growing since) and I was in the top row on the choir stand. We were singing at some celebration of excellence of some sort and there were a lot of teachers, parents and students as witnesses. I really don't know how it happened because you are supposed to be standing still, but somehow I fell off the choir stand. The choir had to stop singing and wait for me to climb back up onto the stand. I swear these things only happen to me.

2.) In junior school I played the recorder. Okay, so it's not the most bad ass instrument but I was very good at it and eventually redeemed myself by moving on to the piano which is much cooler. (And also, Jethro Tull are really awesome and their music is all about the flute, which is basically an upgrade of the recorder, so there). Anyway, because I was very talented at playing the recorder, my music teacher arranged for me to play a solo at yet another celebration of excellence or prize-giving or some event where everyone was serious, dressed smartly and there were a lot of witnesses. So there I was, one of the shyest, nerdiest kids you could ever imagine, playing a solo piece in front of this massive (well, it probably wasn't that big, but in my mind it was the size of the Super Bowl) audience. And then a gust of wind (which I have no idea where it came from because we were indoors) blew my sheet music off the stand and onto the floor. I had to stop playing mid-song and retrieve my book off the floor, relocate the page the song was on, and start again. Floor swallow me up now.

3.) I decided to join the ballroom dancing society in high school. It was a lot of fun and every year, all the schools in town that offered ballroom dancing got together to plan a Ballroom Ball. It was all very exciting. We dressed up in these big ball gowns, had our hair and make up professionally done and slipped our feet into the most gorgeous heels (the girls, not the boys). Anyway, it was a very glamorous and elegant affair. One year the ball was held at one of the other schools which had a massive foyer with a considerable sized flight of stairs leading into the hall. So when we entered the hall we had to walk down these stairs in front of everyone else either entering or milling around the foyer. And let me tell you, it was packed when I walked in. There I am, entering the foyer and walking down the stairs in my beautiful puffy dress, and then I slip. And slide, yes slide, down the remaining stairs. My dress?? Over my head. And so I'm lying at the bottom of the stairs with my dress over my head and everyone is completely silent and staring at me. I have two options. I can either laugh, or cry. I decided to laugh, at which point I think I heard an audible sigh of relief from the on lookers and someone came over to help me up. Inside I was crying with humiliation.

So, as you can see, I had perfectly good reason for being nervous about walking across the stage at Honours Graduation. And the shoes I wore didn't exactly help because they are pretty high and very uncomfortable (by the time it was turn to be capped I couldn't feel my toes anymore) but they were the only ones I could find to match my beautiful vintage dress so I sucked it up. But, to my pleasant surprise, everything proceeded without a hitch and it was an amazing feeling to hear them call my name. I guess hard work does pay off after all and I now have my Honours degree. Now just to get through Masters...and then try to change the world :)

What is your proudest achievement?? :)

Love & light,
M xx

P.S. Lovely photos of my friends and I taken by my equally lovely dad :)