#1: a catalogue of small moments
A list of moments that made me pause and take note in the past month or so.
When I am out sitting and reading on park benches, I find tiny insects crawling on me. The pigeons become less scared, hopping closer and closer, cocking their heads at me. These are small but vibrant red dots, which I assume are spiders, on my hands and my chest, and my forehead. I shoo them away, smush some in the process, and feel slightly guilty. It feels like if you stay still long enough, you will be absorbed back into the natural world.
My favorite thing to do outside is sit and stare into the middle distance. Especially in the evening when the sun is gently blinding you in your peripheral vision. Lately, stillness has become an active pursuit, and I kind of hate that.
The road at night is only as empty as the emptiest establishment on it. There is something viscerally lonely about lit windows at night. It's not so much the place as the fact that the lights are on, expecting patrons at such ungodly hours.
I'm 27, and I'm still made of wishes. I walk into a garden and see all the flowers. I take pictures of the name cards but never look them up. I feel like I can still have it all. The flowers, and also everything else.
Do you ever sit on these hazy and ambiguous feelings and all of a sudden they take shape and the words spill out of you? On February 26th, I wrote down, "I feel like life has humbled me even though I never claimed to challenge it."
The night I felt the spring was the night of April 12th. The air felt so pristine that if I had tried, I could have peeled it off the night in delicate threads and drunk it like stream water.
I keep telling B this every time we talk, but I love azaleas more than cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms give me FOMO. The news channels obsessively forecast full-bloom windows. And before you know it, the leaves are eating up the pastel colors. Something about this transition from full pink to green makes me queasy. I’m quite terrible at enjoying things when the end is looming. Azaleas, on the other hand, are more abundant, vibrant, and last longer. There’s no hurry, they're everywhere.
This was an attempt at documenting moments of beauty and pain from the past few months. The point was to not overthink and write without chasing every single thought down the rabbit hole. I’d say it was moderately successful!