Monthly Archives: March 2005

It's The First Week Of Spring

The city begins to melt as the sun warms soil and pave­ment alike. Trickles of water run every­where while the ice dis­solves, a pre­scient sign of the streams soon to be come from lawn sprin­klers and car wash hoses, as excess finds its way to sew­er grates. By night, the tem­per­a­ture drops below freez­ing again and the small urban cur­rents turn sol­id. Pedestrians prac­tice their wad­dles in the morn­ing as they maneu­ver across the slip­pery patch­es. The only remains of ice are the paths left com­pressed by the tram­pling of feet through the win­ter.

Every day I wake up it’s a lit­tle brighter, in my room, and in my mind.

Answering For Others

Aaron and Karen are noto­ri­ous for their inabil­i­ty to end a phone call with­in the first fif­teen min­utes of pick­ing up. This isn’t always their fault, of course, because most of the time it’s the peo­ple at the oth­er end who per­sist in stay­ing on the line. Sometimes I’ll pre­tend that it’s a wrong num­ber when we’re hang­ing out so that they won’t be dis­turbed. Unfortunately, this time, the per­son was per­sis­tent. It end­ed up being a rude char­i­ty work­er.

My Chinese has a ter­ri­ble Western accent, bad enough for me to be able to rec­og­nize it and cringe. Normally, I’m not so bad, but I was def­i­nite­ly rusty and caught off-guard.

One Of Those Nights

Hi.

It feels like my glass­es are dirty, but it’s real­ly the sur­faces of my eyes.

There’s this inde­scrib­able desire to be amongst oth­ers, after spend­ing time with myself for so long. I’d like to sit in the mid­dle of a café right now, I think to myself, so I could lis­ten the lay­ers of peo­ple talk­ing. I’d like to be slumped down in a soft library chair, decid­ing which book to take home, with the hushed shuf­fling of pages all around me. I’d like to be walk­ing on the streets of New York, dodg­ing the taxis on 42nd and tenth, walk­ing across the streets with the oth­er pedes­tri­ans.

This is one of those nights.

Stepping Through The Shadow, Part 2/2: The Friend Aspect

I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be para­noid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through.

—Tool, Forty Six & 2

Unfortunately, I’m not myself when I’m around my friends.

With them, I’m hap­pi­er, more con­fi­dent, extro­vert­ed. It’s usu­al­ly only with them that I can test the bound­aries of social con­duct, because I know that they under­stand me, accept me, and are will­ing to back me all the way. Sometimes, I end up say­ing some pret­ty embar­rass­ing things off-the-cuff, things made more embar­rass­ing by the fact that even my friends aren’t laugh­ing. But to find the bound­ary, one has to cross it at some point. And it’s such a fuck­ing pow­er trip to know that I’m test­ing myself as well, test­ing how far I’m will­ing to go, some­thing that I can only do with the right peo­ple.

Without my friends, I recede into my shell. I require them at par­ties, events, social func­tions just so I can inter­act with peo­ple nor­mal­ly. When I do find myself in absence of their pres­ence, I force myself to be social. I con­sid­er how I would behave if I was with them, and pro­ceed with cau­tion. It’s slow­ly get­ting eas­i­er for me when I’m by myself. Perhaps I’m gain­ing my own self-con­fi­dence when I’m not around them.

Something I that can only gain when I’m with them.

The Stepping Through The Shadow Series