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Friday, March 21, 2008 @ 3:45:00 PM edit/  & don't we all wish those smiles never fade? "One day, I'll marry a man whom I oblige myself to love. He and I will end up finding a way of dreaming of a future together: a house in the country, children, our children's future. We'll barely talk. I will force myself to accept the situation, and I will wonder what's wrong with me, because he no longer takes any interest in me, ignores me, and doesn nothing but talk about his friends, as if they were his real world. When the marriage is just about to fall apart, I'll get pregnant. We'll have a child, feel closer to each other for a while, and then the situation will go back to what it was before. I will put on weight and I will start to go on diets, systematically defeated each day, each week, by the weight that keeps creeping up regardless of the controls I put on it. At that point, I'll take those magic pills that stop you feeling depressed, then I'll have a few more children and tell everyone that the children are my reasons for living, when reality my life is their reason for living. People will always consider us a happy couple, and no one will know how much solitude, bitterness and resignation lies beneath the surface happiness. Until one day, when my husband takes a lover for the first time and I will perhaps kick up a fuss or think again of killing myself. By then, though, I will be too old and cowardly, with two or three children who need my help, and I'll have to bring them up and help them find a place in the world before I can just abandone everything. I won't commit suicide: I'll make a scene, I'll threaten to leave and take the children with me. Like all men, my husband will back down, he'll tell me he loves me and that it won't happen again. It won't even occur to him that, if I really decide to leave, my only option would be to go back to my parents' house and stay there for the rest of my life, forced to listen to my mother going on and on about how I lost my one opportunity for being happy, that he was a wonderful husband despite his peccadillos, that my two children will be traumatised by the separation. Two or three years later, another woman will appear in his life. I will find out - because I saw them, or because someone told me - but this time I'll pretend I don't know. I used up all my energy fighting against that other lover, I've no energy left, it's best to accept life as it really is, and not as I imagined it to be. He will continue being a considerate husband, I will continue my job, reading books I never quite manage to finish, watching television programms that are the same as they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago. After that, it's a matter of waiting for the children to grow up and of spending all day thinking of suicide, without the courage to do anything about it, One fine day I'll reach the conclusion that that's what life is like, there's no point in worrying about it, nothing will change. And I'll accept it." At the end of the day, nothing matters, no one matters. There's nothing to believe in. I guess I saw too perfect a world, too perfect a situation in everything. I forgot everyone's selfish. Who genuinely cares about who? Or is it that whoever moves on faster and easier is the smarter one. Stubborn and naive, that's all my own problem I guess. & nobody will actually care enough to do anything for long because we are afterall selfish people seeking better lives for ourselves, and no, we will never stop our pace in life for another person, no matter how convincing the "I will always be there for you" sounds. I suppose my life doesn't bother yours anymore, though it isn't true for the reverse. It doesn't matter to anyone, it doesn't affect anyone. At the end of the day only I'd understand how it feels like, because it mattered too much to me. Sometimes, it's not about not knowing how to let go. It's about holding on to who or what really matters to you. Call me stupid, I guess I am. Nothing really matters now you know? This emptiness of neither wanting to live nor die because everything that mattered to you has slipped away and you don't know who you are or what you're wasting your energy on each single day. You spend your days fantasizing of alternative realities and living in your world, isolating yourself from the Common World by choice. It doesn't matter anymore. You do strange things just for that instant gratification and slight adrenaline rush to prove you're still existential, like getting nerdy ugly spectacles and concocting a plan to bump into sharon phua just to have a conversation/ confrontation with her, taking another route home, sleeping cowered up in a corner of your room behind the curtains, insisting on having the air con on the bus blow at you until your hands go numb, popping gastric pains pills because you choose not to eat and feel and rather feel the pain. You realise nothing, absolutely nothing matters except that one thing which you can never have, and that leaves you feeling completely powerless, helpless, vulnerable. I bet you don't know how bad it gets, that sometimes I close my eyes and wish everything will be back to how it was when I open them. 有些人，是你永远都放不下的。 |