Monthly Archives: January 2015
A day or two
How to notice the difference
“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…”
-C.S.Lewis
This, I think, is one of the most underestimated truths.
You can’t look at the difference, you can just look and look again and notice that today is not yesterday.
We do not understand change. We think it’s a moment, the clock striking twelve on New years eve or when you realise you love someone… when in reality that’s just it, you realise the change but that is not the moment it happens. It already has, over and over again, in the choices you keep on making.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that so many good things were once bad – diamonds out of pressed coal – because like the birds rising at dawn, they do not sing about the night.
I realised this while heading out to my room, the little cabin in my garden. It was snowing the other night and this is one of those changes you do notice. But these following pictures are of just that, of the snow and how the light makes everything slightly golden and warm, and how the sun seems to never set in the summer and the flowers make my home rest in a meadow. Nature doesn’t remember the wind from last week. I will not remember how it made everything creak or when the autumn leaves turned muddy and gross, and how even though it was completely dark without the snow, the full moon still managed to create moving shadows everywhere. That is not what I photographed.
The snow doesn’t remember the heat, nor the summer the autumn colours. The flower doesn’t remember the bud or it would never bloom. We think that our problem is that we live in the past, and it is. But our problem is not that we remember. Because we don’t. We see self-chosen memories, not truths, and so we can pick and choose. And we so rarely choose the time in between.
When you have no one else who can say this to you, let me
You are not strange or normal or different or anything else that is not a description of you but a comparison to something and anyone and anything else. Do not get stuck in yourself believing that you are you and the world is the world, but remember that you are you and someone else is someone else, and the world is just a temporary home for a bunch of people at least as screwed up as you are (because God help me, do we need help). We’re not meant to do this alone so find someone who can pull pieces from the darkness and show you the light of being a part of this terrifying place, even though that means knowing that no one actually is. We’re outstanding, a species consisting of individuals existing within their own heads. Generation after generation, all believing they’re as alone in their thoughts and opinions and feelings as we think we are. Just be. And know that someone else is too.
(find someone in the sea of faces)
Surviving school (or not)
So yesterday I got ready for my first day at school. Clothes, breakfast, makeup.. only to get there and realise I didn’t have to go to my first class and could come back six hours later. Wandering home my heels made my feet ache and slip on the ice that was somehow still there even though the snow melted the day before, and I don’t think the sky ever turned bright. Back to school later and then back home. It wasn’t horrible. I met some nice people and stuff. And then I went to bed at like seven and thought I was gonna get up later and do everything I had to. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I slept more than eleven hours. Something about school and the darkness and.. school just makes me want to sleep.
But this is my last term. Thank God, because I am so sick of this. I realised a while ago I chose the wrong subjects to study and that does not help the motivation. I got an awesome backpack for christmas and I just want to go away, travel the world.
But for now I’ll stay here and obviously survive and hopefully live. It’s not bad, it’s just too much of not what I would have chosen to do. And my backpack stands in the corner of my cabin like a promise.