Intesnse

I look at myself in the mirror and realise how much I've aged. My face and my being betrays my actual age. Is the body just a shell and the soul it's temple? If it is, then is my soul really that old as well? Everybody tells me I look older than I really am. Well damn it. Damnit. It's like how a hard rock may be eroded into a pebble by the constant gushing of a waterfall. My life is akin to the waterfall, fast, hurried, rushed, turbulent. Myself, the rock - shaped inconspicuously, year after year, turmoil after turmoil. I've aged, far more than what I really should be. I am after all, only 20. I wish so much for everything that has happened to not happen. But I know it's not possible. I wish so much for time to undo itself, so that I can go back and possibly make things a little bit better, a little more right.

Life is a funny thing. My life was never smooth sailing, never. I never even had a happy childhood. But it's ok. I don't lament how bad it went because I know I could never change what I could not control. But there are certain things I wish I could change. Because I had a choice, because I could. There are also certain things I wish I never did, certain people I wish I never met. But I guess time just sails by and once the damage is done, you can never undo them.

I see you everywhere in my head. Memories playing like reels of tape. I no longer go see you off to camp after all, after what we've been through. I think I finally understand how love can be bittersweet, how love can be turned into hate. Maybe it isn't really hate. Maybe it's really love after all, but that love cannot manifest itself, so it takes on another form in the face of hate.

I can finally detach myself and view the past from an audience's perspective, if that's how I may describe it. It doesn't feel like yesterday anymore. It feels like the past. But, the past in colour, the past in monochrome, never in black and white, the vivid past. Nothing is ever that clear - black and white. I still hear the characters speaking. I still see what they saw. I still feel how they felt. It's as if everything is in 3-D, but it's in the past. Objectively, I'm allowed to play these reels as many times as I like and nobody else gets to see these videos - those moving characters in my head. It belongs exclusively to me, and maybe him, if he still remembers. If he even bothers to.

But it's all in the past now. Although anything may trigger these reels - a shirt, a scent, a photograph, an object, a place, a memory. All so familiar but ever so distant, the past.

Like the tea tree mask I have on my face now. It's been with me for the longest time and is probably the first mask I ever used. It's the same old smell, same old texture, same old feel. Maybe a different container. But people change, times change, so do prices. But the past doesn't.



I wish these memories would go away. They seem so irrelevant now. I wonder if I really want them to go away.