Iris.

Ok enough with the self-pitying, indulgent bawl-fest of yesterday.

Sometimes I get almost repulsed by my tendency to fall into an emotional sundae -- it's a whirlpool of cloying fudge and sticky mess.

One way of expressing everything is like unclogging the arteries, you shove a steel rod in to flush out everything. Much like a therapist shoving interpretations, cataclysms and catharsis like emotional vomit out of your system.

Another less violent and traumatic way is to write a letter. I do that a lot, composing blog entries in my mind. By the time I finish electrolyting words like typing in the brain, and sit in front of an actual computer to tell people what I have just thought through, everything's gone.

As teenagers, the cool thing was to have bruised hearts or scarred wrists like badges of honour of your emotional complexity and brokenness. It was the in thing to profess a liking for Sylvia Plath and feminists ideals, once in a lifetime love that still wounds your soul/heart, or just to read writers who have died -- via suicide.

I think it's all part of the growing up process, so much angst and thinking nobody understand the only way you could do it was to express it vicariously through works and people who actually died from depression. That way to justify that life is all tragedy and pain and the only realness is pain. So the anthem goes, "yeah you bleed just to know you're alive."

From JC till Uni, our lives are like the soundtrack out of The OC, Grey's,  The L word, Queer as Folk (Gilmore Girls too mainstream) and more. Aqualung's 'Strange and Beautiful' plays in our head as we walk past scenes of blurry corridors filled with sad and beautiful youths in Parisian chic, plaid wear, black-rimmed glasses exhaling smoke, casting intoxicating absinthe-filled spells on passer-bys. Until you realise you were probably suffering from hallucinatory effects due to prolonged smoke inhalation and subsequent suffocation. Timelessly temporal delusions.

I used to like this poet very much, I loved all her poems, it was like finding a lost twin. One day I decided to google her history instead of her poems, and I found out she killed herself. And there I was thinking she was different from Sylvia, because she turned her sorrow into song and lived through it. I was so spooked I never took solace in her poems again.

Coming out from all these years of breathing in angst like a chain-smoker recovering from sawdust in the lungs, I go for safe stuff now (like Korean dramas, although nowadays they are getting too stimulating). In therapy you stay away from the heroin, for fear the crack still gets you, still tempts you with a haunting loveliness.

 I still find this beautiful:

Always (means everything)

shackled and torn, you came to me broken
I tried to mend your angel wings, I glued them together
with words and bits and pieces of my heart, I put them
on your fragile back, careful not to rip the glitter--careful
not to let my glass shatter on top of you. You smiled at me,
gently and genuinely, and my eyes forever remembered that moment.

"what if I'm not here come next year" you breathed into my neck,
as I held you, like a sister would hold a sister. "Would you go on?"
(I still recall my smile--it was mirrored in your own)
tenderly, I laid you down. Words were not acceptable to my own voice
and I dropped your head vigilantly onto the pillow
[soft and comforting] aware of your wings, making sure they would not crush

(they were not like mine. smashed and deceptive)
You were so beautiful
(even my ugly almost went away)
You loved me
(I love you)


"You aren’t here come this year", I whisper ever so quietly, but I'm talking only
to the beating of my heart.
"yes, yes, I will go on"

always ~