Eckleburg's Eyes

Maybe I have misplaced my dreams.

I, too, am clinging onto a past that will not repeat itself. I, too, remember the precise moment we first looked each other in the eyes and knew. I had reveled in the frivolousness for as long as I could, but the dance always ends. The party always wanes. I am picking up the dirty vodka glasses and staring out my window. Across the water.

The light is still there, it is still beckoning to me.

It hurts me to know the night has ended, but promises of tomorrow dulls the pain. At least I am not deluded in the placement of devotion.

And maybe this is where I have gone wrong. I am hosting these grand, majestic galas every night. Throngs of people come, in their fancy cars and glittering dresses and shrill giggles. He comes too, his eyes lock on mine and I know they are promising a night of laughter and warmth. They are promising to make up for the other nights.

Those nights.

Those nights when I would beg at his door for him to come, and he would slam the door in my face. Those nights when he would say, "I'd love to spend the night with you, but there are a million things I'd rather do." Those nights, when, even though he would begrudgingly accept my invitation, he would yell at me and tug on my arms to make me dance faster.

We all know how this story was supposed to end.

There is a part of me that looks at my reflection and wonder when I will stop keeping up this charade. When I will have found what I am looking for.

I want him to show up uninvited, to offer me his hand sincerely, to hold me in his arms and tell me that I am the apple of his eyes. That there is no one else and nothing else that matters more to him, definitely not the girl who lives with him, the girl he calls his wife, his life, his future.

It is selfish of me. She is much more prestigious than I could ever be. Her words and her allure beckons thousands of people every year to pay her tribute, while I, in my loneliness, cannot even win over the boy who has sworn he loves me. I am throwing these parties, I am grasping at straws, but the night always ends, and he retreats to her shadows again.

And I cannot wait anymore. It will destroy me. It has destroyed greater people, people who have achieved much more wealth and honor than I ever have. These nights will one day consume me whole and spit out my bones in contempt. And the red ribbon will flutter, and the breath will slowly escape from my lungs, and the sounds of the music will fade.

I will be underwater, in the pool, with my eyes wide open, basking in the lulling silence.

We all know how this story ends.

Ring Around The Rosie

A pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down.

We all fall down.

I saw ghosts of cars today. In the reflection of the bus windows. Car ghosts running head on and crashing into their originals. The car themselves come out unscathed. The car ghosts disappeared.

Did the cars know they were driving into their haunted selves? Did the car ghosts know they were driving into their demises?

Did they know?

Did they care?

Yuma took me to the orchestra room today, and played Imogen Heap's Speeding Cars on the piano. He sang too. I had looked at the lyrics once before but had not noticed them. This time, I realized it was talking about suicide.

Suicide. Such an easy word to say, such a hard word to swallow.

In my dreams—or are they nightmares?—I have been chased many times. I have been on the run many times, from presumed enemies, to win a race, or for the sake of running.

But I have never fallen. Not once. Falling dreams are the ones that haunt my daydreams.

I am suddenly in possession of objects I would deem too dangerous for me to hold. Too dangerous for someone who has such a strong morbid fascination with these objects. But I accepted them with as much grace as I could muster.

What will it be like?

Do I want to know?

My scarf obsession started in fifth grade. Or grade five, as I used to say, before someone pointed it out to me and I subconsciously changed the way I spoke.

My youngest cousin and I were on the streets, with my aunt. We had finished shopping for something, and I cannot remember what it was, but it must have been important because why else would we be out at night in one of the coldest winters I could remember?

My cousin spotted a hat she wanted. We went over, and I, in classic little sibling manner despite the fact I was an only child, decided I wanted a hat as well.

She bought one for herself and one for me. I, in turn, bought the matching scarves and rabbit hair gloves.

My aunt later asked me, “Why aren't you wearing your scarf?”

“It's too short,” I told her.

So she got me another scarf, a long chocolatey caramel vanilla ice cream scarf. And perhaps that was what went wrong. I should never have two frivolous items, because what else could I do with them but want more?

I still remember the Fairweather scarf.

The tube scarf.

And every scarf that caught my eye afterwards.

I gave Yuma the chocolatey caramel vanilla ice cream scarf. It is one of four scarves I still have. He looks nice in it, I think. And anyway, he should have something for his throat, because sore throats are awful, especially for a singing throat.

We shared our favorite songs before. And found out how different our musical tastes are.

I am a melancholy-lyrical-rhythm dependent girl. One who grasps onto the melody and threads it through the lyrics in a silk weave. I do not know how he likes to describe himself musically.

Perhaps not as I describe myself.

The other day I was walking down the street and the trees seemed like plastic toys. The sky was so low it bordered surreal. I remember the air as biting cold, as it always is in December. I had only one year of warm December, where the snow fell as light dustings and winter was just as rainy as it was snowy.

The houses were some laborious decoration. Not real.

I walk alone from the mailbox to my door. No one walks down that path with me, except for Yuma sometimes, and even he does not reach my door.

On that stretch of road, I can be anything. Anyone.

I can twirl the air and pretend I am holding onto Lillian. Slash slash jump. I pretend Prescott is there, and I am telling him off yet again. I even sing sometimes. I start off with songs I know and twist the lyrics to my liking. Then I change the tune.

Then I reach my door, and halt the show.

As I write, I wonder, will I ever be well known for my writing? If I will be, will they who read my other, more famous works look back on these simple thoughts and try to assign some deeper meaning to them? Will they think, “Now here is a real thoughtful piece, here it reflects some profound theme.”

Death. Life. And everything in between.

But perhaps there is no real reason for this piece. It is not a statement, nor is it a message. It is merely an expression, a method to consolidate musings.

It is, after all, what came to mind first. And as I am listening to Speeding Cars right now, and re-imagining the car ghosts yet again, I wonder if they are at peace. Ghosts freed of their curses, free to go wherever they want.

Light Up My World

Here's for cryptic puzzles:

I recently, with the help of several staunch members of the Confederate, realized that to follow in the footsteps of a blue-coat Yankee who has but all the reasonings of a chicken would not only be extremely foolish, but no longer my intent as well, and therefore I return to Fairhill under the lures of the harp.

Lest you think it is some complicated play on words that has a really fascinating answer, I'll reassure you that: a) it just uses rather obscure references, and b) the answer is related to me, and can be summarized in perhaps one sentence, but expandable at will.

Anyway, today I am beginning to think that I am attracted to morbid things. How else should I explain my tendency for spotting dead (albeit cute had they been alive) critters on the ground? This morning I found a dead, squashed baby bird as I was walking to my bus stop. Then, in the afternoon, as I was coming home from picking up the mail, I saw a dead mouse.

Today, Nyx and I also made esters (they're fats with a COOC component) out of organic acids and alcohols. Esters are supposed to (for the most part) smell good, because they're the stuff that gives fruits and flowers their nice smell, but the stuff they're made out of are supposed to (for the most part) smell awful. Like rotten cheese and smelly socks all blended into one and left on the counter-top under the sun for a week awful.

We succeeded in making esters that smelled like gasoline-laced Jolly Ranchers, nail polish removers, and wintergreen. We also made one that had a white precipitate and stuck to the bottom of the test tube, and we had to use concentrated sulfuric acid to get it out, and because we had water in the tube already, the solution bubbled and spluttered out of the tube.

All in all, not too bad. At least we made one thing that smelled nice (the wintergreen).

Also, another not-so cryptic puzzle:

I'm such a coward, because I'm running away from my problems right now. But I don't know any other way to deal with it, even if this will hurt more than it will heal. Ugh. I thought it was complicated enough already. Why does it have to be even worse than it was before?

I can't wait for summer to start. Now. Wait, no. I can't wait for master schedules to come out, now, and then for arena to be here, and for all of my classes to be perfect (or as perfect as they can be) and everyone else's classes to be perfect (kind of impossible, I know), and then summer to start.

These last few days will be dreadful. Oh, and, when will US portfolios start? I'm beginning to think it's going to be a last-minute cram, and if it is so, then I'll most likely be too busy for my liking.

Some Things To Think About

As I was walking home from my bus stop today, I saw what looked like a dead frog on the ground. Figuring frogs usually aren't pink, nor do they usually find themselves in my neighborhood (we don't have any ponds or creeks around, or any large body of water within a one-mile radius), I thought they were flowers of some kind, so I took a closer look.

Turns out, they weren't frogs or flowers (although how neat would that have been, alliterations). They were dead baby birds.

I had to stare hard at them to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. There were three of them, pink and featherless on the ground, with a nest in the middle that must have been torn off the tree branches by the storm last night. It was awful. Absolutely awful.

. . .

We had a sub for US history today, and we had to discuss quotes. When the sub asked us if we were really going to do any work if we didn't have to write it down, Argon said, "I hate to say this, but I have an AP stat test tomorrow, so I'm trying to de-stress myself right now."

"I bet we're going to start off talking about the quotes," I said, "then diverge. Like series. Oh! Nth term test: if, when N goes to infinity, the term has a value other than zero, then the series diverges!"

So we talked about change, and perhaps we are not aware of a social injustice now, but ten years from now, someone who is not satisfied with the way life is for them would come out and bring our attention to the matter. We talked about social cliques, and The Breakfast Club, and how the nerdy guy did not (spoiler alert) get to be with anyone in the end (and all the other non-realistic aspects of the movie).

. . .

I would talk more about Mario, but everyone who knows him and reads this blog knows about the incident already, and everyone who doesn't know him probably will find it infinitely more disturbing (not to mention much better off not knowing), so I'll spend my free time more wisely (such as preparing for the stat test, or the calc test, or listening to music and finishing my English homework, even though I haven't had English for quite a long time now).

I'm also searching for a new template because I don't like the font to this one.

For All It's Worth

I had been bored lately (as I've discovered I'm prone to do whenever a deadline is fast approaching), so I went--what else?--blog-hopping. Blogger makes it easy, with its "Next Blog>>" link. It automatically finds similar blogs for me, so I don't have to go through the hassle of sifting through endless upon endless blogs of boring material (I don't know what this would be, actually).

The downside? There's no "Dislike" button to tell Blogger that, no I don't want to see another blog about making papier-mâché pigs. Really.

When this happens, I usually go back to Gretchie's blog (the only blog I was following at the time that had the Blogger header at the top) and start all over.

So far, my adventures had taken these routes:

1. A Japanese lady who wrote about her life in a combination of English and Japanese-->a pregnant lady and her family-->a mother who had lost her child.

2. A self-employed mother who custom-made lunch bags-->a knitter who also takes on other fabric crafts-->a graphic novel artist who loves to use Winston brushes.

3. An magazine editor with a dying scooter-->a debut novelist who also promotes other people's books-->a young man living in Brooklyn-->a group of students assigned to write creative stories every week.

I followed a few of them, because they sounded interesting, and began reading through the old posts of the collab blog. Their latest (and, apparently, last--but it doesn't matter because they have hundreds upon hundreds of earlier work I want to read through one day) assignment was "Complicated."

The last author wrote:

The word “dead” echoed in my head. I could not believe what I was hearing. My poor beloved mum’s soul was under the sheet. My dad murdered her. I dared not to lift the sheet. But then I did and gave her a soft kiss on her cheek.

It leaves me wondering--what is death to each of us?

I have often written about death. In my second-to-last story on this blog, I wrote about a male protagonist who died in the end. In my other stories--stories of Nephria, where my blog's name comes from--death is a major, resonating idea. It's as if I can't write a story without having someone die, somehow.

But what is death?

Perhaps it is easier to first examine what happens after death. True, everyone has a different interpretation. I have read about the Christian view of life after death: heaven. A place where the little sins are forgiven--where people are given a new chance and a brand new hope. Mitch Albom writes, in his book, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, that heaven is a place where you find out what your life meant, both to yourself and to others. In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, heaven is the stark opposite of Purgatory, where everyone who does not conform to the social and religious norm goes until they learn to rid themselves of their sins or until someone prays for them enough.

My youngest cousin, who lives in China, said she believes that when people die, they go to a sort of afterworld--regardless of what they've done in their lives. Once there, they start new lives--lives whose prosperity in part depends on their living relatives' propensity for burning them paper afterworld money. My grandmother still burns folded gold-paper pieces for my grandfather every April. The dying protagonist in Nŭktae ŭi yuhok asks his grandmother if reincarnation exists--if people could have a second chance at life to right the wrongs that they've committed in this life.

So many possibilities, all because of one simple event. Death.

Death, to me, is the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. I don't know if reincarnation exists, or heaven, or an afterworld, or if we will land in front of Allison Saint-Cross's doorstep, asking him to grant our last wish. I don't know what will happen.

I do know, however, that it will be the end of life as I know it. It might have different connotations for different people--dying at the hands of Peter Houghton in Nineteen Minutes or the boy next door would be different from dying at the hands of cancer or old age, and different from dying because you decided to take a knife, force your way into the apartment on the fourteenth floor, and jump off the balcony.

Death, therefore, is defined by life and by the method of death.

And yet, some lives are defined by deaths. JFK was well known for his political achievements, but he is perhaps even more well known for his assassination. Cissy Pike of Second Glance is only known because of her ghost--a figment of her inevitable death. The Yan prince of ancient Chinese history is only famous because of his attempt to kill the emperor Qin, and his death after failing his task.

Life and death obviously goes hand in hand. As I've heard from somewhere else (I can't remember exactly where), "we're never guaranteed a wake-up call the next day." But until I die, I will probably never know what it really means to die.

So I'll keep on writing my stories of Prescott slipping from his grasp of self-nobleness, of Carter fighting his way to make the impossible come true, of Rena wishing for the exact opposite of what everyone else would wish for, and amidst that, I'll keep on wondering what death really means.