A Self-Loving-and-Loathing Prick's Prelude to End-of-Year Evaluation

Hello. It’s December, and how time fucking flies.

(I always pull that for my opening remarks, didn’t I? Feels outdated now (get the joke?) - it feels as if I’m seeking for whoever's forgiveness for not being able to evaluate more often. Of course time goes by when you only record your steps every half year.)

It’s December, and boy, did a lot of things happened.

(This, too, sounds painfully ungrateful. I don’t think I’m supposed to reduce all my experiences, feelings, and obsessions into a bucket filled with things that are somehow ‘a lot’? Even if I was dead early year and couldn’t write this sentence for today, lotsa things still would’ve happened. Invalid.)

Hello, December. We’re here for my irregular meet-up with myself, only pushed into context whenever I feel driven to.

(If that sounds somber, rest assured that it usually emerged not due to phases of sadness and despair (which were persistently there), but the reconciliation exactly after those: the phase when I thought I might know the answer, but could never be ready to commit myself to it. Often it was driven by a sequence of weak self-love, after moments of lethargy, or boredom, or rejection. Other time, it was simply on contrived rendezvous that demanded a look-back: contrived birthdays, departures and arrivals, end of years like today, etc.)

This isn't fucking working, and I've mostly forgotten what I wanted to write.

Let's try my next birthday. It's springtime, so my brain wouldn't be as frozen.

Ah,

I thought,

here’s the silence. The all too familiar silence. The lurking deafness that I’ve been dreading to meet since I woke up this morning, and the one before this, and before that. The loss of din I’ve been shoving into my two dangling ears my whole day just so I don’t have to cope with nothing. You know it too, I’m sure I’m not at all weird. Nothing is frightening. Nothing is the void with no quality. Not even dark, or small, or quiet -- it just isn’t anything.

I can see silence is inescapable. That’s why we invented music. Nightlife. Roaring speakers tearing our eardrums. That’s why we invented language--heck, I think that’s why we were given voice in the first place. So we don’t have to fight with nothingness.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being still. I savor the inertia I can simply throw myself into at any time, staring at the hazy bubble floating in your eyes. (I’ve wiki-ed it, there’s a scientific shit behind that. Apparently it’s your white blood cell. Weird, yes, but not at all creepy.) See, for me it’s not the absence of sounds or noise that bugs me, but the abundance of voices behind the silence. It’s the humming but explosive cacophony that fills in. It’s the loudest cry, the shriek that’s far more unfathomable than the wildest techno-trash beats you devour at your beloved dingy clubs, but also sometimes the softest whisper, fleeting hushes that don’t even make sentences, but you can understand its demands nevertheless. It’s the monster on top of your bed when you close your bedroom door and tuck yourself in.

Many times it’s filled with questions. Asks I thought I’ve found the explanation to and let go every other night. Other times, it’s just a stream of nonsensical phrases and sentences, or glimpses and snaps of stuffs I failed to make sense. But it’s never an answer, because answers would close the loop, where this keeps going as it’s a full circle of doubts.

Although maybe answers are more terrifying, I don’t know. I haven’t been brave enough to pluck one.

That’s also why we sleep, I reckon. So we don’t have to cope with the terminal noise, which is silence. I tried loving them, but I failed myself most times. And now I’m going to repeat doing what I’m always good at: muting the silence.