Confused-Shoes

I read her letter twenty times over, but unlike in most novels I know, I wasn’t able to memorize the lines by heart. From the heading to the closing, it felt like I was reading something new every time I read the letter. Every single new moment of rereading I experienced a whole new slew of emotions, ripping through me, crushing me. Once more, I thought, life was successful in hurting me the way it wanted to hurt me, and that day life used another ex-lover to show me how useless it was for me to go on resisting, living.

Though the emotions were new, however, my reactions were not. I’ve been through this before and I knew just what to do. What the hell, I told myself. That line from the Talking Heads song Once in our Lifetime rang in my head - “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was”. There was entirely, in general, nothing new.

Shrugging every new heartache off and patiently waiting for another one to come has been the main issue of late, and, I must admit, it must be weird for someone to be so used to such a thing. It doesn’t bother me anymore, nor does it stay with me longer than at most a day, the feeling of being heartbroken. In my 19^th year I was living my life like there were no great typhoons to face but there were the perennial thunderstorms to brave. Which was easier among the two for me to pull through, I couldn’t really tell. But I know the exact difference.

I dream sometimes of the old days when I was young and love affairs were novelties for us teenagers just beginning to discover the pleasures of touching one another in hushed movie houses and stealing kisses when we find ourselves alone in a dim corridor. Boy and girl, love and hate, chocolates and roses, condoms and napkins, briefs and panties, belts and bras. I dream of all the wonderful girls I loved and those whom I loved to spend sunsets with, clad in school uniforms, colored backpacks, a bottle of coke beside us. Nothing beats it, I decided. But oftentimes decisions are bound to change, and, until I find a new feeling to welcome sunshine, this precocious nostalgia stays.

When everything seems so dull now, and rejections and breakups don’t really hurt me anymore, I look back to the time when love seemed to be the greatest issue in being a teen; now, the prospect of work, graduate school or whatever looms, just as I am now realizing that when you reach 20 you can no longer claim that you are still too young to die. Everything seems possible all of a sudden and all these possibilities run in my head, chasing each other in a carousel, over and over again until they no longer shock me.