These long distance phone calls, instead of the comfort and reprieve that they’re supposed to be, are becoming so emotionally exhaustive and aggravating. We just hung up and what’s left from the tele-conversation is an all too familiar feeling that I’ve gathered and cornered into a tiny recess of my heart. But tonight it swelled and expanded, and each time it gets that little bit more dominating, and that much bitter.

While gasping for the correct words to spin a tale of sorrow, I found some old drafts from many months back that already did a very good job. Reading them through, it felt like I could just stitch these unfinished proses all up together and there! – the perfect antithesis to all the highly embarrassing nudges of wedded bliss. It’s a very abrasive kind of hurt to know that under the sheen of compatibility, there is a layer of grime laced with jealously, disappointment and neglect. Perhaps it’s time to air the dirty laundry out in the sun.

……
In all honesty, I just want to be sedated from this well of expectations and pipe dreams that will never be fulfilled. It’s becoming so hard to find myself one step ahead of reality – dreaming, hoping, wishing. For what? Does it really matter in the larger scheme of things that are yet to come?

……
He is a good man with a robotic heart, whose sensitivity and emotional nerves are replaced by a circuit of copper wires that can remain stoicly unaffected by any emotive outbursts from a real, pumping heart. He is never apologetic, never flinching; and all I can say is, can I please have my heart back.

……
When I step away from the grown-up that I have to be, all I am is just a hopeless (and hapless) romantic who needs her fairy sprinkles served on perfect toast at exactly the right time of hunger. And I need you to know that I also like some butter with it.

I’ve always stood by the fact that there are no good years or bad years. It’s mostly due to the fact that I’ve never actually experienced a sunshine and rainbows all year-round kinda good year nor a bad one that I can eternally attach that label to all 365 days of it. To sum up 2009 as best as I can, it was -

• An extremely frustrating academic year –
where I failed a subject, subsequently had my scholarship terminated, and still didn’t do well enough the following semester to earn it back. No surprises on what will happen in 2010… I’m still waiting, preparing myself, for that formal letter of which the revocation will most likely be signed off by the faculty head.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen if I hadn’t taken up that damned subject that I knew I wasn’t going to do well in, that I didn’t even have to take! If I weren’t so naive as to give myself a second go at this accounting crap, thinking that maybe this time I’d be able to redeem myself, then I wouldn’t fail it. And I wouldn’t have to give the scholarship up. And it would also mean that instead of doing summer school right now, I would probably be interning at GE like I’ve always wanted to. Bright-eyed and hopeful was what I was when I was anticipating starting my very first semester in Melbourne Uni, with a recognition of my past academic efforts at my helm, it felt good. 2009 was all about learning that I still have so much to learn. Though, thankfully, unlearning how to feel bitter and sorry for myself was something I picked up quite quickly along the way.

• The year I started to worship leggings and stockings –
so much so that I thought that every pair of jeans that I have are getting a tad bit redundant. That aside, I still love my denim babies. :)

Stupid boyfriend also made a condescending remark one day regarding the over-excessive donning of leggings:

“Why do you keep wearing leggings? Is it because you can’t fit into your jeans anymore?”

• A year of perpetual procrastination –
in obvious ways, this has partially contributed to the fact that I couldn’t achieve my impossibly high target GPAs. In other less patronizing ways, I also put off a lot of things that I could have get done or done better. Little nitty-gritty everyday things such as read more, write more, upload photos on Facebook, spend time with God, learn how to use the G10 to its capabilities, call an old friend up, mend a (somewhat) dysfunctional friendship… Seemingly insignificant things that we always thought will find a place for itself tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.

• A year accented by newness -
throughout the year, I’ve been blessed with many a new things. Tell me, what’s there not to like about something, anything, that is shiny, glossed-up and most importantly new?! There were colourful additions to the wardrobe and scarf hanger. The shoe rack in the apartment that had once been in a dismal barren state has been filled up with fresh soles. All these new-found pleasure in shopping created a thirst in me that I will continue to bring with me into the new year. Apart from materialistic pursuits, I can never be a more lucky girl than to have new girlfriends to gossip and whine to over bubble tea and wedges (you know who you are!). Also, at the very end of the year, we finally moved to a new family home, after all these years of waiting for the S&P to finalize, house to start construction, the delayed handover of keys, renovation works to complete. When the arduous waiting finally lapsed, there was the newness of living in a gated community, of a bigger room with an attached bathroom, and of stepping onto freshly-laid tiles.

Timing might be a little off, to only be wrapping up 2009 and starting out on new year resolutions almost thirty days into the year – so I guess it took me a month to finally make sense of what the last year meant to me and another hour to type it all out – but here it is anyway.

In 2010, I will:
• take a subject that I actually like and want to
• be more green, ie: completely eradicate need for the dryer, wash clothes at 30C, use less paper.
• graduate
• get a job
(the above two seems like the obvious in its progression, but still!)
• be desperate – for faith, for balance
• reignite an old hobby/interest (this one is kinda in the works already)
• say the things I want to say, aloud

Though I’m gradually warming up to the idea of going back to Melbourne prematurely to start summer semester there, I won’t lie and say that I’m happy to be thrown back in Aussieland this soon. I’m bitter, I’m in a little bit of a disarrayed mess and I’m not emotionally ready to leave home once again. When I boarded the plane to come home, I had a 5-week count on my hands. Now I’m left with one and with many many many things I haven’t done and people that I haven’t met. I’m shortchanged; this interval at home isn’t enough to compensate for the times that I will spend away from it in the coming year.

Right now, I want to be away. Away to a place where moments are captured to a still and where the sun falls on my left cheek without fail. I haven’t gone to enough places to be able to rave about a city where time stops moving and the clouds are always a prefect cotton white, but I know a place where I found love. It’s not the most organized city or the cleanest, but in all of its imperfection and shortcomings, I see a beautiful mess.

Yes, I’m talking about Sydney :) Pictures are from when Jwan was here and we made a stopover in Sydney, before returning to Melb. Gold Coast was a huge highlight for us, but I still have a strange affinity for Sydney that I want to share. This trip really opened my eyes to the beauty that the city so willingly offers, if only you let it. It was especially easy for us; that we had Khadine a.k.a. Special K, a good friend of Jwan from uni, who played tourguide and brought us all over town in her zippy yellow VW.

Stupid rocks at Clovelly which we trekked over in order to get to Bronte. The journey was long and hard, though we had to find out later that there was a shorter, more frequently travelled path along the coast.

But you know what they say about the road less taken? You may stumble too close to the edge but you will never fall. The view, I’m sure, was so much better from the altitude that we were at than it would have been at sea level.

I wouldn’t want to be too eager to publish all of the good ones, so after the cut are pictures that best summed up our time in Sydney!

(more…)