I turned 22 yesterday. A healthy age. An age that agrees, “You have made it through the absurdities of youth.” I tell myself that frequently these days. Give myself a mental pat on the back for surviving college… all of those border moments when I found myself teetering on the edge of life and security. Here, I find myself at another one of those phases of transition. I remember slightly feeling this way before leaving for college… like a part of me had died. It is more extreme this time around though. The future is so abtract. Even as I am making plans, I feel as if I will not be around to experience them. In fact, half the reason I opened up this blog and decided to make a post was to document where I am in my life right now… in case I never have the chance to share it.

I feel so mortal. So suspicious of death. When I think about how “in the moment” I was during college, it astounds me. Because now, there is hardly a day I am not wary of death. Every time I hop in my car, I see airbags deploying, vehicles flipping, and bodies moving in slow motion. Fear creeping in… sometimes consuming me. 

I think about organs a lot. I cannot believe how they all work together to create this living, breathing, feeling, thinking creature. And then I think about the living, breathing, feeling, thinking creatures that I know and love. My eyes well up when I think of how they are mortal. I wonder if my thoughts are permanently stuck in this morbid darkness. In some ways, it helps to remind me of the preciousness of everyone and everything. But it severely holds me back as well. 

I leave for India in 4 months. Already I am imagining the moment when I walk away from my family, friends, boyfriend to board the plane. And I know what I will be thinking. I will imagine that I will never see one, some, or all of them ever again. Fear and panic. Yet, for some reason I think I need this trip so that I can overcome this fear-induced paralysis. And if I come back, I think I will be a stronger, more confident woman. 

If I can remember, I want to update this blog as I prepare to leave for India… for several reasons. Some quite depressing, others quite innocent. 

“I go to encou…

“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”

-James Joyce

 

SUMMERTIIIIIIME & the livin’s easy.

 

thoughts on a tangent —

This right here is my desperate attempt to document what I’ve been struggling to keep quiet through this entire trip. I know nothing meaningful will come out of this, but I’ve got to write the words as they come to my mind or I’ll go insane. I’m going in and out of my thoughts–the ones that continue to ring let me know that I do have a few skeletons in the closet that need addressing. Thoughts can be demented, so much so that I have seen them bend. I’m trying to keep everything straight, but we all know that’s not gonna happen. I fear that I’m ruining this beautiful, sunny picture… I keep trying to write around everything to save the rest for some special occasion. I don’t know what I’m saving it for… Just run with it, Ashlyn. Take it. Stop waiting around for that distant point in the future that will magically somehow release all of the gorgeous demons from your soul and twist them into some kind of sense. That’s not reality. And it’s not just going to happen. 

I feel myself coming back to all of the shame. Shame for the girl I have turned out to be. But that’s not the half of it. There is something in my spirit that I defend. All and all, it’s great to be back in a weird, fucked up kinda way. (And that “weird, fucked up kinda way” that I use to dismiss all the complexities of life that I’m too much of a coward to confront, is about to start being described in more tangible terms).

 

 

Rambling…

 

It might be the depiction of some scene, or some careless string of words falling from the lips of a certain stranger that somehow captures the fire of the universe that we’re all trying so hard to describe. Art is…us… our painful episodes at trying to express what’s eating our insides, driving us mad. Then I guess you take a step back, and you can finally see that we’re all just making a huge mockery of ourselves. Who can satirize life the best?

…I’m going to start being more optimistic. I’m not really this depressing…