fixation, fatalism, and feelings

If there’s one thing the elegies of intricate astrological birth charts, familial eccentricities, and psychological typing eulogize me for, is that I feel. Deeply.

 The advent of chilly Novembers, which poured less actual rainwater and showered more melancholy, brought about conveniently-timed epiphanies alongside a minor depressive episode. I could date my realization, that I over-sentimentalized above the average human being, to all the instances I’ve capitulated to nostalgia’s siren song sinking my ships in depths of saturated memories inviting me to jump in (which I did).

 The pedantic synchronicities between childhood and a personal de nos jours, aligned to map out my sentimental multiverse of great singularity, interstellar bodies of sidereal recollection divulging my innate compulsion to entertain matters of the heart with as much cardiac muscles and heartstrings it could sacrifice.

It was listening to Taylor Swift’s country albums, revisiting the Red phase I had back when I was 12. The musical prodigy from the class next door had become the centerfold of my childhood admiration I misperceived as an idealization of falling in unrequited love (though it’s admittedly funny how these days, uttering the word l’ve leaves a bitter taste on my yielding tongue). I read the story of us between album tracks and song lyrics; he was the one I knew was trouble, I remembered our sad beautiful tragic affair all too well, and by hallucinations fault to dopamine climaxes, we were burning red.

I could never see myself with anyone other than him but 5 years later, things are more lucid in retrospect. At 17, I’d picked new favorites in the Red album, favorites that embodied the essence of someone new who’d acclimatized to my instinctual tendencies: the way I’d think out loud, the nuisance of my clinginess (which the serendipitous Virgo Venus I’d met enjoyed instead, since it felt good to be needed), but above all, my melodramatic disposition to vehemence.

Isn’t it curious how futility arises from attaching schmaltz to insensate objects? We’re philosophers defining the world how we see right, but isn’t experience an antithesis of the faith we’ve instilled? 

We swear to believe in our newfound religion, but aren’t our theoretical sentiments subject to transformation?

I saw it in shifting paradigms. Binomial theorem isn’t a methodology of exponential algebraic expansion; it is a tragicomedy where Virgo and I feigned the Romeo and Juliet of academics, “here lies our brains because we can’t math” engraved on our headstones. An octopus isn’t a sea creature with eight tentacles; it is a cotton candy-sky blue comfort plush I’d hug with the hopes of bearing the distance, its golden – tangerine twin 444km away.  And so is sushi not food, blue not a color, and Tokyo not a city. 

Drinking from the cup of disentombed remembrance is comparable to sipping a bottle of wine in August. Doses of velvety sweet Bordeaux dripped into more austere notes, acidity hitting your mouth, turning it inside out. The after-effects of warm summer paled against the sharpness of glass underneath your tongue and you attempted to ignore the present ache demanding to be felt: letting go.

Having a penchant of over-sentimentalization meant that as much as nostalgic elucidation was an appurtenance to how you saw the world through rose-tinted lenses, letting go of passionless supercuts takes a lot more than one might think. You tend to hold on to relationships that have gone bad, hold on to the affinity of a stranger you still saw as a past lover or friend, and choose willful ignorance over painful truth. 

They’re part of the past that should be buried as skeletons in a sunken city were. They were my Atlantis but now only faint chimes of sunken cathedral Debussy transcribed in “Cathedrale Engloutie” could attempt to outline their presence in chalky wisps of smoke.

They’re long gone, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. They chose their fate and though I might wake to see a desert landscape so red I lose the capacity to differentiate whether it was sands of fervent passion or imploding fury, whatever mirage it was, melted into just that: red. The shade you’d so commonly find on fresh-picked cherries, a satin slip dress or the wine that glistens against your glass rim. It’s merely a color and nothing more. I’d learnt to embrace the flush of a summer dawn though it’d left me burnt.

One quote Taylor Swift made punctured my prenotion on tender-hearted nature:

“Let your heart remain breakable, but never by the same hand twice.” 

Feeling deeply isn’t a weakness. When you feel everything in accentuated motions, you love deeply, care deeply, connect deeply. On the contrary, it makes life, life. Things are beautiful because infinity is not a plausible reality: things end. If everything were to exist for eternity, wouldn’t we all be jaded by the prospect that we can’t lose the objects of our desire?

Despite predetermined fatalism, watching a movie begin again, doesn’t mean you know how it’ll finish. Sure, the past is past; it broke, burned and ended. Being graced with the clairvoyance of nostalgia, it shouldn’t make room for fearful stagnation, but dynamic action towards creating an ending that long lives. Currently, you might not know how nice that is, but I do.

And so, until evermore, I’ll wear my heart on my sleeve, feel emotions in the violence of hurricanes. I’ll let my heart remain tender and gentle, never hardened to stone. Kind to the world, but not too much I forget to be clever. Breakable, but never by the same hand twice.