the summer of melodramatics

~

Day

I feel like death if I don’t get my eight hours of sleep and every time my heart beats I can feel it pounding against the walls of my chest, and I am overcome with physical weakness that also feels as though the rest of my organs are falling apart, but I am in one piece still; I can feel my skeletal structure as one and whole, connecting my mind to my stomach and extending this to the protruding limbs of my arms and legs, and I feel good; I feel my skin and flesh as a warm, soft container that envelopes my bones, and I feel proud that my body knows how to protect itself.

The skies outside my window are white, for once obscured entirely by the mist of clouds. Today the skies are my canvas, and they are empty and therefore full.

~

& Night

Skipped my Barre class because I could not muster the emotional energy that rushing back home to change, rushing to Barre then rushing back home to shower and eat, and rushing to Central once more to see Bernice N would take, let alone the soul-draining process of traversing the streets of Hong Kong whereby everyone to everyone becomes an object, an obstacle to swerve away from on rush hour’s narrow streets. Today has been an awfully long day – I think it goes back to my dream during the night (my nightmare, I correct myself, but dreams and nightmares, they’re not that different) whereby I genuinely felt as though my body was being attacked and about to be shredded by this maniac of a stranger – it was when I was experiencing the viscerality of this attack that my body jolted itself awake, taking flight in the face of the death of my subconsciousness, and I don’t think this dream would have hit so hard – in previous years I would have dismissed it as a fantastical monstrosity of a tale – had it not been for the materialization of such a likelihood lying stronger than ever in today’s America – sometimes I forget all that I have experienced in my sleep, but I remember myself distinctly this morning, going back to bed and thinking hazily about how I would probably be inept at feigning lifelessness if I were caught in the midst of a mass shooting, having previously read about people who survived precisely because they were able to convincingly slather themselves in the blood of other murder victims – it is when the atrocious imagination fuses with the conceivability of a futuristic reality that I am most terrified.

Death to us is seen as this wholly catastrophic phenomenon when it personally looms over our lives’ proximity and yet happens so often that it is so easily morphed into banal, desensitizing triviality – I am terrified of it especially because of its triviality, of the prospect of the fate of our bodies being clenched in the hands of another, of another person or of the amorphous, casual unpredictability of nature itself.

So I did not go to my Barre class today and I am currently beating myself up for being a Wimp but I want you to know that I tried, that I put on my gym clothes and my socks and was about to head out the door when the lock turned and my mother stood in front of me and I told her I was exhausted so should I still go to Barre class, knowing very well that she would dotingly tell me stay in which would give me the affirmation I required, and she did exactly that, which is why I am now in my gym clothes and socks about to have dinner at home.