Last Words of A Nineteen Year Old Girl / Everything In Its Right Place / Requiem for a Death Star
September 2025, minutes before I turned twenty.
My actual last words do not matter but know this – today for dinner I had four mozzarella balls and half a bowl of olives and five dates and a chunk of feta and the last of my bag of granola. I sampled each separately from the respective packaging they came in, and it was good.
For the past few years I have conditioned myself to be The Creature of Spontaneity, tossing the cards that I deal myself / have been dealt with onto the floor and then sprawling myself onto the floor in an unwillingness to get up and continue the game…
And nineteen is supposed to be the year that is supposed to encompass the most liminal of spaces, the awkwardness of transitioning that is supposed to all culminate somewhere, eventually – I have been told it’s supposed to be messy! And that the messiness is freeing, organic, a stage of life I’ll look back upon!
But I think that the same will be said about my twenties, and then for all the years that go by too – at this point in time I have no desire to romanticize the messiness, no will to withstand it – I want to be a dogmatic master to my self-enslaved self, for now it feels as though this is the state I have found myself in – exhausted from my mandated rebellion, exhausted from making demands towards myself and this one life – I just want to get through it relatively content, surrounded by the people I love, being the reason for a few smiles every day, making myself proud with the way I decide to go about things morally and politically….
And I did not expect myself to come and say any of this, actually! Life has always been tinted by an enforced armour of unapologetic determination, I think – I’ve tried to live that way, mostly, but now that I write I realise I am actually so exhausted, because with the word ‘unapologetic’ also comes the implications that there is something bearing the potential warrant for an apology in the first place – and I am exhausted of the effort (the mere effort!) it takes for one to remain faithful to themselves!
I realise that this entry has been the first time I’ve properly verbalised all of this, that really I’ve been living a life that has not been solely curated for others but also for myself, in deceptive wiles that conceal to myself the suggestion that ‘the good life’ is not The Good Life, that there are things that I want that I do not feel the pertinence of yet, that I do care about the future and seek to find or retain a semblance of control,
and I am so sick of Playing A Character!
Living in a world that touts individual self-expression so much that we create ourselves out of haste and artifice just to proclaim our defined, distinct, illusory existence…
And this is good, I feel good, that I may not have stepped into my twenties knowing the mentality I wanted myself to adopt or the future I wanted to sculpt or whether the people in my life would continue to stay…..
But I was honest to myself,
This is a step towards Being,
and I take this to be a very good step.
(W)HOLE
February 2026
I am a mosaic of everything that I have ever loved, but also of everything else – of the dust and of the dirt that surrounds me, that which I cannot help but breathe in too, as I inhale, inhale, and spin, alongside the spinning earth.
I am distrustful of my mind for it feels as though it no longer belongs to me – when sentiment and insecurity become exploited for profit, when attention and time become currencies we did not ask to give up and yet struggle to reclaim, and when our senses of truth and agency become slowly dismantled by scorching headlines and oversaturated images that we briefly acknowledge but do not digest, so that our intestines become landfills and our bodies become stone – I do not want to think about what I, too, have become.
Your eyes are open but still you cannot See; Your muscles are twitching but still you cannot Move.
~
Right now my favourite role to play is Passenger On A Moving Vehicle.
The road is where I am momentarily relieved of the responsibility of my existence’s fate. In the skies I occupy my purgatorial space on an airplane. It is the only space where I am floating in time, and Your Arms, violently outstretched towards me as they always seem to be – well, they can’t reach me now, not yet. I exhale.
~
There are wrinkles under my dad’s eyes that form when he smiles. I know this from a photo he sent me recently because I am not present by his side. It astonished me when I first saw them – they appeared out of nowhere; nobody warned me that my parents would age. My dad used to carry me on his back whenever I pretended to fall asleep in the car so that I wouldn’t have to walk the 57 steps it took for me to get from the parking lot to our apartment. Now there is a dull ache that plagues my upper-right back and bags under my eyes that remain greyish-beige no matter how much concealer I attempt to apply to them in the morning. I was not warned, either, that when you turned twenty you would start to feel ready for retired life. Today I took a walk by the Water of Leith and listened to the river run as the wind grazed my cheeks, and all my thoughts ceased; I just listened.
Phase II is Vertigo
Dead skin cells shed themselves from our flesh and attach to all surfaces. There are pieces of ourselves in places that have become dust in our memory.
It has been a while since I last wrote anything here properly. I feel very distanced from the seventeen-year-old self that started this. And when I am distrustful of my mind, I am also distrustful of the words that come to be.
But in spite of this or because of this I am making myself write here again. I seek to write my sense of self back into existence, and then to address the recreation of the voice that appears along my eyes against the backdrop of its surroundings.
~
February 2024
From the grand piano there are discordant sounds that seem misplaced yet above all, played with such intentionality that we convince ourselves that this is how it’s all meant to be. Murky paints deliberately mixed together, streaks of orange and green slashed in the wrong place to create the unpleasantness that is meant to make us Feel.
And it’s interesting, this realist school of thought – to make things that affirm and reflect that ‘this is how things are’; to portray, persistently, variations of the same ‘real life’. I pose an admittedly ignorant critique to such portrayal:
To portray reality as it is is defeated acceptance of the circumstances; acceptance is resignation, and the fact that it is reinforced through art and media and literature shows this widespread recognition which condemns us to maintaining this reality for the rest of time.
I think this is why I am idealistic, naïve or whatever.
This cannot be all there is to life.
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