future

live with a life of expiry dates

There’s a curious phenomenon that begins in your brain when you start grocery shopping as an adult. You know where the aisles are, you compare prices and brands, but most out of character, you begin to check labels. The nutrition, weight, calorie content mumbo jumbo. Most importantly, your eyes will graze over the numbers and look for a singular one that means the most to you: the expiry date.

The expiry date, ah, the singular number that initiates the countdown to a produces death, the day it grows all wrinkly, changes colour and tastes funny, like some morbid food grim reaper. We plan our whole groceries around them, when’s the next buy, or we change our food habits suddenly, like furiously thickening the density of the peanut butter on a single slice of bread. Of course, there are often times we just ignore it altogether, sniffing at the milk like some deranged idiot to see if we can sense the slight shifts in pH values.

However, figuring out how to grocery shop around expiry dates was the easy part of adulting. Figuring how to treat every life event with an expiry date was the hard part.

It was not throwing things out before their deadlines arrive.

It’s holding on to that phone eventhough the new model is coming out and you can afford a change. It’s not dropping out of school even though a few assignments are missing and they needed to be rushed till five in the morning. It’s not cutting off of friendships just when the first argument arises. Not swallowing an excessive amount of pills when things have been going on too hard for too long.

The resilience of staying on to care for things whose time hasn’t come yet, the toughness to leave things in life aside for now and deal with it when you can.

It was to get rid of things that have extended their stay.

It’s understanding that it’s really time to declutter your space of items you don’t need. Time to reexamine unhelpful thoughts that have propelled and motivated you but there isn’t any need to anymore. It’s cutting off toxic relationships that have drained you even though it pains your heart deeply and all you feel like you should do is stay.

The firm resolution to take care of yourself, to not let spoiled things pollute your space, a toxicity that crawled into your ecosystems.

Yet, it was still being okay with the indefinite numbers of not knowing when the expiry dates were going to come.

It’s taking the risk to open your mouth to create connections without knowing when the fine line might snap. It’s being okay with reaching the end of education lines and a vast unknown of what happens now. It’s loving someone with a whole heart of uncertain periods even when you know it could head towards dead ends.

The solace in the absolute silence yet solidity of the end that is sure to come. The peace you make as you link fingers with the oblivion.

The delicate dance of hope and despair with time is the biggest concept I have yet to understand. Yet, it was letting go of the cranks and the cogs and the levers of clocks, willing to free the prying human fingers to manipulate our time, and simply succumbing to the silent countdown to inevitable expiry dates yet to come.

ew, romance

Hate is a strong word, but I hated the idea of love. There was nothing admirable about giving your life up for someone, nothing sweet about waiting for someone who wasn’t coming back. It was idealism at its’ extreme, a futile attempt at fairy tales and happy ever afters.

However, I often found myself in situations where someone has confided in me about their love life. Their yearning for a girl that won’t love them back, a guy who they liked but they knew they were never their type. Everything was a competition, texting timings, lovelorn watching, rapid swiping, falling, falling, falling.

I felt like an exasperated viewer watching playthroughs of all the wrong paths. Comments I didn’t publish consisted of:

“it’s been four years, what are you even waiting for?”

“someone doesn’t need a fist to inflict harm.”

“telepathy is not the only means to communication. talk.”

“the grand gesture can only bridge the half gap between your souls if they don’t meet you in the middle.”

After watching people dent their teeth on the curb of eros and phileo, a privilege we only got when our lives were already practical and didn’t need another partner to make it through, I didn’t want to stain my hands with the wax of a candle burned too bright and too fast for the sake of the thrill of five seconds of limelight.

Rather, I used the forest fires of the chaos around me to direct me away from the emotional turmoil and into the cold hard rational lines of logic, of cynical, of understanding that romance isn’t worth the pain of tearing your soul over and over to bind to another in a fruitless idealistic hope of gaining a sense of connectedness for just  moment.

We only think we fall in love for the neurotransmitters to fire rapidly enough so we can form deep sense of emotional attachments and reward that compels us to breed enough children to cover the face of the earth. We get a high each time we see someone we think we love because its our body telling us it’s easier to survive together to fend off predators. There is a longing to see them because your body naturally hates loneliness and the societal pressures views alone as outwanted and outcast eventually pressuring you subconsciously to fit a mold.

I thought I knew all there was to it.

But I was a teenager. They were teenagers. It was a teen love, a young Eros, Phileo love. A bulb of actually understanding a relationship beyond a quarter of its purpose.

I may have woken up earlier, but I still haven’t gotten out of bed until it was time for someone to pull off the covers.

Love isn’t just fluffy emotional fulfillment and attachments, nor intense physical intimacies, but it’s not cold hard pragma either. It’s all of those and more.

It’s learning to be rational about situations, yet hopeful that it will be okay eventually. It’s learning that there wouldn’t be any eventual benefit or gratefulness out of things but you still do it anyways. It’s something you have to do together, as long as the other person does it 40-60% of the time too. It’s knowing when and how much to give, and when and how much to take.

Love is…growth. It’s mature, it’s adulthood, and it’s fulfillment.

It should be a model of the perfect love God gives to us imperfect beings. It’s Agape. And it’s beautiful.

 

 

what now?

It’s the question of every graduate, every job seeker, every parent to be. The end is always a start, and the start eventually leads to an end.

Since we know that truth so well, the care given into answering the question of “what now?” is ambiguously ambivalent. The world of crossroads and choices. The luxury of choice. The burden of privileged perfection.

The world is our oyster yet I’m embedded in the flesh of my protective shell.

what now?

Yet all I wanted was the answer for how.