Different

Heard this on Gossip Girl (Season 5, Ep 4) and immediately tracked it down.  Perfect down to the slight laugh in her gravelly, wistful voice.  

As I've grown up, I've noticed that certain people use the word 'different' to mean 'someone who is unlike us', 'someone I don't really understand, and most probably cannot get along with'. It's code for 'let's keep a polite distance from this one'.

A: How do you find person X?
B: Hmm, she's had a lot of life experiences. [pauses significantly] She's different.

A friend once shared a favourite book entitled Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. It was about a girl who was different. It wasn't about daring to be different. It wasn't about trying to fit in. And it wasn't about trying to be someone. She just was herself.

“In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.” ...“We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against. She was unknown territory. Unsafe. We were afraid to get too close.”

---

“She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' 

Maybe that explains it,' I said.” 

And the people who chose to set her apart.

Words unsaid

We want to say 'I forgive you'.  We want to say 'I understand'.  We want to say 'I know you've been through a lot, and I get that'.  We want to say 'I'm sorry'.  We want to say those three words.

But these words rise up inside of us and get caught at the back of the throat, like a fishbone that refuses to be coughed up or swallowed down.  Instead we say something easier, hoping that by the slightest of changes in attitude, like by being slightly nicer to someone, or by sharing our problems with a third party, somehow, the other person will know how we feel.

People say that it's pride that gets in the way.  But sometimes it's just the awkwardness of saying something as if out of the blue.  It's the fear that in expressing a sentiment, you might find yourself unable to follow through.  It's having experienced something together, but not knowing how to deal.  It's seeing the person, and not knowing what to do.

Love like a double-edged sword.

'There's a reason I said I'd be happy alone. It wasn't 'cause I thought I'd be happy alone. It was because I thought if I loved someone and then it fell apart, I might not make it. It's easier to be alone. Because what if you learn that you need love and then you don't have it? What if you like it and lean on it? What if you shape your life around it and then it falls apart? Can you even survive that kind of pain? Losing love is like organ damage. It's like dying. The only difference is death ends. This? It could go on forever.' 

- Meredith, Grey's Anatomy Season 7 Ep 22

Constantly torn between the romanticism of love and the reality of it.  One minute, one day, one moment in time, you're filled with the possibility of love.  The next, reality hits you in the face and you realise its impossibility.

So I face reality, and I realise that as much as I make out of my friendships, there is a gap between my ideal of friendship, and the reality of what kind of friend I can be.  We're supposed to feel, then think, then act accordingly.  But there's a gap.  A gap I wish I could fold like a piece of paper to make two ends meet, but I can't.  

Then, there's the gap between what I make out of the friendship, and what my friend makes out of the friendship.  We all have different ideas of intimacy.  There's always an imbalance somehow.  And as much as I'd like to bridge the distance that exists between one person and another, there's a gap.  A gap I wish I could fold like a piece of paper to make two friends meet, but I can't.  I'd rather not break the ice if we both get caught on the shards.

Meredith: We are not better! [pause] Cristina, a psychiatrist given several opportunities has deemed me unfit to do my job.

Cristina: Well he'll get over it, just go back in a couple of days.

Meredith: You are not better!

Cristina: Well, in a couple of days I'll be better too.

Meredith: In a couple of days you'll be married.

Cristina: Are you trying to talk me out of this?

Meredith: Look at me and tell me you're sure.

Cristina: Okay, you know what? You don't get to do this. All you get to do, is help me break the tie between the lilies of the valley and the peonies. That's it.

Meredith: No, I do get to do this. Derek is the love of my life, but you're my soulmate. I do get to do this. I mean, why can't it wait six months? Your flowers aren't going anywhere! You broke up with him because he couldn't choose you. Just why does it have to be right now?

Cristina: I think, I think you should tell Derek about the miscarriage.

Meredith: We are talking about you.

Cristina: We are talking about us not being better? Then you need to tell him.

Meredith: He's not ready. He's not okay.

Cristina: You're not okay! You should tell him!

---

Cristina: I never gave you any crap about your post-it.

Meredith: You look beautiful.

Cristina: I know. How's Owen? Is he good?

Meredith: Owen's perfect. He's perfect.

Cristina: Thank you.

- Grey's Anatomy Season 7, Ep 1

If only life was the way they portray it on television.  To have the soulmate, the friend who sticks closer than a brother (Pv 18:24).  To have the kind of friend you can crawl into bed with at the end of the day, and be welcome, even when they're married.  To have sentiments toward each other that are equally reciprocated.  But reality is that such friendships don't exist beyond the silver screen.

And if I already feel that way about my friendships, what of love? What is love?

They say it is better to have loved and lost, than never have loved at all.  But if all I feel is an emptiness that belies my sense of loss, maybe I've never really loved at all.  Maybe, I never will.

There's a reason I said I'd be happy alone. It wasn't 'cause I thought I'd be happy alone.

Quotes

"The heart has its reasons that reason does not know." - Blaise Pascal

"We all want to fall in love. Why? Because that experience makes us feel completely alive. Where every sense is heightened, every emotion is magnified, our everyday reality is shattered and we are flying into the heavens. It may only last a moment, an hour, an afternoon. But that doesn't diminish its value. Because we are left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives." - The mirror has two faces

"A dream makes perfect sense until you wake up. Then it is often recalled as illogical, bizarre and disjointed." - Laurie Richards

Scab

Madness is when
the mind gets stuck
on the wound that never healed,
when the scab that can be picked at
starts to bleed and before the clot can be formed again
you pick it apart, just so you can stay there
in the pain.

Because underneath the life you lead
that scab itches
and when you run your fingers across the surface
you can feel
the bump
the inconsistency -
the knowledge of your failure to gain
full closure.

So in order not to be
exposed in your ugliness
your scabby state naked to the world
you clothe yourself in the business of everyday life
and cover over your wounds
with the mask of sanity -
you deny ever having been hurt at all.

---

Paper/cuts\

Where the wor/l\d/s
daggered, jagge(re)d edges gently cut -
sublime douleur exquis!
        Perhaps too close to the bone.

S/witch worlds for word/s erration
The pain on
        pane of\f/
                     Frostian glass\flash of light pierced up- /
                  on the darkened ash-filled fireplace re-
       flecks off/on\ the burnt-out soul.

---

As I trudged home today, I noticed the bark moulting from the trees.  The smooth white veneer above was tearing away, strip by strip, to reveal the jagged, browned unevenness below.   Thus laid bare, the trees seemed wearied with the pain of growth.

I don't know, but it seems to me that growing up feels so much like giving up on your dreams.  It seems like the more you learn, the more you lose.  And I feel as though I've lost so much of my life that the rest of it barely seems worth fighting for.

Fed up of the endless feeling of angst, of frust.  Fed up of seeing the hopelessness and the helplessness of life - the fallen, sinful nature of man, magnified in chains of action and reactions - reflected images disrupt on shards of glass.  Full up on being fed up.

On beauty

Some women wear makeup to enhance the beautiful,
Some women wear makeup to mask the plain,
Some wear makeup to make plain the suffering and pain.

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is vain; (Pv 31:30)

Mis-Sings

All the missing pieces
are marked by empty time.
And empty kinds of places
make for empty frame of mind.

My mind is full of fullness -
of time and times gone by
lacing all the streets I wandered
with laughter and with love.

An isle of memories remains -
a-head I wonder on
the streets that have been laundered
dry of memorabilia.

This place is waiting to be filled,
I know this in my head.
But in the streets of far away,
my heart is dis-placed instead.
And empty kinds of places
make for empty frame of mind.

Your feeling eyes, my falling life

I fell for you -
because your eyes were just a little bit sad
when you smiled
it seemed like your eyes knew
something your mouth wasn't letting on.

And that glint when you were thinking
some private joke I thought you'd share
with me later,
after everyone else had left.
Those eyes seemed like the only ones
which could look into mine
and see what was going on inside,
not for what was wrong or what was right,
but with humour and empathy's ready light.

I'd feel for the promise
the hint of sensitivity
of (im)maturity
of subtlety
of the something more.

Of the one
I'd never found
before.

I felt like mine could see - for a moment(!)
that spark of an internal landscape
that painted new horizons in my own
with the light of your eyes.

And swiftly, I was felled.

Bliss beneath the Moon

Four eyes gleam with the same vision -
no spectacles are these -
two are mine, two are yours.

Common vision begets common thought
common thought begets common voice -
incoherent and unintelligble to the others -
running in subtext, we have our own language.
Dancing through daydreams, we share our musings
without regard for propriety or linearity of thought -
we can leap through quantums, holding hands and smiling.

We relive memories
we build dreams
we share laughter
we imagine the future
we commiserate the present.

Separated by continents - by time - it matters not, when

we are tied by the constant sameness of who we are together
even if our thoughts touch only for a brief moment -
before the tides of life pull us onwards.

Inexorably we grow up -
but nothing, it seems,
can make us grow apart.