The older I grow, the more I notice how most people don’t care about other people until their world is falling apart or in an hour of extreme boredom, both of which tend to arise with haste when you do not have others in your mind when you live. That, and art. Most people look for other people and art—an extension of other people—when they don’t have much else to hold on to. It is a sad state of affairs, and I can sit and lament over this and that is often the only course of action for things out of our hands. But not being able to do much for a thing does not make it untrue. It only means you cannot do anything about it. While this thought has overstayed its welcome, I will direct my attention elsewhere in the spirit of that last sentence, so I will think of this year and its beginning.
The beginning of this year has not been as smooth as I had imagined or what I had come to expect. Expectation—what a peril, what a pain, what a thorn in my foot. When I say not as smooth, there is a comparison in my mind. Like how they say that a solitary number means nothing unless you have another to compare it to, I have been ruthlessly comparing this year with the last. At least, I have played with this thought in my mind. Where last year began with a stupendous zeal to begin anew, this year has already started with an urge to protect, and with the idea of protection, comes the fear of failing at it. When I was younger, I read somewhere: when you have something, you have something to lose.
I believe this beginning in a January when it failed to rain in the city and snow in the hills for the better part of it, where things are precisely as they were in December by design, where like my apartment, everything is in its right place at all times, I feel a mild anxiety I had not felt in a long time.
In this beginning, I fear change. It has been years since I have felt this, but that is not what scares me. What scares me is that the tendency of life is to change. To know this and still want to protect what you have is a fallacy. This is a beginning of dissonance, but here, I sit outside my life, en garde.
Once again, my fallible humanity has gotten the better of me.