Home Sweet Home

Coming back to the house itself is pleasant, I suppose. The bed here is the most comfortable one I own, and the space in which I can laze about extends beyond the door, to the outside where there's overgrown grass and wet soil. But in my eyes, the mopped tiles and replaced bulbs are signs of aging, where loneliness is disguised as a presentable home.

A house may be presentable and that might as well be called a home. What is the difference? As long as its front is welcoming enough, it would turn into a home eventually.

Someone I used to talk to once shared with me his frustration of being surrounded by people incapable of thought, those shallow beings whose minds do not wander beyond the here and now. I want to let you know that I finally felt it, that frustration. Whether or not a sardine thinks like one is of no interest to me, and it can indulge in its simplistic musings until it dies a satisfied death, but when such a sardine goes out of its way to confront me, ridicule my unconventional temperament based on its own judgement, I have no choice but to acknowledge it. After 21 years of life, I've finally accepted the fact that people, a whole lot of them, have terrible insight.

You can beat me, rape me, then rip it out of your memory because you're a creature of the present and nothing else, but unfortunately for us all, my reclusive development created a broader mind, a whole new world which could take me in when the real one refused. And in there, time isn't measured by the ticking of a clock, the changes in minutes and hours, or even days. So I see what had been, what is, and what will be.

How long more do you think we can all be like this together?

Personally, I dread family gatherings. I can barely recall one where I am happy. All of you act if you cherish this time, and maybe you do, but it takes a special occasion for you to do so, doesn't it? What about waking and sleeping from day to day without even seeing each other in the eye? We don't have long together, right, then why don't you put down your fucking phone? Remember the dinner yesterday, where we had to wait for our food for more than 30 minutes and all the tables around us, the families and friends that were gathered, they held actual conversations. Our table, silent. I looked at all three of you, then up at the sky, and at the neon sign of an old hotel I couldn't locate. Suddenly, I miss our mother, whose overbearing goodwill is the only nourishment for our waning bonds.

Ah, disappointment is in the air. I am a selfish being who underestimates my own worth. Then again, nobody reassures me otherwise. Before I come to defend myself, I've already given up. I have never been taught how to speak to properly.