Sheep

1…2…3…

All to myself. I used to love it when the house was this way. Empty, quiet, and free to do whatever I wanted. For a couple hours the entire house was my domain. But now I miss when there was the incessant sounds of some personality echoing from downstairs. I miss smell of her cooking. I miss her chopping away, sauteing, frying, and baking. I’ll never taste it again.

4…5…6…

I cooked with her rarely. There were only a few times that the urge would hit me, but I would try to learn. And then relearn. The last thing we cooked together was an Oyakodon, which literally means “parent and child” donburi. There was no chicken though, so we used a can of tuna instead. It was simple and tasty but a little salty. One of the last things she wanted to eat, as I could remember.

7…8…9…

I tried to cook it again. I used the same stove top. This time there was some left over chicken from last night. It wasn’t the same. Too watery, too salty. The eggs were overcooked. The chicken was soggy. It wasn’t the same and it never would be. I would never eat like when she used to cook. That only remains in some foggy depth of my memories when I didn’t care and is smudged by arrogance and ungratefulness.

I threw it in the trash.

10…11..12…
He came home with take out last week from a restaurant that I’ve been going to since I was a kid. I knew the chef and loved his cooking. There was condensation on the ceilings of the styrofoam boxes that dripped onto the food. It was hambagu, a Japanese style patty with sauce on it. I haven’t eaten this in a while. I can’t remember the last time I ate this, but I guess that’s the same with everything else.

It was good like his food always was. But it wasn’t the same and this was when I realized it never would be.

13…14…15…

After the ceremony earlier this month, people gave me words of encouragement and condolence. Some people said to me that she was glad that this happened when it did because I was an adult now. She was glad I was off to a nice college and a great future lay ahead of me.

I can’t even buy myself a beer.
“An adult.”

16..17…18…

Every summer since high school my fingers felt this way. They’re stiff and rigid. Slowly becoming petrified from idleness. There’s so much time for my mind to go over myself. I feel every fold on my body. My joints become rusted. I can feel my churning and slowing down because there’s no reason to be ready. My eyes drooping, not even the energy to keep them open. My brain waiting to go unconscious again. My muscles are eating themselves.

19…20…21…

I do these once I wake up so my brain can lie to itself. You’re doing something productive. Maybe. At least it feels like something. My joints pop and squeak. I breathe with a purpose for half a minute. I count until I can stop and give up.

22…23…24…

What do I do in the after? What do other people feel when this happens. Am I supposed to walk through the house and wonder what she would think of me if she saw me now. Do other people feel compelled to better themselves? I only feel compelled to feel guilty about myself. Nothing has changed, but nothing is the same.

25…26…27….

There’s a herd of sheep on the hill that faces my window. I hear them crying. I can hear them chewing. Sauntering across the hill and slowly eating the brown grass away. Walking from one spot to the next as if they will never be full. I wonder how it tastes to them. I wonder if they’re enjoying themselves. I hope they are.

28…29…30…

Every evening, because I rarely leave the house, I see a black sedan pull up to the curb near my house. The car is an unremarkable workhorse that’s burnt its share of fossils and spent countless days baking in the sun. A tall Asian guy maybe in his twenties, old enough to need a job but young enough to just be dicking around, drives it. He always glances up towards my window. He sees me. I see him. Then he walks into house across from mine. I wonder if he knows. I know nothing about him. Why would he know more about me?

41…42…43…

Almost done.

This is the hallway that was flooded by an exploded sink. She spent days trying to dry everything out. To try to get everything the way that it was before. Whenever I came home for about a month she would be sucking the water out of the carpet with an industrial sized vacuum cleaner.
I just see the feint yellow border of where the water was now.

44…45…46.

One more than yesterday.
What to do now. Fix myself something to eat. Wash some dishes.

I wonder if if there’s somewhere I can get something to drink tonight.

Year One

A year and 13 days later comes this entry from the last time I've written. Reading through my older posts is a strange feeling. A portal into a time that has passed with fleeting passions, thoughts, and emotions. Like looking at a complete stranger, but at the same time knowing exactly who that person is. And, for some reason, it was frightening to see that person again. I could hardly bear to read every single word that person had written and as I went further I could only skim. I wonder why that is. Maybe as a person that had just graduated from high school and was about to enter the wondrous world of university it is frightening to remember that person brimming, relatively, with ambition and bucking up for a ever better freedom. But now, a year and couple days later, that person has been, essentially, crushed. Everything that he thought was going to come from college just didn't quite pan out the way that he had hoped that it would and every fear that he had was pretty much realized. And instead of rising from the rubble and ruins I find myself pretty much in the same place that I was back then. In my room, at my house, in Chino Hills, and up till the late hours of the morning like I used to do. What little hope that person had, I feel, is gone now.

But I suppose, like I said I haven't done so far, I should get up and get my life together in some semblance of order and direction. And I feel that by this point in the summer my need for being lazy has run it's course and now I'm just feeling my life wasting away. Time to stand and do something. And maybe, for once in my life, something for myself. Something that I want to learn or do because I want to do it. To what extent that will be, I don't know, but something substantial I hope. But that's exactly the kind of talk that I need to step away from. I hope, I will, I could, I would, I think, and move onto I do. Getting myself to exercise daily has been a step in the right direction (really trying not to say "I think" here). People talk of the epiphany they receive when running the daily course of their life and discovering something amazing or waking up one morning to realize that life is beautiful or some other trite poppycock of the sort but that isn't for everyone, I presume. I reckon it's about time to be my own epiphany. Hard that.

By now I wonder if I should even attempt to comb through the first year of college and figure out what were the most important and life changing parts. Hard to say since it's only been a couple years since that has officially passed. I'm not sure that it's been a year of self-discovery and what-have-you that most people tend to play up but maybe somewhere down the line I'll realize that it was. Or not. The latter seems to be the case usually. So I'll just skip that. Things that stick out the most:
-Pledging
-"Have you ever thought that you just aren't that interested in academics as you thought you were?"
-College is far from a place where I find who I am, where I'm going, or any of those other things that people tend to suggest and instead I find myself lost more than ever with my life.
-Alcohol, you wily devil
-Passive Aggressive
-Maybe I should have gone to a college further from home.
-People are just plain mean, people can be nice, and some people put on the masks of one or the other.
-Jesus, so much writing that just isn't fun.

Some of those things listed right there are pretty generic things to say about life in general and I'm sure I have or could have said those things in the past but it just seems to stick out in my mind particularly right now.

I'm not quite sure where all this leaves me. Somewhere between expected and hoped to high heaven that I wouldn't be where I am now but water under the bridge now. Nothing to do but to take it in stride. Something to keep in my for next time:

-Writing Creatively

At this point I figure no one will read this and if you, lucky reader, do then have fun. Or something. The internet has moved on from this relic to tweets, tumblrs, stumblrs, facebooklrs, googl+lrs, and whatever else. The old way of communicating updates to this blog through AIM is even dead now seeing has how people have moved onto other IM clients, Macs, and AIM itself has effectively killed profiles as I knew them. So much has changed and at the same time hasn't. And now I use Winamp, go figure.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."