The beginning part is always the hardest part

Monday evening. It was raining outside and I was sipping coffee at a Starbucks outlet down town. As I was trying to write a story about Monday evenings, I soon began to notice the light from my computer screen being reflected on my fingernails, and I realized, hey, why have I never written anything about my fingernails? The bizarre realization fascinated me, and so I started writing about them in descriptive fashion. Like, for instance, how my nails grow so fast I always have to carry with me a nail clipper everywhere I go, or how tiny soil particles get caught underneath them whenever I was bullied and pushed to the ground back in elementary school. Or how I try to maintain their lengthwise measurement to a specific one so that I could scratch myself whenever I feel itchy somewhere.

I sipped some more coffee and I suddenly became conscious of how much I’ve wasted my time writing about them. I was already five pages back-to-back writing about them and there was no progress and nothing more exciting to write. The whole aspiring writer writing in a coffeehouse attempt suddenly became a painfully monotonous and uninspired sideline profession and before I knew it, I’d already dunked the paper into the now empty cup of coffee. I grabbed my suitcase and fiddled with the security code until the lock snapped open and revealed a week’s worth of numbers to key into the machine. Oh, the mediocre joys of a permanent job.

Got myself another cup of coffee.

Might as well fall in

I don’t know about my dreams.
I don’t know about my dreamin anymore.
All that I know is
I’m fallin, fallin, fallin, fallin.
Might as well fall in.

I don’t know about my love.
I don’t know about my lovin anymore.
All that I know is
I’m fallin, fallin, fallin, fallin.
Might as well fall in.

I don’t know about my dreams.
I don’t know about my dreamin anymore.
All that I know is
I’m fallin, fallin, fallin, fallin.
Fallin.

I don’t know about my love.
I don’t know about my lovin anymore.
All that I know is
I’m lovin, fallin, lovin, lovin.
Might as well love you.

The vicious cycle of good and bad

It almost seems that our lives are constantly subjected to balances and checks, our troughs and peaks flattened out into fine lines that stretch horizontally, irrevocably with time. It is as if there are invisible forces of nature that can sense an imbalance of sorts in our lives, fixing them by chronologically cancelling out their effects with their reciprocals, deliberately establishing a highly deterministic universe where probabilities do not and cannot work.

Good and evil, black and white, push and pull, question and answer, dead and alive. Like two sides of the same coin, the choices are limited, so much so that even if you favour one over the other, a part of your existence will inevitably gravitate towards the other side of the coin. As such, dualism appears to be an inseparable thread of life. Under such an assumption, that life cannot explicitly be either happy or sad is almost a violation of nature’s design. That a beautiful woman cannot have the intelligence of equal calibre, for it is a physical and moral transgression to have the best of both worlds. When something good happens, a bad event is almost certainly inevitable. It is as if dualism was the only structural framework of life that can exist, and so absolutely nothing else in between the two extremes could be perceived, let alone materialized. There is no spectrum, no variation, just pure opposites, which happen on an alternating fashion.

But it is during moments like this – when one good thing is immediately followed by a bad one, and becomes a cycle so vicious that it inevitably erodes a person’s sense of hope and faith – that one begins to commit the grave mistake of conflating causation and correlation, and start sliding down the obscured path between reality and make-believe, where dreams and realities transfuse into a poisonous blood that seeps through the deepest trenches of the human mind, heart, body and soul.