like one, two, three, start afresh

Today my brother officially moved into his house. Though it's not moving in, exactly, since he's still going to be living at home because it's closer to work. In any case, his house is now officially fit to live in. If you discount the noticeable lack of any kind of furniture. It's stocked with his clothes and toiletries and kitchen utensils and cutlery and non-perishable foods though. I'm not really sure why we had to spend the entire day there though. After my mother did some incomprehensible Chinese ritual, we carted everything inside. 

I am clearly not cut out to ever try to assemble anything, even when given written directions. Instead, I got relegated to washing and putting things away. There really wasn't a lot to do and I spent the better part of the afternoon just lying on the floor on my phone, writing, and then napping when I got cold. Since it's a new developmental area the reception, and the 3G, is sketchy at best so there wasn't a whole lot I could really do. 

I'm not really sure what he's going to do with the house now though. I guess eventually it'll go up for rent? I can't imagine any of us moving in there, since it's a good 40-45 minute drive out of the city. I really like the set up of the house though, particularly the open kitchen-living-dining area. We're still working on the backyard though - it still needs to be paved and grassed and fenced off. The surrounding area is really nice too! There's a playground and a walking circuit just out the back, and the shopping centre is only about 15 minutes walk away. 

I don't really think of my brother as old, or even that much older than me, in any sense. That he actually owns a house now is sort of an odd thing to think about. It's like he should be in a steady relationship and preparing to get married or something like that. 

departures

Part of graduations is the significance that you're done with this part of your life. It hurts to think about, even if you're not the one who is graduating. Watching the people you know graduate just hones in the fact that there's only a limited time left.

You know that one day the person graduating is going to be you, and you're going to have to wake up and look around and tell yourself that you're really not a child any more. That you have to start thinking about other things, prioritise, that you can't just sit around and let blissful waves of a fantasy world wash over you any more. People disappear from that world you created together, replaced by new ones that you don't know. People leave and move on and disappear, leaving virtually nothing behind. And one of these days, that's going to be you. You just won't be able to afford that world any more, time-wise, money-wise, emotion-wise.

Sometimes, there are people who are fortunate enough to have a few people who will carry that world forward for a few years, to be able to indulge in with the people they know who are in the same situation, unwilling to let go. But it isn't, it won't be long before you feel an overwhelming wave of patheticness. And that's the last thing you want to feel or to call others. But the problem is that there is no support out there in the world of "I need to find a career".

A career. A family, perhaps. A life outside that little bubble that you managed to encapsulate yourself in. A life that other people will approve of. Because while you were so busy not caring about what people thought when we had the beautiful, dorky, amazing parts of our fantasy world, they moved on without us.

And life afterwards can get very, very lonely.

In life afterwards, you feel like you've lost some of your best friends. In a way, everything in that world was your best friend - always smiling at you, encouraging you, doing silly things with and for you, telling you they love you; you spent all your time in the world together, even if sometimes it all made you cry. And then it's gone and you only have a few people left who understand, and you have to go through the jarring transition together, holding on for, and onto, dear life.

You have to make that transition from your fantasy world and all the happiness that came from it to everything else. Everything real. Everything that isn't what you spent all your waking time on for the past however many years. It felt like forever, but it wasn't.

Sometimes, you hate that you ever found that world. Because even though it made you so indescribably happy, you know that leaving it will hurt so much more, will be so much worse, so much more sad and painful than it was happy. Is that world, has that world been, will that world be worth it? Sometimes, you don't know. When you think about it, you're not sure that you will always be able to say that, "Yes, it was worth it."

All you can do is wait to find out.

would you lend me some of your time?

After a prolonged period of time away from a certain group of people, I always overestimate my ability to socialise with them. Either that, or I somehow seem to convince myself that I was better friends with them than I was, and that they will actually make concerted efforts to talk to me and include me in the conversation. It's kind of a vicious cycle, wherein everyone else seems to have fun and I am left feeling stupid and ridiculous for ever entertaining the notion that people actually enjoy my company.

The thing is, I value everyone that has passed through my life, regardless of how fleeting. Unless you've done something monumentally stupid to make me dislike, I usually think of you fondly and will want to go out of my way to see you and talk to you and find out how your life has been, provided there's been a suitable amount of time since the last time I happened to go out or run into you. Except that, of course, not everyone feels like this. Particularly when they're closer to everyone else who is not you and happens to be in attendance.

It's a little disappointing to go to an event and end up talking to less than half the attendees. I guess it could have been worse. At least H didn't really know anyone else there either, so once she arrived I almost exclusively talked to her. Out of all the others who attended, the only one I semi-regularly speak to was S, and that only because we share a unit together this semester. It got slightly better once we sat down for dinner though, if only by virtue of the fact that everyone concentrates at least a little more on eating than on talking.

The food was delicious and it was a lovely place to be, I have to give N that. We booked out the back room, and ended up re-arranging the tables to make it a little easier to talk. There was also a man stationed in the alcove singing intermittenly during the night. If I'm remembering correctly, there were pasta dishes with chips, salad and calamari rings for starters; a steak dish or chicken parmigiana alternated as the main, while dessert was vanilla ice cream, blueberry and marshmallow pizza and nutella spread between toasted pita. There was also ice cream birthday cake!

It was a pretty subdued affair on my end, although I suppose some of the others would beg to differ. It was pretty fun to see M and V interacting with the children who kept running through the room, anyway. I've always been the type to sit back and let everything happen around me though; provided others are enjoying themselves, I can sort of forget how excluded I am. That sounds pretty bad, but it doesn't upset me that much, I think. Most of the time, I just watch and think about all the different ways I could write this slice of life. I still ended up staying longer than originally planned, if only because I always feel guilty on skipping out on birthdays before cake, even if I know it's not my fault. Living a ridiculous distance from everyone else has its distinct disadvantages.

I enjoyed being able to see everyone who attended (V, M, J, L, I, S, H, N, A, D, T, are all that I can remember though) even if I didn't talk to most of them. It was a nice reminder of a time of the past.

fuck fuck fuck and more fuck

There are an endless amount of things to do and not enough time to do them all in because I can't get started until I get over this emotional issue. All I want to do is curl up in bed or throw a tantrum, though that would not be productive at all and would only serve to make me even more frustrated.

I haven't failed anything since first year and I don't plan on doing it again. There's so much going wrong though, I don't know where to begin or what to do. I hate technology, I hate group assignments, I hate things being unclear, I hate not being able to find the time to even take care of my body - I hate these health problems, I hate you drawing attention to my lack of participation, I hate writing, I hate not being able to write, I hate not being able to see you, I hate you not contacting me, I hate not accomplishing things that I was supposed to do

I'm so fucking stressed and tired and just plain unhappy. And it just makes me so fucking frustrated and makes me want to cry. Or at least use the word 'fuck' a lot. I fucking hate that you think it's okay to just fucking not show up and leave me in the lurch with a flimsy as fuck excuse, then have the fucking nerve to just defer a semester and not even fucking bother to tell me about it for two fucking weeks and fuck me over for an assessment. I fucking hate that you're shoving this part onto me when I'm clearly the weakest of our six. I fucking hate that we're not doing shit until the last minute, that we're changing shit up in the fucking two days before the due date. I don't fucking care that it's not even worth all that much, I fucking care because doing this shit requires time and effort that I really don't fucking have right now, especially when you all fucking know about how I can barely even fucking sleep anymore.

Fuck uni, fuck you all, fuck all of this shit.

This is so fucking unfair, I just want it to all be fixed or over and done with. I just want to not fucking feel this way, like there's no fucking end in sight, like I'm helpless and strained end to end and under so much pressure to live up to expectations. I just want everything and, at this point, everyone, to go the fuck away so that I can fucking deal with my life again.

I hate feeling like everything is so fucking out of control and that I'm fucking up my entire life.