October 23rd 2012

You tried to read a book but your fat belly bulge distracts you with its rolls. For a couple of days, you were doing well. No pb, no starch on its own, yogurt & fruits. But you've run out, like this pen. Full of potential but horrible in execution. You want results too fast, and when you see none, you get discouraged. Or, when you succeed a little, you get overconfident & give yourself a break. Then you fall, like Sisyphus, staring in store windows the reflection of your fat arms, thick thighs, the sad bloating in your face. Your own disappointment is enough to turn everyone's attention to your body, or so you think.

So, this is what a continuously failing diet feels like. Sitting in a park writing in your sad journal with your sad pen, lingering of memories of your sad non relationship. You admit now you have no self-control, that life will be filled with these disappointments, caused by your own lack of will power, forever just so--mediocre in your own self-esteem. In the middle of a park of immigrants with their poor lunch foods you see yourself, eating from a bag of chocolate animal crackers, or pb-filled pretzels, or gluten-free chips bought at the penny store. Everyone gets by in their own unfeeling sadness.

You've started to take up your own guilty-feelings in an attempt to expose yourself and correct yourself--a verbal/visual mirror of sorts to guide you from your cycle of same-but-different mistakes. But here it is--everything you do is temporary, unsustained + by nature unsustainable. You need outside powers to dictate over you, give you a schedule, a diet, a jail. In restrictions you find freedom, and in liberty you find your own prison. The fact is that you were born to be discontent. It simply feels better when you can pin the source of your discontentment on someone else. 

It is not your fault, it is your parents' for having birthed you. It is not your fault, it is theirs for having brought you here, for raising you up as a foreigner in both lands, it is the fault of your friend with the eating disorder whom you tried to help, it is unrealistic social ideals & too-high personal expectations bred by the media. But, here, now, it is what it is.

And here, now, seeking shelter from the rain, you ride the subway just to avoid reality. You look at your reflection in the train window and notice your face again, and it makes you look away. You adjust your hair, but it hardly makes a difference. This is what you are. This is who you are. And this is what you display to others: the face of discontent and self-disgust.

It would be better if you can ride the subway on reality continuously--which is what some people do, to varying degrees. But it is hard when the reality you are trying to escape is yourself. This is who you are: You are constant dissatisfaction. You are self-hate. You are seasoned with love in the good breaks in between a long, neverending bad day. It is hard to go to sleep for too long because you constantly worry about how it would feel to wake up again into the day. Rest turns into more time to be occupied by anxiety and dread and sad looks at your reflections. Puffy clouds soothe you momentarily with their peaceful slow and quiet commitment to life, until you are reminded of where you are--on the ground, with cars, people, buildings, your self, all subjects of wear and tear, visible aging, visible injuries, visible time.

It's time to take the other train back to where you started now. The platform is filled with other waiters. You watch them, to escape yourself.

Why do you want to be skinny anyway? For him, for him to love you still, to not disappoint him, to keep him into you, so you can have him and belong to him, to be kept in that warm adoring prison--all subject to change. Over which you have no control. You have no control. You have only the chance to stay in this prison until you are ousted yet again into your own liberation, prison--colder, more alone. You are lucky to have been admitted in, but it is not up to you to stay forever. Try. You can try to stay. But if you can't stay, know that you weren't meant to stay--the system turns, the light changes, the pedestrians walk, even if they've no idea where they're going. 

You, in the subway car, going nowhere in the end, but riding from point A to return to point A just to escape the rain for the meantime. You could've sat on a platform bench, too, but you chose to be moved back and forth. To be part of the noise of the train coming in and out of the station rather than observer of the noise. It is more comforting to be inside of chaos and blind to it than to be outside and powerless to stop it. You wonder why you don't do this more often.

You see a picture you want to take but you don't take it. You feel the regret coming but you see already the salvation of forgetfulness. What you might give for complete forgetfulness--and what you wouldn't for repeating your choices. The eternal cycles of defeat by your own hand, the only hand you have.