Author: Chiaski

heart rates and gold

Published by Chiaski

My idea of self-worth has often been defined by superficial things. For the most part, life has been a journey of understanding who I want to be and what I want to be a part of–grasping onto things that make me feel bigger and significant. Everything we live through is fragile and empty and I am daring to do something that would make me feel alive. This is a confession to you. This is part of the footnote, or perhaps the conclusion. This is something intended to be bittersweet, or something like that. This is something you would never read. … I am confident that humanity’s goal is to love and create. When I was a child, all that I could think of was to write. It was disastrous crayon-on-walls and pen-on-arm, but it was something that I was proud of. Happiness was the tangible stain of ink and the feeling of color flourishing through everything–as if wax would compensate for emptiness and loneliness. It was through the sun with shades on the corner and …

Vagrants (dream schools and whatever)

Published by Chiaski

So, I finished my applications. I gave in and dropped one, so my Common Application list only reads (19) instead of that sweet, maximum (20). How did this happen? I told myself after clutching January 1 supplements that I am never, ever going to do that again. I’m going to finish my January 15 ones right away. Did that happen? Of course not. It’s a new year and I cannot remember the last time I’ve arbitrarily assigned something to be a form of renewal. Not new numbers, not clockwork, not time or dates or anything that can be quantified, really. My rebirth is in something far less tangible: in moments of realization while staring at the bedroom ceiling, in showers or the procrastination before one, in long drives home when I can’t fall asleep and instead feel the leather of the car seat tugging and marking my skin when normally it should be numb and I should sleep and drift off and feel nothing until that certain pattern of turns that I just memorize and wake up …

specter .1

Published by Chiaski

Over the weekend, after sulking into an existential abyss of holiday depression (my regularly scheduled Christmas one that just kind of happens because of traumatic incidents that happened in my adolescent, formative years) I got an idea for a game.

EMO COUNTDOWN 2017

Published by Chiaski

Greetings. It is 11PM on a Sunday night and I am dying. Normally this doesn’t happen until about 4AM, which is why it’s quite strange. Here are my top emo songs of the year, not necessarily from the year, but of the year. Get ready to go down and get wild. Your local emo (TRUE EMO NOT FAKE EMO LIKE MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE AND AMERICAN FOOTBALL REAL EMO IS PAGENINETYNINE AND BLABLABLA… kidding) is about to show you what true torment in the form of soundwaves and lyrically-induced existential crisis is all about.

Outside Gate 2.5

Published by Chiaski

Outside Gate 2.5 Here, I am the rich. I, ilk of captive grasslands; interim of conversation and strangers of shared descent. This discomfort will follow – as oxide stains the validity of tonsils, leaked of coarse throat, straining, frugal with desire to be heard. I abuse the story I come from. Here, a gun asks for a namesake. His crippled hips grin of a lawless history, scorned of the 70s. Hands shuffle us inside. Tell us for a moment, we must finally scream for our own selves. I, voiceless for a future, has entanglement clock our sameness, our waning fear of living. Inside, they pick up all our mangled selves, sputtered of wax; and so we become ember, holding onto life again. We become your voice, ascent to fueling the ends of times, like gunshots splayed of freefall towards streets. Here, I am the rich, burdened of word – further, they tell us not to fight again. Further, they say we do not seek them. To this I wonder the requirement of boiling my skin, …

Standardized

Published by Chiaski

I like complaining about this arduous process that I don’t even supposedly have to subject myself to; it’s 1:17 AM and I’m anxiously waiting for it to hit 4:00AM (or 3PM EST) so I can receive my subject test scores. I realize here, that I am consumed by the process in one way or another. The worst part of it all is that I am letting myself be subject to it, and doing nothing but falling deeper and deeper into an endless, self-deprecating mess of numbers, words, and rankings. Here lies a coalesced ramble of feelings about being jammed into numbers, figures — and wondering if there ever really was anything more. Thinking back to the roots of it all, I try to remember why I fight. Like everyone else was, at the age of seven or so — I was meticulously crafted to live for the only guise of praise from only my parents. Their words were the highest honor – and still now, countless people live in the shadow of not receiving that …

Tales from Uzushiogakure

Published by Chiaski

I used to scoff a lot at the fact that I had no binding attachment to some oversaturated series on the market. The engorged entitlement in estranged mothers and fathers bringing home Harry Potter box sets or superhero pop figurines to fulfill their childrens’ temporary obsessions didn’t really compare to my interest in just making things on my own, or my faint interest that lacked that touch of physical satiation — the kind that would let me bring the toys to school and gain some self-confidence with that sweet, unrivaled fifteen minutes of classroom fame. After all, when Lisa Frank and sticker-ridden clearbooks lost their marvel, the only thing that could account for such was that market validation. Then, I remember that I did have something in my youth, actually. Except it falls on the entire premise of being a complete and utter weeaboo. I then remember that at age seventeen, I am literally as captive to it as I was at the age of ten. I can’t help but to bring it up due to the …

on college admissions and capability

Published by Chiaski

The beginning of August sought an issue that I would never have dreamed of going through — or understood the rigor of. Journeying into the US college admissions journey as an international student that only knew of universities like Harvard and Stanford from western TV shows, Legally Blonde, and obscure chick flicks (Sydney White, etc.) is definitely, without a doubt, one of the most stimulating challenges I’ve faced thus far. As shallow as that may sound, being thrusted into a season with the potential for the entire course of your life to change is exhilerating, frightening, and quite frankly, nerve-wracking. Last week kind of marked the beginning of literally nightly existential crises — of which I deeply apologize to all my friends for having to witness, as well as my organization mates, and slowly but surely, everyone around me as well — like the dawn of the end. I still have dreams; the kind where I picture myself in full-fledged comfort, where ambition is synonymous to reality and all the ideas I have can be made in …

overachiever fever

Published by Chiaski

I am sinking my guts as fervently as I feel the pen sliding across my throat, twisting my organs, slithering across a paper of items I do not understand. My mind flashes back to every single failure that we have ever sung. Every lapse of ungreatness and unfulfilled fervor is a crime to humanity. An unabiding dishonor of traipse for the ones who carry my name to lament. This is a foul cry for the ones who do not deserve to do so — whittled down to self-depreciation at the instant. Wherever it started, whatever had happened — they’ve all clung to this despondent nothingness. A melancholia for the person that I had never been, not once a sign of forgiveness for the person that I could be. We are destined, intertwined, by faith and numbers and chance and cash and time and lovers and passion and spirit and uncountable things that remain out of our control; as we are destined by faith to crash and die. My fondest memories from my childhood were not …

—is it not the death of a firefly

Published by Chiaski

A story about a funeral in the dead of the summer. With the relapse of summer on its idyllic deathbed, I once again draw nothing with the close. It is the same feeling that follows me with every untimely visit to living mortuaries in the outskirts of city, bordered by red district lights and the wick of laden candles. Where concrete becomes an overture to a short-lived piece that we drag on and on.