Author: Chiaski

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.

compendium on prose

Published by Chiaski

I thrive on writing. It’s freeing, and it feels as if that since the very beginning, my imagination has been running on the spill of punctuation and the doting tilde of analogies and similes. Coming more naturally to me than anything else and a forever love despite not being the most avid reader; I’ve taken it upon me to push forward with this mess. An angsty teenager with a pen and the Goodreads quote section for Chuck Palahniuk or the HelloPoetry collective of Allen Ginsberg is recipe for crisis. So, I published a chapbook that contains a collection of my poetry and am in process of continuing a winter novel that has become so much more than I initially anticipated. Read more to find out about them, and stuff.

on savior complexes and self-genesis

Published by Chiaski

Like a crash course on reversal, this is my story. A year has changed me in so many ways, and the years ahead of me (whatever may be left) become figures to ponder. I wonder what has kept me going, but a better wonder is to seek how I have begun this trailblazing journey that seeks infinity. Slowly, I get left behind and come in once again, on a rapid blizzard, a perverse blind game to becoming names on paper. This is a summer reflection on the person that I had become, and the person that I will be. Divulging everything out in little blog posts that no one reads but me in the dead of server malfunctions and better-forgotten nights. And god, indeed — have I changed, have I become so many new people and learned that the world is kind of my plaything. And god, what a living ghost will I rise from as I transcend so ethereal that you won’t know how real everything I will become dares to be. So to …

this blur that had become our lives #1

Published by Chiaski

Approaching the inevitable dull of the summer, I find that I am losing reason and meaning in everything. You can tell by how I have resorted to writing once more. This is the cascade of sorrow, of drunken days toasting forgotten sobriety, cloud nine high at the glimpse of yourself in the mirror, morning sunlight fights against the dusty carpet with the shadows, husks, and living dolls strolling around your home. This is the rekindling of my god complex; an earnest screech of life tracks against the drone of forestscapes, an avalanche of the world that surrounds me — a girl in the dead of the night playing games with her fatigue and mental instability looking back and recounting the months that had passed. In other terms: this is the most that I had ever done. I live a haze, a beautiful, distorted, warped reach towards so many things that I label off as driven and passionate — learning how to speak (figuring out that I actually quite like it), still figuring out how to …

damsel of the craters

Published by Chiaski

A living ghost is a moment’s grasp from the underworld. Sheathed in writhing emptiness; an abyss that everyone has made of her along with white lace, intertwined dandelions on the holes and darts (the only remnants of the love that she once bound). The dead cannot love — it is upon the cataract time-stop beat, the drawl of the flat-line and the rapid walk unto the “bad wing”. She is the reason why her dying breaths consisted of “keep loving” — why the paper airplanes she folded with bone poking out of skin were etched with “keep living,” why she was smiling, pursed lips and all, your softness against her own. An old discman next to water-filled speakers like a joke against the revolution of technology. During those final hours where she played music and spun brittle yarn emerging from her throes. I danced with the daughter of the moon on the infinity evening of a Tuesday night. She counted down, like an old grandfather clock — the continuum ring until a new inception. We were ethereal …