thoughts Archives

october’s series of trailing thoughts

October 12, 2019 by Chia Amisola

Alone on the New Haven green at 4AM on a Sunday morning. In this moment of time I wonder why I am and all I ever will be. I wonder what it must feel like to be rich and have the ability to throw everything away into a sabbatical, pray myself a meaning. I’ve been praying for sixteen years and it brought me nowhere. What does it feel like to have everything and want to reduce yourself to nothing? What must it feel like to have the liberty of finding yourself and doing the right thing when you have the liberty of freedom and choice? __ Finished two midterms. Thinking ridiculously deeply about the bigger picture: what I’m working for, why I’m here. How much time is left there? I can’t say I’m alone — I never really am. The whole world is there with me, but I haven’t been with it. Reading about protests in Hong Kong. The LRT on fire. Figuring out how I can structure words better after I think about code all day. Thinking about fucking pre-incrementing pointers to pointers and the shifting of papers and how I was sitting in a lecture hall amidst flasks and hoodies thinking only about the fire and the fire and the time I was losing. This is not right. When do I get to be in this space of learning? Nowhere else — but so am I deeply enclosed in thinking about hypotheticals and bubbles. Maybe this is just crisis because I’ve been looped out of school for weeks and I don’t have a job. Maybe this is just crisis because I’ve touched upon so many of these things in this world and I have no desire to do any of them. Remembering everything vividly. The two-hour bus ride home, leaning and falling into the empty aisle in front of everyone. That smile dog picture that I accidentally opened in a forum post when I was 9. My self-harm keloids that still won’t fucking fade. About who I will die with matters upon every conversation I’m in. The mascara that accidentally got on my eyelids. My professor telling me I look like I’m so fucking tired with eyes of pity and the other who talks to me like an old friend. Revealing my traumas in English class and never crying for an entire semester. The spreadsheet I open inMore?

Love as repetition

February 6, 2019 by Chia Amisola

Incomplete, last update: 2/6/2019 11:44AM How do I tell you that I think I fell in love with someone on Skype. Their screen name revived by the spam message I accidentally sent, everything unanswered and rewinded. Like I spent my teen years thinking I was better because I lived in another world in my room, listening to 8tracks playlists by all my past lovers. I closed my eyes and listened to the Ending of Dramamine. My hair is the longest it’s been in years. We bleached it thrice but I couldn’t get it to gray. It’s the darkest and thickest it’s been in years. I wanted so badly to make it wither and gray, anything but how it looked then. Did anyone ever send you a death threat in BBCode? Or maybe the war we started in phpBB. No amount of trying to get myself to like what you love will fix this. Do you wonder what you would be like if you were a kinder person? Not anything amped up, just kinder. Forgivable in every sense of the word. Looking at myself in the mirror with my skin tearing red and my body defeated and slump into the corner of the room to push my body against and against the force of gravity and against and against everything you ever thought of me and I can see the bones on my neck again and I wonder why I hadn’t done this sooner. I cried the most when I lost all the dreams I wrote down on my Notes app. I think I had over a hundred there. (I am driving the car and you know I told you I would never drive except for this.)

Newfound Interest in Snowstorms

February 3, 2019 by Chia Amisola

I became a girl alive three weeks into class. Even before I left Manila, I fell into this annual sick mess. Like when you can’t breathe you pray to just remember something you have had for your whole life, over and over and over, with every little glimpse at having that again being some cruel joke until it subsides and you think nothing of it. I am so sick I could die. I am so sick I could wait and wait to be okay again and endure it all. The first two weeks or so at Yale (and many, many other colleges in America) are an add/drop period, they call it shopping period here. Your classes aren’t finalized until the period finishes but you have to keep up with all the work for all the classes you choose to attend. Being sick and walking around campus with your head spinning and holding back the urge to start coughing out one’s guts for 5 minutes straight is quite possibly my worst experience here so far. The time my mental state lets me go is where my body fails me, and it’s like 2019’s opening trick on me. But it’s okay. Homesickness usually kicks in around the second semester of your freshman year. You are apparently too busy going around and getting overwhelmed with everything that college freedom has to offer, but I spent much of the Fall doing nothing. I’m starting to get these periods where I wake up in the middle of the morning (I try to sleep at least 6 hours a day now) in a panic, remembering fragments from the dream I just left and then thinking–thinking about the most inane of things. My mind often goes to the fact that I am here. That this was what I was thinking about a year ago, waking up wondering if I would wake up here. Past me must be so disappointed that I’m spending Friday night walking back to my dorm at 10:30PM combing through my Letterboxd “to watch” list to see what my plans for the rest of the night are. Last night I was thinking about my homesickness. I’ve told so many people that I feel this immense sense of regret (that is completely irrational) about being away because I am no longer really part of the country. The moments where I get to speak a fullMore?