Far (Hope)

I don't know what kind of personality I have - though a very good friend of mine told me recently that I tend to pursue an eccentric tangent of thought and behavior which tends to border on the strange (and sometimes annoying!). I have characteristic pitfalls such as these embedded into my person, like scars. I become envious when I see groups and couples flit past, their voices closing over my ears though they are far gone. I am envious of their shared happiness that seems like a tacit chide against my solitude. I often find myself walking around town alone after lectures or tutorials. I take my favorite path: the riverside trail stretching up the hillside toward the Bailey. But, for the most part, I'm alone in enjoying its beauty. There's no-one beside me whenever I look over my shoulder. All my family and friends are oceans away from me. I don't expect one of the extremely few good friends I have (who's also my flat-mate) to always be with me whenever I break down - there must come a degree of islanded separation between people; it is irrational and violently misanthropic to expect someone else to be at your beck and call. Everyone has their own time, their own lives to get on with. What's stopping me, then? Why do the scars I carry often bloom into dying slabs of flesh? Why can't I grow up?

I catch the sheer wave of it all washing over me - I'm alone in a country where I have to account for my independence. I am my own taskmaster, my own guide. I have to navigate singly along an incessant learning curve wherein I discover the most displeasing facets of who I am. Everyone I know back home are a single phone call away - but the time-zones seem so strikingly vast. I'm awake when my parents are asleep. And they have their own commitments and constraints of which I am entirely oblivious. Distance often appears to be both a liberator, and a destroyer. Perhaps I am now enduring this pain due to how immense I feel the same afflicted freedom to be.

The sense of an over-arching necessity to be conscious has overtaken me. - Worrying about student housing for second year, going through the motions of applying to a myriad of part-time jobs, feeling out of place in the dining hall when others are already thriving within their morphing friend circles. Thoughts of how I'm going to sustain myself during and beyond my undergraduate studies here inundate me to the point when I lose control of my emotions. My flat-mate admirably covers her first-year accommodation costs through her part-time income. I can't help but be in awe, and also be estranged. Can I ever truly be capable of doing something like that?

Perhaps I simply am underestimating myself, since I lack complete self-knowledge. Or perhaps I am proleptically revealing to myself a whole new world of unknown struggle. I knew that from the beginning while I was applying to universities in the UK. The fear and anxiety I experience are sacrifices I have to make for a greater advantage. But what precisely is this benefit - satisfaction? self-fulfillment? or is its nature and form still yet to be realized?

I nowadays see that I ask myself more questions than securing legitimate answers: Where am I going? Where do I want to be? The desire for answers is probably an illusion we entertain for our instinct of self-preservation. Sometimes, the enormity of my intrinsic loneliness steals within like a secret paralysis. I am most happy when I am alone, then contrarily do I find myself out: I am not fully at peace with my solitude. A dispassionate pathogen writhes inside me from time to time. The scars I possess never thaw out. Being so desperately distanced from familiarity, I inwardly recoil into an apparently evanescent despair. But it runs deep. - Turning its abstractions away from the darkness to light when I least expect it.

Only time will tell if it heals itself. I hope it will. It will. We alone change ourselves - but it is done together.

---