Month: June 2018

23bd

This year really passed by too quickly. It scares me so much how quickly time flies by.

When in the midst of things and with a crowd of people around, it’s usually easier to just suppress emotions without any problem. Almost doesn’t feel like I’m leaving sometimes because the act of departing is not being carried out instantaneously.

But it’s getting harder and harder to feel comforted by the thought of going home and returning to my room where I would have to be alone and deal with the suppressed thoughts and feelings clamouring to be heard the moment I close the door and severe any communication with the external world. I’ve said too many permanent goodbyes within this week alone but it doesn’t get any better each time.

But this isn’t supposed to be a post about leaving. It’s a post about my gratitude for the people I have met and gotten to know here for the past three years, how they all turned up to celebrate my turning older by a year yesterday with an outdoor barbecue. It’s also a post about my gratitude for all my friends and family, in Manchester or not, who had remembered and sent me well wishes on my special day. It’s a post about my gratitude for being alive in this enigmatic but ultimately wondrous world for 23 whole years, and for being loved by so many.

Thank you everyone, I love all of you.

my reflection in the window in front of me is a black mirror

when it’s late at night, and there’s almost a sense of deafening silence piercing the stagnant air like needle-like icebergs, or maybe iceberg-like needles. there’s a lull in the air that makes me feel detached from my surroundings in a disturbing way, like i could be the only soul existing in this humming astral plane.

idle days aren’t really idle, are they? when the sky turns dark and my slouch increases inwardly a few degrees more, wanting to be released from the captivity of tedious obligations but also fearing the mirage of freedom even more. there’s nowhere to run, really. there’s nothing i can do, except to meekly bow my head in submission to the cruel passage of time and the bristles that come with it, and hope that these wounds don’t leave scars at places where healing will be impossible.

sometime during this week or month or maybe even year, i was branded with an expiry date. it’s the most arduous form of torment upon one’s psych, but it is precisely this urgency that made me pledge to document this process as best as i can. i want to write more. at least this way, i won’t find myself losing these emotions that are important to me.

Our Sunset Over the Castle on the Hill

We only decided to go to Ed Sheeran’s Manchester show a week before the show itself. Over dinner. We got our tickets from Twickets and on the 24th of May, after our IP law paper, Ee Min, Yee Lin, Ash, Jia Yang, CC and I headed for Etihad Stadium.

Getting to the stadium proved to be an issue in itself at first. Manchester Metrolink had special security measures for an event day as big as Ed Sheeran’s concert apparently, and it took us about an hour of waiting time just to get on a tram, and we eventually only did so by forcefully squeezing our way into the absolutely jam-packed carriages. It was a highly uncomfortable 20-minute ride and you could see everyone audibly gasp for air the moment the tram doors opened upon arrival at Etihad.

Ed’s entrance onto the stage was…to be honest, quite befitting of his super humble character. No fanfare or anything fancy like that. He appeared, got on stage, and immediately started singing. A man who gets straight to the point.

Just gonna outright admit that the songs of his that I was most familiar with were entirely from his + album from eons ago, a distant phase of my life. It reminded me of driving in my car after freshly acquiring my license for the first time at 17, and gushing about his music with Irfan back in college. It felt quite surreal, like a clashing of worlds.

But I’m glad I got to make new memories to associate with his newer songs, in his actual literal presence at that.

Michelle’s People I’ve Watched Live List, updated: