22

I started reading Murakami's Wind up Bird Chronicle a few months before my birthday, back in 2015. On the day of my birthday, the chapter I was reading started like this:

"I was born on May twenty-ninth," Creta Kano began her story, "and the night of my twentieth birthday, I resolved to take my own life." (Chapter 8: Creta Kano's Long Story, An Inquiry Into the Nature of Pain).

The last book I've managed to finish this year, was Silvia Plath's The Bell Jar, a novel I've actually started reading in 2012 in e-book form. I discovered a hard copy at an impromptu big bad wolf trip long past midnight, sitting on a returned book shelf while I was queuing for a thick ass Gogh biography book. The Bell Jar was fairly depressing, just like the timeless hype it gets. I don't really get how people managed to survive (as in, live on after) reading this during their teenage years so, had I finished the book back then I wouldn't know what will become of myself right now (but then again I would probably never gather enough courage to do such thing; the aftertaste of the book left a stinging pain in my stomach each time I stare into the thin, fragile, defenseless, and somehow very visible blue veins up my arm.)

Birthdays are pretty horrible in a sense because you're confronted with your temporality and momentariness, in a bad way. Its like a checkpoint for questions, like: "How much have you achieved?", "How many people consider you as a friend and are somewhat thankful for your existence?", "How much of a burden have you been to other people for the past year?", "How many anger and sadness went repressed, how many person did you hurt?" "Is the world (or anybody's world) a slightly better place with your existence or are you the exact opposite; the oppressor?", "Are you truly alive or just killing time?"

On this year's birthday, I am faced with a reality that I (may) have (deliberately) overlooked: of how easy I am of settling. There are so many things going wrong, in a sense, in my life, from the tiniest detail (like a large chapped paint off the corner of a wall in my bedroom and how much of a mess it is, crazy ass phone that will def kill me should I ever got into a life or death situation) to the large ones, like how I have never, ever fight for anything in my life.

Here I am, a twenty two years old fresh graduate with a proper job before my graduation, most definitely the opposite of a fighter.

-

I had hoped this writing will probably turned out as one of those imbecile rants, but after I had erased a sentence from the paragraph before, I think I get it.

It has not eased completely the unshakable existentialist in oneself, and this is probably one of those completely wrong justification and blind romanticization of things, but, tonight, this will do.

Hope is a weapon; survival is victory.