quarter-life crisis

126 5 2
                                    


I think comparisons are powerful things. Juxtaposition, contrast, they speak volumes without having to lift a finger. Here is one such comparison that I found in my recent writing. The first piece, I wrote when I was almost finishing high school. The second piece, I wrote not too long ago, amidst a crisis that still shadows me. 

In one, the world seemed to glimmer, within the reach of my fingers. In the other, no so much. 

Which is which? That's for you to decide. 

*


then // claire was eighteen and a fresh highschool graduate


Sometimes, I see this girl inside of me—a broken bone, a hollow shell. A shapeless form morphing into a twisting spiral of smoke. She flutters out of a kettle spout like the ghosts of butterflies, an apparition that nestles in-between the words that I want to say, but don't.

Sometimes, I feel like I am an onlooker in my own life. A simple passer-by. A fleeting entity. A lifetime existing in the space-time continuum only for the evanescent moment that the universe blinks its celestial eye. Poof. Have I truly existed if no one knows I did?

And I suspect that it has something to do with the way that I am a mere observer in these cataclysmic cosmos. I like to gaze at things. I like to watch the great engine of the universe combusting with the black, sleek oils of the night sky. I like to watch the great and the glory. And whilst I am a spectator observing the contenders of the great cosmic gladiators, something pokes inside of my chest, reminding me that to this cacophony I have but a whisper. In this ocean, I can only offer a raindrop. In all of the constellations, I can only offer a star.

This insignificance is crippling.

And there are days where I feel small. Days when I chug on, my legs being dragged me like a dead body behind as I weave through the lush labyrinth of the human civilisation. An industry in itself that pumps in smack-talk, and produces soot and smoke and sulphur. It is these days when I remember that one less star does not dim the night sky. One less star does not interfere with the quantum threads of reality. One less star does not make a difference. Who will be there, in the end, to pay homage to this star? Who will write a eulogy to the thing that never existed?

I am one star.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I saw a girl who was a ghost. Her thoughts were crippling, shredding through her skin and sliding in-between her ribs like razor-sharp knives. She was suspended in a solution of immobilising self-doubt, swimming in her own insignificance.

One day, the reality pushed her down from behind.

It felt like this: A loss of my footing, a nanosecond of realisation. My face on the floor, and a cut on my cheek and the blood on my wound. I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive. The fall was the question, the blood was the answer.

Wake up.

Glassy eyes snapped open to the verdant darkness. It felt like the ruby elixir of life surging through my veins, and a jerk back into reality the way it is part of primal human nature to resurface for air. Virid grass scratched at my toes, and my heartbeat rattled my ribs like a captive monster. Was I alive? My hands clambered and teeth chattered, palms splayed out onto the soil, attempting to anchor myself. The wind sighed. I could feel its breath in my ear. Scarlet blood splashed onto scintillating blades of grass as I stumbled.

Wake up.

"I'm awake."

Being alive, awake, and understanding that I do not exist alone in this universe has been the most liberating thought I have ever experienced. Because it means that I am not simply alone in my isolation. In fact, I am part of a dynamic web, a colourful ecosystem of loneliness and people and people who are lonely. The singular fact that we are all interconnected in some way, no matter how trivial, is a reassuring lullaby. I am the living, breathing form of stardust. I am the culmination of evolutionary relationships and phylogeny. I am a clump of atoms, but so is the sun. My insignificance does not have to be crippling—it can be liberating. Because despite being a seemingly secluded spectator in the threads that weave the universe, there is one thing that I forgot: I am born and made of the stars. 


*

now // claire is older, a university student

How do I begin to put this into words? For the entirety of my life, I've used a string of letters to help my mind process the universe the way a computer processes binary code. For the entirety of my life, things made sense – or at least, they seemed to. I've learnt that facades are powerful things. Lately I have been staring down at my fingers only realise that they bleed. Maybe, I should reframe the question: How do I begin to put this change into words?

But the inexplicabilities of life no longer seem like binary code, and my mind seems less and less like a computer.

Some days, I find myself frozen. As if my thought processes no longer keep up with the strangling, obscene nature of time. Some days, the sun shines through my window and I find myself staring at it for hours on end. Am I waiting for something? Here is where the binary code begins to bend and break. This one thing keeps meandering in my mind like a river I can't find an end to: why does life seem so big, and I so small? Why have the dreams that I have stuttered into fears, and then grown – cancerous and vicious – into nightmares? My fears have grown so big and my frame has become so small. When did it begin?

When will it stop?

And sometimes, words no longer make sense to me. How do I put the entirety of this confusion, how do I package these thoughts and feelings into something tangible and immortal, something ever-comprehensible? So that it becomes nothing short of a snow-globe: a moment of time pressed into an unmoving mantelpiece. A thing for observation in the future. 


StagnantWhere stories live. Discover now