2:39 AM
It has been a long time since I last stayed up this late.
This weariness—adrift, untethered—exists only in the moment.
Once gone, it leaves no trace.
I feel awake. Or something like it.
Before me, vast fields stretch into nothingness.
Flipping through pages, beside my pillow,
a strange lightness settles over me—sudden, inexplicable.
How wonderful, to finally be still.
Once more.
On words—
Lately, I have been reading The Revenge of the Lawn.
Some of its oddities feel eerily familiar—
Jack, who hacked down the pear tree, dousing its roots in kerosene,
not out of malice,
but out of a fear of bees,
born from nothing but a trick of memory—proactive interference.
And the drunken geese, greedy and absurd.
Like me.
Except I am luckier.
At least my branches no longer bear green fruit.
Out of respect, even decay must be absolute.
There is nothing more ironic than hope,
when it is nothing but a hand that digs its own grave.
He said that in October, the water would take only six months to boil.
He said there was no saving them.
They said that in spring,
a young man’s fantasies would turn to love.
In his March, the water began to bubble.
In my May, fantasies could still cradle a cup of coffee.
A friend pulled me into a romance spun from fantasy.
Shattered families, yawning distances,
pride sharp as broken glass—
none of it could sever love.
She was enthralled,
perhaps drawn by nostalgia for the original novel,
perhaps swept up in the dream.
I only thought—
that modern people,
the love-hungry,
had already begun their dance with life and death
the moment they stepped into the theater,
caught between modernism and Qiong Yao-like dialogue.
Dull,
and yet, strangely, I did not resent it.
The last month before graduation, I read furiously.
As if to bury the emptiness of high school’s impending end.
More truthfully, as a form of self-redemption.
"At least, in my final semester, I read."
How ridiculous—
the way we chase the illusion of intellectual fulfillment,
only to deceive ourselves in the end.
Stopping to think,
I realize the words that linger most vividly in my mind
are from a book I once loved:
"I have always tried to place myself on sunlit soil,
and then hurl my will into it."
And yet,
somewhere along the way,
the meaning of sunlight
became blurred beyond recognition.
For my graduation message board, I left behind another beloved line:
"I mainly feel that I am becoming a servant of sorrow.
I am still searching for its beauty."
I could think of no words more fitting to encapsulate high school.
Like shifting—
solitary, melancholic.
But this is who I am.
I do not wish to erase it.
If anything,
I cherish it.
A very important person once shared this poem with me:
Suicide’s Note
Langston Hughes
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
And so,
I left it on my graduation message board—
whether in honor of the poem itself
or in honor of a fleeting version of myself.
And that is all.
For now.