Unfinished.

“Love in its purest form may not always be mutual, but it must always be unconditional.”

CHAPTER 1 – “Cause sometimes you only want to hear the beginning of a story…”

I guess you could’ve said I saw it coming. It was about late February when all the insecurities and all the arguments we’ve had in the past years came full circle. In recent months I had disappointed her time and time again whether it be her birthday or even just a weekend together. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel like trying harder, it’s just that after so many years together I felt the banal reality of our relationship and being the child that I was, I didn’t think it would matter much if I did. We’d been together for what at our age, felt like an eternity and the drawn out idea of being together “forever” didn’t seem like a real possibility.

“You’re the only one who could make me feel so many things at once, anger, hate, frustration, love!” she yelled as I laid there emotionless on the couch.

“I don’t know what to do, what do you want me to do?!” I replied.

“I just want…I just want you to care…”

I was so naïve then, not giving her a second thought about how she felt and how much this really meant to her. In my mind, she cared almost as much as I did for this relationship which by then wasn’t much. I hadn’t realized at the time that it meant just the opposite. She was emphasizing our flaws in order to try and fix them because she wanted so much for us to work. Blindly I passed this off as yet another argument to get through the day, similar to how most of our days went by lately. We’d yell, scream and argue and eventually make up, which really just meant postponing it for another day. This time though, it was different.

“You don’t even care about us anymore…you don’t care about me…” She said.

“Yes…I do.” I replied indifferently.

That was probably half a lie. I didn’t even look her in the eye. I still cared about her, I just wasn’t sure I cared about us. To me she was just being her overly dramatic self and I figured when she was done being emotional then that would be it. Plus I had grown pretty accustomed to her always being around no matter what, that even if we fought, I never gave it a thought to how it would be if she wasn’t. I thought I’d had her down to a tee. So being the less than brilliant man that I am, you could count on me to spit out just the worst possible comment at the worst possible time.

“Maybe I’m just not good enough, you deserve better you know?”

Her eyes began to water.

Those words would come back to haunt me more than you could ever imagine. I didn’t mean it; I just said it for no good reason.

She was quiet now, the yelling had ceased and she looked up at me. Her deep brown eyes, the ones I would lose myself in and the very ones that used to sparkle every time it saw me were now staring straight into mine, crying out as if I had just broken her heart. She held back her tears this time, and her crestfallen face was all I needed to see to know what I had just done.

As she headed for the door, her last words to me still to this day, echo within my thoughts.

“If you love me you’d keep trying no matter how hard it seemed…”

It hit me and it hit hard.

For the first time in my life, forever didn’t seem long enough.

Excerpt.

This is really for my own archiving now since no one really reads this blog anymore. But, if you happen to stumble upon it, then knock yourself out.

This is an excerpt of an autobiography i wrote a while ago, in its original text. (Bad grammar and all.)

….So for once things were pretty normal and everything in my life made sense. Thus it was only predictable that God or whoever up there felt the need to give my life another jumble.

Cue the greatest and worst thing to happen to my life thus far. Not to sound like an emo clichéd story but yes it was a girl. Her name was Li Chen and I have to admit that most of what I am today, both the good and the bad is in some way directly related to her. That might be giving her too much credit but it’s just how I see things. I met her the summer after my first year of high school.
Beautiful would be an understatement. I’d list all the generic qualities of perfection in a girl but I’ll spare you the mushy details. You may be wondering why an autobiography about myself would be so much about someone else but you’ll realize sooner or later that speaking about Li, is the same as speaking about myself. She was my life. She was a catalyst you could say for everything in my life. Once again not trying to give her too much credit but its probably true. The strange part about it all was that I learned about all the things wrong with my character as well as my view on life while we were together and all the good after we went our separate ways.
We were together for three years which wouldn’t seem like a long time in the long run but it seemed like an eternity at our age. So it started like any other relationship and it was good for a while but quickly I learned that I didn’t have her as a priority. At the time in high school I was too busy keeping up with school work and the constant pressure from parents to get grades that would put me in an Ivy. Also I was on the handball team so I played literally every day through rain, snow, or any climate. This is where I started to learn about myself and how big of a jerk I was to her.
I never gave her the time of day. Still we kept on going with her doing everything for me and me doing not much else. Fast forward three years later and one life changing relationship and here I am. She left me and soon there was another guy and I felt the full force of everything I lost. This girl did everything from feed me and taking care of me when I had a 105 degree fever to even doing my drafting homework. Now I was pretty much left with nothing but the guilt of how I took everything for granted. This happened shortly after prom which I had considered to be one of the best nights of my life and a milestone. Yet now I always associated it with the demise of our relationship.
It pretty much overshadowed everything that had happened in my high school years including winning the Handball City Championship which before had meant everything. Seven years of training all to win it and now it meant almost nothing. But I did grow and learn from it all. So what wisdom did I take from it? Well I spent the next summer pretty much moping and feeling sorry for myself but eventually I got back on my feet. I spent the next year trying to win her back. I did absolutely everything you could think of and in the end it all just wasn’t good enough for her. I couldn’t possibly list it all. But even though I told myself I was never a quitter, after spending an entire year, my freshman year of college mind you, I figured it was time to call it quits.
But in that past year I learned about myself, my will, my potential, and my heart. It taught me that I should never view things in an indifferent manner and never take things for granted. I learned that my potential is limitless as long as you set your mind to it, to always be passionate about what you do and to never quit as long as you find reason to keep going. This makes me wish sometimes I could just go back to being a little kid. But, since I can’t do that I might as well grow up.
Even today before I say anything to someone else or work on anything, I think back to how Li and I ended and what I learned from it. I think about what I could have done differently now to better myself as an individual. I spent enough time in my life wondering but I intend to start doing.
I’m in my second year of college now in my sophomore semester and there is so much going on that sometimes I can’t even keep track of it. There’s so much I want to do but I’m taking it in stride. Hopefully everything I do will have a purpose and help define who I am because I figure there’s still a lot I don’t know. So right now I’m in Binghamton University in the School of Management and pursuing a degree in finance. It’s been a pretty wild ride getting to this point but I’m sure there will be many more bumps along the road ahead.
I’ve done my time being a follower to learn to be a leader, I’ve done my time being a jerk to learn to be a modern day “Romeo”, and I’ve done my time being upset to learn to be happy with how things are now. I can’t say I don’t relapse from time to time but looking back on anything isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We can learn from them and sometimes the reminders are physical and sometimes they’re mental. From looking at the scar on my right hand and knowing I probably shouldn’t ever stick my hand into a radiator again to remembering how to juggle the people in my life. I know that I am still young and this autobiography is far from done especially since my views and personality may change as years pass but right now I know who I am and I’m happy with that.
Between my grandparents, my brother, my parents, my friends, and Li, I’ve grown and become the person I am because of what I’ve learned from them. So my greatest hope in life is to affect and make a difference to the people around me because just as I am writing about all the different people whom I’ve encountered in the 19 years of my life that have made a change in me, I hope someday I’ll be in someone else’s autobiography speaking about how I’ve changed them. For the better hopefully but its anyone’s guess for now…

Note to Self.

Life isn’t always meant to be planned out

In fact sometimes we just need to sit back

Catch a breeze and watch the sun set

Have a drink and laugh with friends

Each day should be new and forgiving

Never forget, but never lose yourself again.

Post-it #2

I think you’re mad hot when you’re in pajamas.

Post-it #1

I thought about you today.

I liked it…

Think I’m going to try it again tomorrow.

Sweet dreams babe. =]

Sunny Side Up.

“I guess it’s probably just human nature, but i really don’t see why our safety net for any and all troubles is time. We all rely so much on it when in reality, its probably one of the few things in this universe we actually can’t control. I was never one to believe it when people said leave it up to “fate” or “what’s meant to be will happen”. Sorry i’ll pass on the rhetoric philosophical bullshit. I’m all for having hope but thats kind of like putting all your eggs in a basket and throwing it from a skyscraper hoping that it’ll magically land unscathed. Chances are..you’re having scrambled eggs for breakfast.”

I realized the other day i had that short post saved as an unpublished draft for quite some time. I wrote it a good while ago and for some reason i just never felt it was complete. I’m sure it still isn’t. But from what i can recall, i wrote that in some pretty bad times with some fucked up shit in my head so looking back on it now i’m not even sure if I believe what i wrote. Regardless of how i felt then, time HAS passed and it has undoubtedly changed how I feel. I’m not going to be the first to jump to the conclusion that any scenario I viewed with pessimism before is now a big shiny ball of optimistic hope but I want to believe that with a great deal of effort, things will work out in the end. I’m a little tired of pretending like my life is going to be this great big train wreck forever because its not. I’ll save the world someday…but i’m going to have to start with my own.

I always did like my eggs sunny side up.

Brick Walls.

“Brick walls are there for a reason. They are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop people who don’t want it badly enough.” – Randy Pausch

First off i’d like to thank everyone who took their time to read my opening post/poem, and to all those who left their thoughts on it. I hope you all read it and took it to heart in your own way.

I’ve always been better at expressing myself in written word rather than speech but lately i’ve been struggling to express all the things in my head clearly. Whether it be about current events or my own future, it’s not exactly writers block but i just can’t seem to find the words that do justice to my thoughts. Then, yesterday i stumbled across a video of a man who did the exact opposite. It is a lecture by a man named Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Dr. Pausch  expresses his insight from a lifetime of lessons and experiences that span topics ranging from defying gravity to love, all through one speech. I know each person who watches his lecture will take something different away from it because it is only human nature to relate it to your own life, but part of that i think is the beauty in it all.It isn’t a short video but when you find the time to watch it in it’s entirety i highly recommend it.

Find your own inspiration in anything that you do. I’ve found mine.

A poetic beginning…

Relapse

Insomnia comes as night comes anew
Thoughts run astray as dementia ensues
A relapse more than just recollection
My own insight, in my own reflection

Each memory is served as a scar unhealed
As a mental wound, a suture yet sealed
An infection of lies clinging behind
Still twisting askew, every word they bind

Sorting pain from fiction, fiction and you
Opaque emotions I’ll never see through
With a scenic view of life’s cross-section
Our love was a blemish, marred perfection

And as dawn breaks, the images rescind
A fleeting feeling, as quick as the wind
What remains beneath, bitterness untold
My resigning heart that you still hold.

- A. Lee