Some nights, I stay up cashing in my bad luck.
Some nights, I call it a draw.
Some nights, I wish that my lips could build a castle.
Some nights, I wish they'd just fall off.

- fun., Some Nights

-+-

There is something poetic about today.

The way that the day was so perfectly laid out. It was like someone rolled out a red carpet for me, preparing me to face this.

Life has been wonderful. There is no doubt about it. I saw the other side of the nation, a sea of green, with walls marbled with red, white, and blue. Flecks of gold lined the skies as I held my breath and looked up, thinking, "This is amazing.  This is the most beautiful thing I could have ever imagined."

However, life has the tendencies to throw you curveballs.  Like when you finally have time to sit down and write, it's on the worst day that you've had in a long while.  It's on the last day of the entire year.  It was a lot of little things, building up over weeks and months, culminating together, all on this one day.  Life is beautiful.  Life is glorious in all its gifts and privileges, but those are stories that I have to put on hold right now.

Because, at this moment, I am stricken.

I sat there, literally crippled by tears.  I have not cried like that in a long while.  I could not breathe.  My hands trembled, barely able to hold myself up.  My vision began to tunnel.

"Breathe," I was told, in a kind, reassuring voice, "Gather yourself.  Breathe."  

It was so different from the Old Life.  I used to cry like this a lot in the Old Life, and I was used to sighs and exasperation when this state of mind used to be a regular visitor.  I was used to a harsh snap of, "Can you stop crying?"

I followed, and I calmed.  I calmed into numbness, and then into anger.  My thoughts took an intermission to ponder, '...Five stages of grief.'

"Promise me that you won't do anything stupid.  Promise me."

I grunted, and refused to raise my head.  I kept staring at the floor.  Soft, beige carpet.  Nothing in the world could get my eyes off that carpet.  Off my purple toenails sifting between the soft brown threads.  For the first time, I could not bring myself to give a definitive and honest, "I won't."

I don't remember the last time I have been so fragile.  For a year, even considering everything that's happened, when compared to last year, I've been a rock.  I've been dumb, I've been stupid, I've been vulnerable, I've been impulsive, and I've been every variation of all of the above, but this felt new.  Fragility felt so new.  When I trembled at the touch of a fingertip on my shoulder.  Where the small words, "You should go," stripped me of my ability to hold a breath.  I fell, unable to keep myself sitting.  I fell, and I lied there, crying, unable to get back up.

"Is there anything that you want to say?"

I shrilled, "What am I supposed to say, huh?  I'm losing my best friend today."

"What?  What, no!"

And then, I said it.  I said the words that will terrify me for lengths of time that I cannot predict.

"This always happens to me.  Everyone always leaves me.  Everyone always tells me that we'll always stay friends, and they never do, they always leave.  Everyone always promises me that they'll always be my friend, but they all lied, and you're lying now too, because everyone always leaves me, everyone always leaves me."

And I realized, that all those months, all those times where I always insisted things like, "My life always gets turned upside down," and "The carpet always gets pulled from underneath me," it usually had to do with someone leaving.  I realized that when Phuc left that fateful year ago, it set off a chain reaction of departure, where I now always expect everyone to leave.  I have given my most valuable, life-changing friendships a countdown until they inevitably come to an end, and my life completely changes once again.

Life has left me waiting for people to leave me.  I walk into everything now with the mindset, "I am going to treasure this for as long as it lasts, because I know that it will not last."  I've formed a notion of transience, of fleeting joys that must be cherished to the fullest before their deaths.  I called it an adaptability to an ever-changing, fast-paced life.  I know now that in reality, it was a coping method with abandonment issues.  I don't know how to react to that.

At the end of the day, it was all just a case of miscommunication, and I just blew everything of out proportion and I severely overreacted.  Life is actually still beautiful as it's ever been. 

But there's a crack in my rose-colored glasses now.

I don't know how to react.

PS I promise that things don't actually suck.  It's just that I don't really need to write in my journals and diaries until the need to vent the bad days.  I am writing this with fresh mental wounds, and I'm sure that my mood and my thoughts will improve with time and reflection.

I owe you a happy blog post sometime.