10 seconds of fame

11.08pm 30 Oct 2006 Monday

I've been having the most bizarre dreams recently. Each dream features different characters but the underlying theme is the same - in all of them, I'm somehow involved with someone I'm not supposed to, and all the protagonists have, at one point, been the object of my affections.

Today you feel very far away. Talking to you and the kids on the phone felt so much like a chore, an unfamiliar burden. I don't want to have stepchildren. I don't want to have debts to start off my independent life. Those are problems that should be worrying me when I'm older, not while my contemporaries are talking about the latest fashion or their daddy-sponsored graduation trip.

When will you finally leave me alone? Perhaps the conviction that marriage as an institution is nothing to be revered, nothing sacred has finally been drummed into my head.

But that's not why I came in here to write today. I had been looking for some recipes for the upcoming party when I stopped by some food blogs. It seems that everyone is blogging, everyone is cooking and everyone loves eating so much, that a food blog is dime in a dozen. If writing served only as a salve to my soul, then why was I so bothered that there's nothing unique about the things I do?

The truth is, I'm probably like every other blogger, writing for an audience and waiting for my shot at 10 seconds of fame.

Maybe we all seek different things in love. You seek support and encouragement, while I see your suggestions as fuel to a grandiose puff of smoke. Right now I feel like at the end of this all, there will be nothing left of me but a pile of debts, a garbage can full of castles in the sky, and a pathetic heart full of misguided optimism.

I struggle with how to end this essay because I think of Alan, and how easily hurt he was. There was a discernible change in that carefree lark's personality after I told him to harden his heart, and I will never forget how I took a fragment of my boy's poetic soul. But the question now is, who are you going to be true to? A self that is always checking itself in trying to be PC, or a self that shows the world how bitter, vindictive and quarrelsome she truly is, deep inside the black heart?