Holding You at Arms Length

Click: Holding you at arms length

Woke up today with the sun streaming into my room with orange walls aglow and thinking,
tomorrow I'm flying back to NY,

Friday was great: I bussed to York U. to keep Jerry company through a showing of '300' along with Bobby and Kevin. Since I arrived there on time and everyone else was running late, I amused myself by walking around campus and plopping myself in the middle of the food court with my sketchbook to soak in the normal university student campus life. I love it- so many like-minded people around in a 'restricted' area- something I feel like I'm missing out on as a student in New York. After the movie came food and coincidentally, bumped into a fellow AY high school classmate who recently borrowed my apartment for New Years but never saw since gr 12. Then came a slightly hellish bus ride back to the Silver City station with Bobby and then met up with the summer Japanese crew for food and then taught them how to make tiramisu. And then came SALT, bumming around and bubble tea at the new Destiny till 2am.

I haven't once wanted to go back- ever looked forward going back. Except I already know what will happen when I return: busy evening unpacking, getting ready for school and returning to 'old' friends and to a somewhat familiar church.

The elixir of numbing and forgetting unrealized dreams has always been the brutality of the separation through distance. As painful as it is, it somewhat allows me to detach myself from people and things that I could never let go willingly in my wistfulness. As much as I don't want to go to NY, it'll allow me to reconnect with a few good friends I made there and forget the intensity of ones here. I hope as my life becomes more cyclical there, I'll start to forget, and forgetfulness is the soothing balm to my selfish desires.
I scribbled this drawing down today (for some odd reason I wrote 'jan 9' instead of 'jan 20': the 9th was a day prior to my departure from HK while the 20th is Toronto)
I've realized I hold two different people at arms length: those who I somewhat dislike and am guarded against because they're not healthy to be around and those who I want to be loved by but am afraid to be transparent and let them in. If love and hate are such disparate things, why do I act somewhat the same in both circumstances?
But perhaps you too are holding me at a distance.
Some people are so hard to embrace because it means so much.
I don't want to love anymore.
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Sitting face to face at the tea shop today with china dripping in celadon, the snow flurries swirling round and round the wooden skeleton wrapped in a glass skin, it seemed like a fleeting moment set into eternity.

A summer ago you were one of the last people I would have considered someone I would confide in. I don't know why I told you the things I did- matters that usually stifle my tongue when others ask, but am cautiously telling all to you.