I'd Like December To Be Cold
(the subtlety of a painful rebirth as December primes us for our summer funerals)
There's nothing that happens today. Nothing's been happening for a heavy stretch of glued time. […] Beautiful in the absence of motion, horribly gorgeous in our silent trying. Silent. It's been silent.
the last week of every month to the first week of the ones after, @catfilled
Just a little bit more
Let’s shake this poet out of the beastBag of Bones, Mitski
Everything has been a game of successively bad decisions, down to the number of blankets to hide under, or using distance as my top method of closure. December was a reflection, it always has been this sharp slit into the ankles; catching one’s self off guard with zero defenses. Slaughtering vulnerability in front of a grieving heart. The culmination of every single mistake I’ve done in the span of one human year. Mistakes sink deepdeepdeep into the guts, sirens ringing out a plea for immediate change. If there’s something about December of 2021, it’s that there is no change, only a semblance of its apparition. I’ll buy a new journal and the first three pages will be dedicated to the month of faux productive routines. All my bullet journals are heavy with glue and torn up pages. Frustration, maybe. Regret, mostly. Twelve glasses of water mold into two by the end of next year’s December. And I’ll get used to not seeking stagnancy in drastic times. Welcome to my December, these pieces have been sewn together, in case December needed structure, in case wooden stilts manage to hold a family of strays.
Seasons fade into hot, hotter, then into cool perspiring warmth. December's a cradle for sticky hands and quicksand love. I enjoyed eyeing paintings of snow and musings of December, as this month has been romanticized with winter-tinted lenses. There’s a tinge of envy I have for snowfall. Living in the moment, crystallized and fragile and piling up until the seasons melt it out—timed sadness, beauty in boundaries. Songs that muse of a cold turning of leaves, of a brand new restart to the seasons, of an attempted freezing of our muddy desires. The breeze feels a tad bit less hesitant singing my way this time around. December is heated yearning, because it’s the month of entitled pretension. We can pretend; we pretend hard. I’ll wrap myself up in the prettiest of bows and shower in the glimmer of ornaments. Pretty and empty. Worthwhile and unheard. These words have become synonymous under a colorblind ear. Blue, blue, blue.
Loneliness tackles you with a handkerchief and chloroform. This month, this year, has been the unwanted intimacy of shared suffering. Isolation hasn’t been an act of choice but more of a mandatory responsibility. There’s no reassurance that I'm being listened to with all the filler conversation droning in and out in these makeshift get-togethers. I have decades of information to catch up on. As 2022 approaches, I feel more of an echo from 2019. This year has been a hyper-intensive phase wherein I attempted to scrub away and change everything that could be changed. I bleached my hair fifteen times, just to feel something akin to control. I rearranged my clothes once every two weeks, thinking that a version of myself that touched a smidge of contentment would exist in a four-year-old too-big shirt. I swept every crevice in my shared room, not allowing dust to collect. I wouldn’t be myself if I stopped being destructive—it’s an addictive venom, to break yourself down till the only remnant you’re left with is the faint hope that you could be someone else. I allow dust to collect sometimes now. I'm only an amalgamation of people at this moment, and I think I can be content with that for a while. A mosaic of people in one person is good enough to live. Living vicariously through the lenses of others is still living. I'll just kneel down and wish I'd start living through mine one day.
The month of gift-giving, a reconciliation for some, an abyss for most. December is the loneliest of all. December doesn't bring snowflakes, at least not here. It's a gooey kind of condensation, the atmosphere full of chatter, faces of which I've grown to treat as strangers. Noche buena is served as tradition disguised under what we have come to translate as love. Every dish served is overly saturated, everyone’s fingers a little too frightened to start the chain of eating. Whoever eats first becomes the butt of endless body-shaming jokes from seething aunties and uncles. Food, after all, is the way to the heart. Though the food is warm, the heart grows sour with excess. The photo above reminded me of my stage-play relatives. Theatrics are ever-present with family. “All four people need to coordinate their actions and lift simultaneously,” said Wexler, pertaining to the interconnected mugs of coffee. When one lifts up too high, the lowest plunges down to the ocean. When I don’t take it to heart, they dig a hole in failed arrogance. I’ve been used to having a bigger pot among all the mugs, a whirlpool of multiple oceans carefully balanced in the frame I own.
근데 미안 난 나를 포기할 수가 없어
But, I’m sorry, I can’t give up on myself내가 아는 나를 난 놓아줄 수가 없어
I can’t let go of me who I know as myself어긋, RM (Translation by doolsetbangtan)
I think I've come to terms with my version of love for the family I have. They’re the warmth of an orally passed-down recipe; only to be cherished every month, as daily intake nips at the bones. It's rocky, and sometimes I feel as if I'm the most ungrateful child. Other times I'm off praying how I'd be safer dead. I love them from afar. A blue flame. Can't stay too close or else everything’ll burn hard and quick. So far, the only burn[out] I enjoy is anything of the work sort, anything that pays off and is rewarding. The only reward one gets from this bloodline is resentment. I love them from afar and I could only hope that soon I'd fly away to some place in the world and send my love from there. Distance makes the heart grow fonder as much as it makes the heart grow up, makes the heart less reliant on others, makes the heart love itself.
We have no obligation to forgive anyone who has hammered a stake into our hearts. Apologies aren’t closure. It’s stupid, I can’t help but want to try.
December is for the wealthy, we use Christmas money for next month's electric bills. It’s my fault, really, for equating love to the physical aspects of life. I was hit with the reality of nothingness. It was not great prices I sought for, but the sentimentality of small things. A tiny rock. Or a letter. It’s my fault for wishing. I never believed in Santa Claus. More so, I never got to believe in him. My parents were always adamant with transparency, and what was transparent, what was real, was our empty wallets. It was fine, I stopped expecting much. Christmas season became just like any other day, and back then, we were lucky if we had space to invite people in.
This year's Christmas has been better than most. Though I'm extremely insecure and wary about financial matters because December brings anxiety. I don't know how to overcome the lack of giving in such a month of extravagant generosity. Impulsivity and frugality are my false dichotomies. People say a presence is enough, but the expectation of coming empty-handed eats from the inside and out. Scarlet everywhere, starting from the soles of my feet. Imploding from embarrassment. Because December is money. The lack thereof. December is an expensive sacrifice.
When December isn’t cold, I turn the AC up high and pretend snowflakes fall, like the stuff they sing about in songs. When December isn’t cold, I remind myself of the showers after every Christmas-adjacent event I’m forced to attend. My surname is a badge. There’s a certain scent in each house, some smell of fabricated nuclear families, others of department store coconut candles; it’s a distinct mixture of notes I paste in my brain. You can almost always smell loneliness. The familiar scent of a creak when getting up from bed at 6 PM, back aching from cosplaying someone bed-ridden. The lines between reality and cosplay get blurrier. I wasn’t home for three days and the rooms reeked of liminal spaces. Lived in, but there’s something unsettling. Greatly out of place, an anomaly amongst a few.
December is the collation of all realities. Past. Flashbacks of every December from the earliest age you can remember. The rotten egg smell of a room that’s been left unattended. Yearly pity sock gifts to the kids who say they want anything; kids too shy to tell what they like in fear that it can’t be afforded. Present. Pa’s family who he can’t stand. Every family member buzzing and stinging, throwing backhanded shots, reviving the only thing we were taught to know: comparison. Family losing its meaning. Future. Kids growing up and never speaking to each other, family looks like family, family feels like a slap in remembrance. I’m on the plane to somewhere, never looking behind, for I’ve looked behind too much. Everything I say is a mistake of the past. Yet I say it.
One morning this sadness will fossilize
And I will forget how to cry
I'll keep going to work and you won't see a change
Save perhaps a slight gray in my eyeFireworks, Mitski
December grows cold. It eventually grows cold and breaks off into the warmth under blankets. I will end this on a lighter note. When I can, I will. My fifth grade teacher once taught me to never start a sentence with the word and. I can’t help but want to end something and find out that it hasn’t stopped. And that it’s continuous. And contains a heartbeat. And a longer purpose. And maybe through this stupid text I can close the gap between myself and I. And heal a few things along the way. And decide that December is cold enough for it to kiss away the problems, pushed aside for this moment, for the endless tomorrows to deal with. And maybe this continuation will serve as something. And maybe 2022 will caress us gently, with care, with utmost fragility because we’ve been trying. And trying hurts, but it hurts so good. And what have you been but good?
ENDING THOUGHTS
Wrote these pieces back in 2020 and edited them to…fit better with the current emotions I’ve been feeling. I think I have a hard time trying to make a newsletter that follows a casual narrative style, as I tend to lean towards these (as I like to say) slightly pretentious and melodramatic sentiments. This looked wordier than what I’ve been used to write, but you’re reading this part, so I could only hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for being here, I’ve grown to replace my incessant apologizing to unstoppable gratefulness. Thank you for reading. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the year almost ending. Five more days till the year ends for me. This time really emphasizes the solidarity with our fleeting emotions. On a lighter note, I got some books as presents and I’m finally returning back to my fourth grade bookaholic roots. Always said I was an avid reader when all I read were the AO3 fics I had on rotation (even better than some novels nowadays). Will update soon on the things I’ve got going for me rather than the loss I’ve received throughout this year! May 2022 be blessed. (If I have typos in this newsletter…we move on as a society.) Love you, stay safe.
Love,
Jupiter