stuffy saturday

Not feeling well meant staying home the whole day, which I thought might be good. You know, to catch up on chores, tidy things up, read a bit. But I spent way too much of it online! There are endless things to do once you’re sucked into and stuck to the sticky threads of the world wide web. Let’s see, reading ST online (because it’s my homepage) reading all the various newspapers and magazines, reading and replying to emails (something I’m so bad at though I really mean to keep in touch better with all these people I love)….What else? Downloading sound clips to learn the various tones of Cantonese, and Teochew phrases, searching for lyrics, ebay-ing, amazon-ing, msn-ing.

I’ve just come from a minutes of such tension and unbelievable excitement frozen to sofa staring at the television screen waiting to know that… Zoe & Ian are through to the finals of Strictly Come Dancing (!!).. The Saturday’s really flown past. And now I’m back in front of my laptop screen again.

Being at home also meant, a lot of silence to think about recent events and other things. After all, it’s the end of term already, good to reflect a bit.

I still think that feeling of being ignored or rejected or just being treated with indifference as someone of little consequence is one of the worst – possibly worse than loneliness. Not really a very enlightening comparison since I think I quite enjoy being alone. Anyway.

I think the number of broken relationships littered around makes the world a tough place to live in. I wish to love and pour out my heart into the lives of as many as I possibly can. But I can’t do that with him because I still struggle with the concept/idea of who he is to me now, and I think he does too though he’d never admit it. Why should a concept/idea matter so much anyway when what we’re talking about here is the very concrete problem of two lives that need to be set apart, but are too intertwined to be disentangled neatly? Or is that just the way I fancy it to be? I don’t know I don’t know.

And actually it’s not just him, how do you find the balance between opening your heart to others, and knowing what to guard and not keep secret? Secrets are such annoying things. Ok, sometimes I must confess they can be secretly delightful, but mostly they’re just whirring generators of distrust and more questions and hurt and disbelief etc etc etc.

A year ago, I might have simply decided that the winter gloom is too much and I deserve to cry. (I learnt last night that this is medically known as seasonal something disorder, I forgot!) So I would let myself cry to the tunes of impossibly sad music under my duvet. This year, I’m not so prone to tears. (yes, apart from when lectures are cancelled ;P)

Rather strange and foreign actually, this girl who sits at my messy desk with so much going on in her mind and heart that she’s unable and unwilling to express properly in words and who insists on playing FIR on repeat ad nauseum only she doesn’t ever get sick of it and is in fact on her way to memorising all the lyrics!

Maybe it's, and in fact I think it really is, because I now have a special group of people more nearby than ever, who constantly drill into me the fact that it’s nothing about how I do, how I handle things, but what the state of my heart is, do I look to God, does my soul cling to Him? (see, why being alone isn’t necessarily best much as I think I like it)

Yes, realising that that it’s all about grace, which doesn’t exclude the presence of despair, or dryness, or niggling insecurities, but grace, which sweeps in onto the shore of my everyday life like a tide of love that fills all holes, the deep and the shallow. And yes the sandcastles I built for me, they may crumble under the wave and loss hurts, but then the rocks are so much more obvious for being the only ones left standing. I struggle to put it in words, but there is peace, and it’s only because of grace amazing, unconditional love.

So if I need to cry today, I know better than to cry to some stranger’s voice, no matter how good it is, I’ll cry to my one Best Friend, because I know He hears.

Wow, that was one long entry.