Tiny Distant Flags

Un jour, notre jeunesse sera derrière nous

Someday Our Youth Will Be Behind Us

There is a voice grown-ups reserve for little boys and girls—they pull their words out of hats and infuse them with joy and wonder, transforming them into seesaws and swing sets, cotton candy and carousels, toy trucks and train tracks, bunny ears and doves. Sometimes one has to wonder if they remember this voice from their own childhood, from afternoons at the park waiting for rainbows and magic, from houses with airy kitchens and sunny porches, from their grandfather’s lap, his hands leathery and smelling of smoke. One has to wonder just how much they remember.

On rare occasions it is the same voice they use on bigger boys and girls like us, but those moments are so few and far between that we tend to forget, and anyway those voices are lost to the sounds of slamming doors, engines rumbling to life, fingers flying over a keyboard.

And yet, a promise: we will hear this voice again from our own selves, in the future. We will reserve it for people we love— sad grown men and women who might need to feel like children again—and we will take good care of one another, because that is mostly what we have learned through the years. We will listen for the chance to recognize in one another our smaller, simpler selves.

Someday our youth will be tiny, distant flags behind us and we will tell our sons and daughters that when the world is too big, and everyone just wants to be larger than life, it helps to feel little again.

away they're goes

"I hate that i sabotage things when they're good - because i think everything good goes away"

Rainy Day Tunes

A soundtrack to your cozy indoor rainy-season solitudes in the rainy season. Optional atmospheric percussion supplied by rain pounding on roofs and windows.

rainy day tunes from hannanbatarfie on 8tracks Radio.

Artificial

Lately, after years spent sleeping with a light on, I’ve been enjoying the sensation of lying in natural darkness—it feels smooth and cave-like. Some light seeps in through my thin bedroom curtains, and I wonder how much of it is man-made, and how it compares to millions of years ago, when some distant ancestor of mine slept outside. No houses, no bricks or tarmac. Imagine that. Imagine living by the natural cycles of the moon and sun and stars.

Everything seems quite grey at this point, and so artificial. The constant mechanical groan of cars makes me feel sick. I am tired of urban life. It is dull. Cars and roads and buses all look the same. The weather is hot and dry and I keep longing for a torrent of rain, and that swimming sensation I adore: limbs stretching through atoms, rippling blue, while I use my muscles to glide through. Something to crack open the stillness of April.

But it’s time to accept that while campus is grey and boring, there is no other way. I can embrace hard work—it is finite, and after months of seeing no end in sight, it finally feels that way. I don’t want to rebel against it. I am itching for forward motion, but I also like listening to Björk sing, “I don’t know my future after this weekend / And I don’t want to.” I keep reminding myself about what i thought at the start of the new year—that you can’t make many plans in life, and the not-knowing is OK

Anxiety

This week has been a little tougher than what I’ve been used to lately. But I know, and I keep repeating in my head, that there are ups and downs to everything in life―including anxiety. There’s been a lot of it recently, and it’s a huge black blot on my mind. When general anxiety comes on like this, it’s both surprising and familiar, like when someone hugs you from behind and you feel uncomfortable because you don’t know who it is. But I do know what it is. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. I now understand the power that anxiety wields in my life. I suppose this means I am no longer walking blind, just wondering why things are so hard.

I wish I didn’t think about anxiety so often. It seems to be the main thing flowing from my fingers right now though. It’s taking over, affecting my life, intercepting every other thought, occupying the muscles in my forehead and neck and shoulders, destroying my appetite, ruining my conversations. It can make me selfish and short-sighted. I close myself off from the world. I know it’s hard for other people to understand; sometimes even I can’t understand.

I know I can be better at controlling how much it affects me, but recently I’ve lost my grasp a little. I’ve let it take over more than I should have. And as always, life flows on without me, not stopping to let me catch up. Like all the times before, I just have to pick myself up and hope that the people around me and the world in general will not stop giving me a chance to do better. I have to hope that I will give myself a chance to do better. I wonder whether there will be a day when I no longer have to talk about it.