Mood: Comme ce, comme ca.
Today: “rolled in the harvest”
Man, the Eragon movie was bad. I love the books for unknown reasons, but I would very much like to stab the DVD.
Switzerland details and pictures are still being worked on. It’s such a beautiful country. I would love to work and retire there someday, but it’s such a faraway dream…I can’t deny the contentment I felt when the plane landed back in San Francisco. I love California, despite all the Terminators and the polluted bay. Besides, I don’t speak Swiss German, and apparently you need to know High German as well.
A couple things on my mind.
~
I don’t know what you would call it. A nightmare? I wasn’t scared…but it was definitely one kind of torture. One night in Switzerland I had a dream that I’d committed suicide. You’d be interested to know that the afterlife felt something like MapleStory’s Sleepywood.
The interesting thing is…in seventh grade, when apparently my hormones were going crazy and I couldn’t look at a streetlight without imagining myself hanging from it, I found solace in a few people. My friends. They were always there for me, always willing to support me, hug me when I needed to be hugged and hold my hand when I’d lost sight of anything in life.
I still clearly remember two such friends…Marcus, a friend I’d never seen but had always so close by, was the first to listen to me when I’d thought I was ready to blow. I was in tears of frustration and confusion, and amazingly he stayed on our conversation for all of my ranting. By the time we had finished talking, I was calm again and suicide was once again, temporarily, a distant option. Maybe it was because I didn’t really know Marcus from face-to-face experiences that I was able to talk to him directly. He was the only person I actually told outright. Not even my friends knew until long after it had all ended.
The other is Connie, who has been one of my closest friends, if not the closest, since sixth grade. While I have always been pessimistic, with a tendency to brood and a fast temper, she has always been positive and supporting…I have never, in three years, seen her truly lose her temper or explode from frustration. I am Yin. She is Yang. And while I’m left without doubt that she is strong enough to survive without me, I can’t do the same without her.
In the end, that realization got me past my completely unexplained emotions.
In the dream, I can’t remember why or how I committed suicide. The part I remember the most are the thoughts that ran through my head as I sat there, knowing that was dead.
You promised you would never commit suicide. You promised.
I’d told myself that so long as I had friends I wouldn’t take my own life. I recalled that promise each time the notion of suicide returned, until one day it just stopped crossing through my head. Knowing that I’d broken that promise gave me one of the worst feelings I’d ever had.
I finally realize what people mean when they talk about their lives flashing right in front of their eyes. Perhaps I didn’t truly see my graduation, my first job, my wedding, or my future, but…imagining each one, and knowing that it would never happen, is worse punishment than anything life can throw at me.
Do I resent having the dream? No, I’m actually quite glad it came up. Maybe somewhere I always knew, but now I truly realize that suicide is not one of my options. There is nothing to gain from throwing away my friends and my life.
[I also never really thought about what the afterlife would be like. Somehow I just couldn’t imagine it being all clouds and sun and white togas. I would much prefer a quiet and peaceful place like Sleepywood, which is, by the way, my favorite location in MapleStory.]
~
On to happier subjects.
I’ve always known that I love wildlife. While the ignorance and total disregard for the planet widely displayed by large numbers of the human population disgust me, all wild animals, trees, and plants live in perfect harmony with Earth. True, I have something against spiders and flies, but I recognize that they are a part of that harmony. I always feel a little bit of regret each time I smoosh a spider, knowing that there are another four mosquitoes in the world that it will never eat.
Maybe that’s why I love plants more. I’d always thought I was an animal person, but going to the Imperial Greenhouse in Vienna left me in no doubt that I love plants. Walking through the greenhouse made me feel more alive than I had in years. It was something I hadn’t felt since fourth grade, when I first began to see the cloud before the silver lining.
I can find so many things in plants that someone like me just can’t see in people sometimes. Beauty. Health. Peace. Delicacy. Strength. I wish the world could see the same thing in a single rose or a great exotic tree that I see when I look at them.
Maybe this explains why Sleepywood is my favorite MapleStory town o.O Ellinia being the obvious second.
I suppose that adds botany onto my list of possible future careers, but I doubt it’s nearly as good money as being a dentist or a doctor. I guess not everyone can do what they love.
~
I was going to rant about something else here, but it’s late (11:32 PM, but I can’t post it right now because the internet has already shut off) and I’ve forgotten what it is. Besides, this post is getting long. Congratulations on making it to the end.
If I remember there might be another Musings #4 O: