Wilting Flowers
April 30, 2025
How beautiful impermanence can be
(trigger warning: mentions of death and suicide)
麻醉
No cost too great.
No mind to think.
No will to break.
No voice to cry suffering.
— from Hollow Knight
A shot (administered) in the dark,
If no one heard the cry, then did it ever happen?
I break down pillars, break my morals,
break my soul, break for you.
I obfuscate, I command,
I cower, I planned,
I cry, I steal,
I lie, I kill.
Any extreme brings pain. All sweeping conclusions are wrong.
What I chose to challenge led to a path of thorns.
I sing a lonely song of devotion, answered by silence.
Internally thrashing, I only wished for you to listen,
not imitate.
I never asked, I never called,
so what about the machine if it doesn’t think?
A boy crumbled at the sight and took it out,
The cost? The city. The thought? Not much,
only his morality and a sense of loss too overwhelming.
But it too, is forever destroyed,
seeing the city gone, it feels responsible.
It cries and cries, and he cannot make it understand.
What does it cry? It cries,
“I will be good.”
•❃°•°❀°•°❃•
I don’t actually know why I have Instagram sometimes. Many times, I have thought about making a post, and hesitating to do it because it feels like asking for attention I don’t care about. As a platform, it feels superficial, and it seems like the only purpose is to document a memory for myself. I don’t love the likes and comments that come with it—there is no feeling, merely formulas to how people are supposed to react to a post.
Instead, I document memories through excessively taking photos and evidence, because they feel like evidence that something has occurred. Photos and videos have become my way of recall—I struggle to remember events without a trigger. Perhaps taking so many of these photos and videos have made my memory worse. It’s like the Google Effect, the idea that one’s memory is worse because they have the confidence that it can simply be searched up and is stored securely in bits.
Maybe even worse is looking back at a photo or video, and realizing that it’s all gone. After hanging out with a RISE friend in San Diego, it felt like letting go all over again, a cruel foreshadowing for the end of the year. I have prided myself in having a strong online presence in terms of keeping in touch with people online—keeping in touch is very much dependent on your response time. But I think I’m finally going to understand that having a hybrid relationship (one that is online and in-person) is not going to be the same as being strictly online or in-person.
I remember shortly after MathCounts Nationals, I met someone who went to the online version of the high school I attend. I learned tree(3) from him, and he was clearly pretty crazy in math. He could’ve been a great mentor for me, but I remember feeling uncomfortable with how quickly he responded to my messages. It was almost instant. I wouldn’t understand at the time, because I wasn’t as on top of responding to people online. But now, I understand. It’s really hard to keep in touch with someone if you let their message sit there for several days. Being chronically online maybe isn’t the best either, but going hybrid feels a lot like living in two worlds.
I don’t want to leave a trace…
Let me ask you this. Do you think leaving a trace is a bad thing?
Every time I’ve held a grudge towards someone, it was over something silly and I regretted it later. Also, I was highkey projecting most of the time.
The other person usually had something I didn’t have—a skill, a material good—so what it took to get over that grudge was correcting my understanding, getting over my insecurity, and appreciating the person for whatever I can learn from them. There are very few people who I truly have a reason to dislike. Even then, my instinct is to forgive, to acknowledge that there are differences but accept them anyway. I find that it is overall more exhausting to live with a grudge.
People say I’m kind or that I’m nice, which I always thought was out of politeness. Turns out that maybe it’s not? It feels weird to take those adjectives as defining features as mine, because it also feels like I am kind/nice for selfish reasons too. In middle school, the experience was so horrible that I would not want anyone to experience anything like I did.
I still live with a lot of these struggles—of self-loathing, of questioning life—and it turns out that a lot of these are not normal! But I hope that in sharing, it helps with knowing you’re not alone.
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
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