Tag: moments

What Matters: The long ride after the longest ride.

This is a new segment of my blog. It’s called What Matters.

Millennials are supposedly the loneliest generation. We have the luxury of connecting with each other in more ways than what has been possible in the past. With the emerging of the internet and social media, we can connect with humans across the world from us, instantaneously. So, why are we so lonely?

We live in a society where no one talks about their real life. Maybe it’s from the stigma and shame of vulnerability. We think no one wants to know how we are really feeling, so we respond with “I’m good, how are you?” 

We choose to show how we want to be seen by posting our active moments, our adventurous selves, and our beautiful faces on social media. We cover our blemishes, our scars, with filters. Even those not participating in the social media world put filters on themselves and what they share with others. Nobody gets that close to anyone. What we give are the good looking framed pieces of our lives. 

So, this segment is meant to shed light on the real moments of life. On the moments that we don’t talk about, the moments that we don’t think anybody cares about. Really, the moments that we are scared to share. Because life is not all good. We forget that we all lose our cool sometimes. This is not meant to be a pity party, or me venting, but to show pivotal moments in my life that are real, are ugly, and even embarrassing. Because I am not just the filtered cropped pictures on my socials, and neither are you. If we share ourselves with each other more, really become transparent with one another, we may realize that we are more relatable with each other than we thought. From there, maybe we can beat the loneliness that consumes our generation.

Every moment in our life matters. Our feelings matter. The small things matter.

So, I want to share my moments. Because they mean something to me. I might leave out the backstory. I might leave it vague. But, I aim to share some small parts of my story, my life, that would normally get shoved under the rug and never spoken about. 

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THE LONG RIDE AFTER THE LONGEST RIDE

Sitting there, after ripping my own heart out just hours ago, I hold a carnation given to me by a stranger. I feel every bump of the shuttle ride. I shift around my backpack on my lap and stare at a spot on the floor.  I feel eyes on me by the people sitting across from me. I know they can tell I’ve been crying. I let it stain my face. I don’t care. I sit there with a broken heart and a shattered frame of mind, flower in hand. When I get home I put the flower in a glass of water. The next morning it starts to show signs of wilting. The next day even more so. I let it sit on my kitchen table until it bends low below the rim of the glass, dead in a puddle of water.

Sometimes we have to remember

This morning, I ate 4 cinnamon rolls, the kind that comes in the tube that you have to smash open. Each bite was less satisfying than the one before, but still I continued eating. The frosting is what kept me going. I got the cream cheese kind because, well duh.

Sometimes, the frosting is what keeps us there, in a good moment. Underneath the mundane reality of a singular moment, is something sweet enough to make it memorable. These sweet moments, although may be short in duration, last long and strong in our memories. Because, it’s not about how recent something happened, but how memorable it was. That’s what matters. Our life is compiled of events. Some of them are sweeter than others, and those are the ones that usually continue to stand out to us over time.

Time is something that goes, always. It will always be there, and it will always be gone, away from us. What we need to remember is not the amount of time away we are from the good moments, but the moments themselves. Because they will always be there. They won’t change, they happened. They may have moved us, stopped us, made us ponder, or made us feel. The fact is that they were there, apart of us. We forget too often about the memories that matter to us. Our present reality is not everything, although a lot of us rely on it for happiness. When we take a look back at our frosting moments, we get another glimpse of something we let live back in our mind. When we bring it to the front, we see and recognize something that continues to be a part of us. Because we aren’t just made up of this moment, but all the moments before. And we should remember that even though the past is where they live, they are still with us, always.

 

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