I try to keep this blog mostly fashion related, but the truth is I also look at this as a personal time capsule; I want to be able to look back on this and know what I was feeling, what my life was like. I have a bad memory. I tried keeping more than one blog up to date but failed – so every several months or so, you might have to skip over a slightly off-topic, more personal post. Feel free to gloss over this whole post if you’re just here for the fashion.

Lately, I’ve been in a transient state of cloudy discernment and emotional regression.

And I’ve been lost. I’ve been completely lost.

I’m telling you now that the New Year, remaining loyal to my tradition, hasn’t started until I say it has begun. I can’t bring myself to start off the year with such a feeling of bewilderment; I need a direction and I need it to be pointing forward. Instead, I’m looking over my shoulder and blindly tripping over everything ahead of me. What is missing inside of me that keeps me absolutely fixated on the past, especially in what should be new beginnings?

I guess I’m just lost.

Yet, here I am in one piece and breathing easily, my heart a little abnormal but still beating. Where is the tragedy in my ordinary life, and what is so wrong with today that makes me want to drown myself in my past? I’m starting to think that I don’t know how to function without chaos and heartache in my life. It’s all I ever knew and at times I’m hopeless without it, desperately searching for something to keep me from ever being content. Sometimes I’m afraid of contentment, because I never want to stop looking for more.

My past week in particular was a lachrymose fairytale with me, the dubious heroine: it was both beautiful and utterly disastrous. I went from being miserable to giggling my face off and making the most of an awful weekend and having a huge fight with people I love. I attempted to see my dad, failed, tried again, failed. Made a similar attempt to see my grandfather, failed, gave up and resigned myself to the idea that hell, my family didn’t want me there in the first place. I sank into a friend’s couch, feeling both defeated and vindicated at the same time, because this was always the universe’s plan for me and I knew – I just knew that it would all fall apart. Woe is me, boo-hoo-hoo. New Year’s traditions and anything to do with my father are always a tragedy; to act as though this was all a great shock is misleading and selfish. I made a three hour drive to escape bad memories and ended up looking for more of them. Isn’t that the epitome of teen angst? And here I am, twenty five. I consider myself a generally happy person and it doesn’t take much to make me ecstatic, but I slip up from time to time. The past several months, it has been more like time to time to time, time, time.

To a great extent, we make our own happiness and create our own misery. I went and found the latter, but after renting a car and treading to my friend’s place, something (and someone) made me want to discard it for the former. So, we went to St. Augustine, because it was too cold for rides at Disney World.

St. Augustine: you, a friend and a pair of starlight glasses saved my weekend and gave me a bit of clarity. Maybe it was the haze from my teary swollen eyes but by golly, you felt like something out of a dream. A very chilly, very pretty, very welcome little dream. I might be feeling a little lost again and I’m positive it’s self-imposed…but dear, pretty, ghostly St. Augustine, I do love the way your lights danced and temporarily brought me out of the doldrums and halfway into the new year.

My original New Year’s resolution was to be a better person, whatever that means. With the way things have been going, I’m not sure if I’m there yet or will be there anytime soon. Instead, for right now, I intend to keep dreaming in the daylight and keeping calamity at bay. I need a little sunshine, a little clarity, a little bit of fantasy and a lot of love. Reality is obviously a little too mundane for me, which just sends me into disarray. I’ve always been a night owl – it’s when I feel most creative, most compelled to write, to love, to apologize and forgive. I just need to figure out how to keep that constant through my days, to keep my idle hands from starting fires just to entertain. I need adventure; I need to start living a little more. I need to be happier, always. For that, I think my dailies should at least resemble my nightly reverie. It isn’t as though my dreams are ever that unreasonable. I can’t decide if this is an achievable goal or if I am just kidding myself.

I’ve always believed that what the stars ignite, the sun will smother. Is it possible to keep on dreaming in the daylight, or should I just resign myself to sleep forever?

Whatever the right answer may be, I hope that my New Year starts tomorrow. I miss being little miss sunshine.

Love love,
Keiko Lynn