Turn the page

As I grow older, I started noticing a few things that keep me up all night. It happened this week, this involuntary thinking. I was talking to mom in the kitchen after our working hours. She talked about her worries and I shared mine too. We talked about the act of moving on and the analogy of turning pages that everyone knows about.

The act of turning implies change, becoming, spinning, or revolving. To me, it implies change within something that already existed, and this ‘something’ will still exist afterwards — either as a distant memory or as the potential of becoming again. I realized there needs to be a thread connecting the pages — yes, there is more than one page — and this connection is not only present on the cover of the book but in the content between the pages itself. One thing leads to another. A domino maze of actions depicted by words, drawings or splashes of cheap highlighter you bought back in your university years.

This made me realize that, by default, if you start reading a sentence in one page and stop reading it before you go to bed, the next day you will have to come back to the previous page for context. Not only for context, but for meaning. Pages are usually connected by words, sometimes slashed in half, in paragraphs or to fit into publishing norms. If moving on can be read, visually, as the act of turning pages, then I need to think a lot about the context and the lack of meaning. I also need to think that a new chapter only exists because there was an old one.

Life, just like a book, is about the threading of the pages and chapters, of having empty pages and scribbles on the side of others. It’s about realizing that you can’t pretend turning a page means forgetting what came before that and dealing with it but keeping it real and flowing with whatever the world throws your way. Parts of me are linked to this new version of who I am today, and who I am today will bring meaning to who I’m going to become tomorrow.

And so there’s this thought: The new page breathes itself anew, connecting dots in between layers of a bigger story. There is always something bigger within us, as if we’re stars in a constellation. Where do you see yourself in ten years? A year? A few days from now? All I can see is you here and now and maybe that has always been enough, I guess we were just too busy with other things to notice.

I could hear my own voice in a Korean drama the other day. One of the main characters was always murmuring about life and love, saying he was busy caring about the things no one cared about. The harshness of the earth, the beauty in blossoming trees, the scorching heat of the summer and how it leaves the back of our necks red and itchy. I felt like I was seeing myself out there, in a fictional Korea waging war against Japan. I could see me busying myself with these pointless things.

I’m moving on from things but looking back might hurt sometimes. But I’ve realized the hurting is just part of the process, as is the act of moving onto better things. I’ve been dreaming of becoming something so big I could swallow my old self whole and somehow this mental image brings me some comfort in the changing of seasons that are happening inside me.

Lately I’ve been staying up all night thinking about some of these pointless and the not so pointless things. I could say I’m daydreaming about the next page, while memorizing every line on the current one. Like revolving around the sun.

Right now, I’m realizing I could touch you if I reached my arm far enough.

Maybe we’re neighbors in this constellation.