i am about to vomit my thoughts onto this page

Are you ready for this?

Disclaimer: Ugh, words. Sometimes you are so insufficient. Also, sorry I apparently have lost the ability to make coherent sense.

I'm not in the mindset to rant but I just need to sit here and type type type every annoying thought that crosses my mind without pause and without editing.

Wait, let me get cereal & nutella (yum, dinner) for when my fingers get tired. Also, I need to finish my milk before it goes bad.

Okay, actually, scratch everything I've said above (bar the writing my exact thoughts bit because obviously, I'm still doing that).

A few days ago I decided that I need to learn to listen more than I speak when I'm around people I know well. Around people I don't know, I'm mostly very quiet and cautious but once I get to know them, I probably overtake a lot of the conversation. And that's not very nice of me. So I'm working on that. Simple things like asking how people are instead of reveling in their asking how I am.

I made a list of things that were weighing down my mind a few days ago, just to get it down and pinpointable and attackable and then suddenly, I discovered something new to add.

(When the hell did it become February?)

I've built up a very sudden, very early aversion to turning twenty. In my head, when I imagine my birthday coming nearer and nearer, I actually picture myself cartoonish-ly leaning back on my heels, digging into the ground to brake as fast as possible, as thought I were about to hit a wall. That's pretty much how I feel. 19 has been so good to me. With 19, I am still an impressive teenager, I am still closer to being a child than an adult. A silly thought: it holds an almost hip and "with-it" sort of connotation that I cannot connect to 20, even though I know my 19 has been nothing of the sort. But twenty is just so far on the other side.

I'm not ready for all of this sudden shifting across the point of no return. I think that's the root of all my worrying and agonising. Everything is rushing head-on, piling straight on top of me so ridiculously quickly, without time for rest and recovery and acceptance. It makes me feel like that's how every moment for the rest of my life is going to end.

Ugh, thought vomit paragraph commencing; I couldn't hold it back: Every time I've spoken to my parents for the last two weeks, each time I've hung up, I started to cry. I can't help thinking how vast the spaces are between us, spread across the world like we are. How I don't get to spend one last full year at home but even if I quit university now or if I'd gone to UCLA like I'm quite certain I should have and stayed home, it wouldn't be the same because my family's not there and I can't go back to high school and have that routine the way it once was. I miss high school. I miss home. Right now, I just want to spend the rest of my life in California at home, the way it will never, ever be. Can you imagine? There are things that will never ever be the way they began, the way they're ingrained in my head and heart. And yet. I'm so excited to live in the UAE. I wish I could have stayed in the middle east through till high school and I'm jealous my sister gets to. I miss my family. I feel like I'm living with the sole purpose of making it till June when I can go back. I want to go back now. I want to go to Disneyland. I want to be certain. I want to roam Target and Costco with my mom. I want to go back to being a kid, living in Kuwait, slipping on the dusty tiles of our backyard. I've never had such a strong urge to revert to childhood.

I haven't had a rest since September and it's breaking me. I keep thinking of all the ways my life could have gone differently. I'm so stupidly mentally and emotionally exhausted. Second year is insane. I've had three days to not think about academics and then I restarted bright and early today and I felt like I'd never stopped. I don't have time to breathe for the next 8 weeks or so. And the problem with always living on a countdown is that once I get there, to whatever I'm waiting for, it just flies past and feels like it never happened. I don't want to always be counting down. It just reminds me of how much time I don't have. I don't have time before I turn twenty. I don't have time before I go home. I don't have time before my family leaves home. I don't have time before third year. I don't have time before grad school. Grad school? What am I even doing with my life?

Oh, let's add in the fact that I haven't been able to sleep at all for the last two weeks and the only way I made it to my 9.45am exams was by staying up the night before and pushing through till my 2pm exams and then not sleeping again. I lie in bed, ever so quietly on the outside, watching the ceiling slowly adjust in the dark and I listen to my thoughts. The thoughts that don't want to linger on exams so they turn to having left home which frustrates me as I start to get upset so I move my thoughts once more and they land ever so hopelessly on my quiet wakefulness and in this circular torment of thoughts, I curl up and cry. I feel like something's wrong with me -- I just can't stop.

It doesn't help to think in five months I'll be home. I just keep picturing my mom and sister leaving my brother and me at home, home alone for two months before we leave our house half empty. And if my mom comes to send us off, it kills me to think of leaving her home alone, knowing that she'll be leaving the house empty. I keep thinking of all the places I haven't had at my fingertips these last few years and realising I won't have them at my fingertips for more than just 'these few years.' I keep thinking of sitting on my couch and knowing that my mom isn't just out grocery shopping and coming back in a bit. It makes everything so so far away. I feel so stranded.

I feel like this isn't even the half of it. Like life is finally shaking me out of whatever shelter I've been in for all my years and showing me that this is how it's going to be from now on. I don't appreciate it, not one bit.

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Um. I just got a call that my friends' flat just got raided by the police. Um. So. Wow, what a way to lose my steam.