felt like a terribly sorry excuse for a human being today. spent the whole night and wee hours of the morning editing photos for a production and fell asleep in the midst of doing it. woke up way too late and missed all my classes. wanted to die. i had told myself that i would stop missing classes this semester.

tried to burn the photos into a disc but accidentally deleted them all away. what was worse was that the pictures were urgently required and i had to submit them by 3pm and it was already 2. took hours to retrieve them, only to realize that they were completely corrupted. every single picture was scratched with black, green, blue and red lines all over. nothing could be salvaged. everything was gone, gone, gone.

my mother remarked, after my string of "fuck"s, "aiyah, you're not a photographer anyway. they shouldn't have asked you lor. what were they thinking?!"

i told this to my boy over the phone and he chuckled quietly and said jokingly, "well, there's a reason why you gave up photography you know..."

i winced inwardly and blinked back sudden tears. couldn't decided between strangling them or strangling myself.

"i hate myself," i said, "i'm such a failure. i'm a stupid stupid girl."

"no lar," he said curtly, tired of me repeatedly beating myself down, "can you stop saying that and just concentrate for one moment?"

i bit my lip as he proceeded to coolly and carefully give me a series of instructions to follow on what to do in order to get myself out of the mess that i had masterfully created on my own.

my hands did whatever he told me to do but my brain was spinning with spiteful self-mockings, "why can't you be more like him. see he has everything under control. you never get anything done. you never get anything right. so useless. so worthless. so fucking weak. just a damn fucking lousy piece of shit who screws everything up."

later on while in the shower, the self-loathing and self-disgust and self-pity was so strong and unbearable that i had to slap myself. it was either that or cut, but cutting is so thirteen years old scrawny teenage girl with big raw red pimples and dark circles and frizzy hair and legs as thin as a pair of wooden chopsticks and a chest so flat that her friends could never resist the temptation to hit it with their bony elbows and remark, "wah lao eyyy can be aeroplane strip sia" as she laughs with awful shame. no. not anymore.

my skin burned a bit and the stinging sensation felt so good. my boy sometimes likes to imagine that we are in this melodramatic sort of japanese anime/romantic-comedy. he'll pretend to be furious and slap me across the cheek. powww! when i'm in a good mood, i'll oblige and move my head as though reacting to that blow and pout as though truly hurt. i thought of all that and suddenly had to smile to myself.

when i went into the living room to continue working on my laptop, my mum came up to me and wordlessly pressed a hot cup of milo into my hands, her hands cupping around mine firmly.

"drink drink drink," she said warmly, "drink now! whole day you haven't even eaten anything..."

"orh," i replied.

later on i would receive call after call after call from my worried boy who only wanted to know how i was doing and how everything was.

i'm okay.

it seems that each day, i find more and more flaws about myself, and less and less positive aspects to keep me going. i take each and every little thing too hard. i'm over-sensitive. i imagine the worse. i give up so easily. i self-destruct. what's good about me? what's there to love about me? i don't know. more often than not, i don't remember. because i forget, it means the world to me to be reminded day after day, second after second, of all the infinite multi-coloured dreams and endless possibilities i could reach inside me, by the ones who tenderly piece my heart together and keep it intact.

there is no such thing as a perpetual high. if you go up up up, you must come down down down and hit the ground.

the ground is rough and hard and i try to breathe. the air stabs my lungs but i don't scream. the air stabs my lungs in a surprisingly sharp and wonderfully overpowering way. the air smells so fresh and sweet. i can hear my heart beating in my ears and the blood rushing to my head. i've never felt more real and alive.