I think everyone knows what it's like to wallow in your own sadness, drowning in melancholy and self-pity, after a painful heartbreak. I don't know what it is with us humans and keeping ourselves trapped in a cage of sorrow and anguish. Maybe we're all disgusting masochists at heart. Or is it the pain that makes us what we are? Does pushing the help away just to suffocate in all the negativity really help us in any way? Why do we subject ourselves to this torment despite knowing it does more harm than good?
Summer is my least favorite season. It's humid, stifling, sticky, even agonizing at times. But it's simultaneously the season I feel so much love and nostalgia for. There's something about the heat that makes one feel so incredibly alive when you're young. Isn't it so damningly beautiful how all these growing pains you endure build you into such a beautiful butterfly in the end?
I retain no recollection of 98% of the events that transpired during my sophmore year of high school. Maybe it's the sadness of the thought of my parents getting a divorce (they did not), or the mental turmoil I was undergoing at the time, or perhaps it was emotional abuse I was experiencing at home and at school. My time during those times is a blur.
Maybe it's the music. Maybe it's the emotional growing pains of that period in life. Maybe it's the first love everyone inevitably experiences. I can't believe it's taken me so long to have finally seen this film. I don't know how I would've felt or reacted if I'd seen this in theaters at the time.
Spontaneous, and indecisive.
Chaotic one moment, dull the next.
A hopeless romantic, easily changing minds.
A living dichotomy, a contradiction.
Losing a loved one. Never again to be seen.
Rebellious, yet obedient.
Hallucinatory dreams, while fully awake.
Life is an oxymoron.
Mary is happy, Mary is not happy.
It's all Mary.
The lot of us queer Asian diaspora know what a ride it is finding and accepting your own queer identity whilst going against the grain of the heteronormative lives we're expected to lead. I imagine that experience must be so much more difficult for older first generation immigrants, especially when they've already lived out much of their lives unable to follow their true calling. May all of us follow our hearts and live as our real selves. Your youth is never wasted.
Frustratingly bland to a fault, starts out with a promising enough premise but is inevitably run into the ground via a haphazard plotline and juvenile ending. The only source of excitement one could get out of this is Rosamund Pike's acting (carried btw), and by the time the film was over all I could think about was how little I care about her character or about anything that happened.
「3P頑張ったんですか、良かったですね。」
Happy Pride Month!
At a certain point in my life, I had a mind so fragile my body would go into a frenzy each time I stepped outside. I'd break into tears, numbness consuming my limbs, each and every square inch of my flesh trembling violently. I couldn't handle social interactions; how could anyone speak to someone like me, much less display a sign of kindness? Even as my general aversion to social situations eased slightly, for a very long time I found it difficult to process situations where people did things for me, complimented me. It's as if my entire being rejected the idea of happiness, of being treated like a human being, from years of being told I didn't deserve such a thing. It's much easier to accept these things when you treat it as a transaction, to delude myself into thinking, "these people are just doing what they should be doing." And when the end comes, you'll have no settlements to make.
The person who repeatedly crushed my dreams, my self esteem, my spark of life, was my mother. This film has no "good" mother figure. No role models, no nurturing entity to enrich their children's minds. Nanami doesn't know what she wants or needs. She goes with the flow to the point where she's treated as a doormat. She had no real mother to speak of, and thus is a child trapped in a woman's body. It's especially why the ending with Mashiro's mother is crushingly beautiful. She's never known this woman. And yet through her, she's able to confront her own relationship with her mother. A small step towards healing.
Finding your self, especially under these conditions, in this day and age is difficult. How is it that the birth of the internet age was supposed to make social life flourish, and yet it brought just the opposite? Only loneliness prevails, naiveté clouding judgement, and life moves along... with or without you. There's no right or wrong, life or death. In this life we're all thrown into the harsh waves and expected to learn to waddle, just as sea turtles are born to do. But maybe, within that journey, we'll find a glimmer of our selves, learn from people, be hurt, be loved. And just maybe, we'll live to see yet another day.














































