All Day [Growing Up]

"So what is it that you do all day?" I've been asked since I moved into my own place. Me, who thrives in the midst of crowds that know only to adore me, so suddenly solitary.

It frustrates me how everyone is frustrated that I chose to do this and then whine about it.

YOU GUYS. I JUST LIKE COMPLAINING. Seriously, it's a thing. There are support groups for extreme complaining as a sport.

The novelty of living by yourself is not only fantastic, it's something that, once you get past the I'm-so-cold-and-lonely-hold-me part, you will want for the rest of your life.

It's when you live alone that the age-old saying "YOLO, motherfuckers" comes to life with new, very relevant meaning.

So what do I do?

I do errands.
Errands and chores are the most unfortunate by-product of modern life. I'm unemployed, but I'm constantly working. Laundry, frantic floor scrubbing, cleaning, doing the dishes, organizing and re-organizing, getting called crazy obsessive by my brothers, etc. I took for granted the fact that I always had someone else do all of these things for me in Jeddah. Now I pay the price with un-gloved hands. #SaudiGirlProblems

This afternoon, I walked to the supermarket, unknowingly for the best walk since I got here, with my TARDIS shopping bag. (Makati very recently became a plastic-free city, so there are no plastic bags anywhere, just brown paper bags for your groceries and I hate those because I don't know how to deal.) A car zooms past me, and from inside it, someone yells "TARDIS!!" at me, and suddenly, my life became the greatest thing that happened to me.

Suddenly, I didn't feel so alone in the world. YES! I wanted to yell back. YES, A TARDIS! MY COMRADE!

My magnificent Tardis shopping bag made by the hands of Souma and Sahrish.

The moral of this story is like all other stories: silver linings. Errands are not so bad.

I hold hands with the internet.
It's lonely, I've said it before. I have no friends here yet, because starting friendships means a lot of explaining.

"Here, this is me, put me neatly into this box," is what I have to say so that people can try to understand who I am, why I'm here, why they should be friends with me.

But I'm not ready to explain myself. I want MY friends, who don't need any explanations, with whom conversations are just back-and-forths.

So I cherish small things: 45-second videos of their faces, their voices through the Skype lag, messages I wake up to, pictures of tiny details of their lives. All assisted by the internet.

I figure out my next step.
I also spend a lot of time by my window, with my magnificent view of a city, thinking about my immediate future and what needs to be done to get to it. This is what I do.

My view is so emo.

I so mistakenly thought that by this time, at 29, when I'd finally gotten my act together and jumped the major hurdles, that everything would fall into place. WRONG AGAIN!

And it's not so bad, yo. I'm starting to love the misery and misfortune of uncertainty, wearing it like an armour.

Who knows what comes next?

We'll find out.