growing up is hurtful

Wednesday, November 17th, 2022

Dodge Media Archive Library, Orange, CA.

this is a facebook post.

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In the moment i have the most fun here i hear my mom's biggest fear echoing at the back. adulting is not growing out of something, it's being divided and torn apart. adulting is not becoming bigger but smaller and fragmented.

to have a whole childhood is to have a scattered adulthood. maybe that's why i like doing scrapbook, ironically. tearing things into pieces and putting it together - to keep ones that matter and make new wholeness out of it. The odd of a completion made of random jigsaws. But is it always the nature of everything? - everything's made of fragments, elements, ingredients, organs, cells, atoms. To be is not just to be but to be held together firmly. Being intact is temporary, the glue decides the durability, nothing is forever.

Maybe this is the new way of thinking about co-existence. Maybe that's moving on. Maybe moving on is not about you leaving people behind but leaving a part of you behind. Maybe moving on is not about returning to a full moon but being a whole crescent moon.

Again, it's about being torn apart: những nỗi nhớ cồn cào the childhood toys left in the basement the uniform given to cousins the schools you left the nostalgia the flashback that gives you goosebumps the memory you can never return to the moment the plane took off the laugh that ended the friends that just disappeared the eaten cakes the sent messages the spoken words the outgrown love the outfitted arms

the grown kid.