January (from The Professional, which can be read here)

He lays his hand on his parents’ foreheads and grips their flower cone with his fingers just as the girl did, reads the inscription– 3rd January 1999…called home to be with the Lord…greatly missed. He touches it. He breathes, trying to capture its essence. Breathes, trying to summon the feelings of the boy he was years ago, the boy with nothing to wear to the funeral but his primary school uniform, road rash peeking out from under his collar as he craned his neck to watch the custodian smooth wet cement along the edges of his parents’ nameplate. The boy who wasn’t afraid to sob all over his uniform and into the thighs of the aunts that took him in afterwards, the ones that told him to be strong for his parents, to grow up for them, to stop harping on the sad things and to never cry for them again. The boy who corked up his grief in those urns for fifteen years and thought that made him a man of steel.

His fingers slide down the concrete cold and slippery and no matter how hard he tries now, he can only imagine tears.

February (from the two plays I wrote during this period: one for my World Literature assignment based on Jean Anouilh's Antigone, and one for ACSIS Assortments based on Isaac Asimov's The Last Question)

ANTIGONE. I don’t think I would be a Queen like Ismene would be. Or a parent, or a wife, greeting her tired husband after work, with a smiling face and cheerful step. Perhaps we would not always be happy. Perhaps we would quarrel, and fall asleep at night with a space between us. Perhaps our children would cry.

On the top step rests AC. Alternatively silver and grey and white and transparent, she is very much part of a larger device; she kneels with her arms outstretched, held in position by a tangle of wires that extends throughout and beyond the back of the stage. Her head is down, a blindfold over her eyes.

March (from Water Treads and Aquarunners, which can be read here)

He looks and the uncle looks too, both of them smiling as they behold his pale, knobbly, cleft feet, with their two giant toes each that are twisted and bowed at the joints like lobster pincers. They smile down at the feet that his pastor calls devil’s hooves, the careful bandages his ever-worried mother wraps around them every morning now stained with dried sweat and blister-fluid like they always are after a long day and now unravelling smoothly in the water, borne by the rippling waves far away across the pool, far away where neither the uncle nor the boy can reach them.

April (from something no one will ever read)

(except for the times when she hit on something that was apparently something, that made his pale eyes solidify before he looked away, his face drawn up and shuttered like a window against a hard gale, whether it was in self-protection or determination she wouldn't be able to tell, and then the shutters would fly open again even wider and radiating even more light than before)

May (from a private blog post) (it was SYF-and-IAs month, apparently I didn't have any time for anything)

People who cry are people who fear and hate and feel so intensely that they must either cry or explode from the inside. They are of the same class as the fighters and the abusers and the maniacs and the murderers and the terrorists. Criers are the least socially destructive of all these pathotypes.

June (from something no one will ever read)

He was a boy who lived in caves all his life, caves within caves, and small spaces with still air were never a problem. Space made him nervous, like the first time he saw the sky, extending upwards to nowhere. Walls felt like home.

July (from something no one will ever read)

She knew the boy who'd stayed behind long after he'd left to keep working, working because he was so excited about how things were now and how they were to come.

And now she also knew the boy who stood before him now, his hands shaky and his lips all unsteady and wobbling like a child's, aquiver with words he didn't know how to say, let alone how to find.

If this girl could say that this wasn't a change for the better, wasn't an awakening from childish thought and indulgence, didn't that mean anything at all?

August (from a private blog post) (it was all-the-IAs-at-once month, it was a trying time)

Maybe if I say now that I want to believe in the God that's real it will circumvent all these earthly imperfections in information that no one can avoid, will circumvent all the different denominations and customs and systems of customs and customs of systems and interpretations of scripture and oysters and sodomy that we've made, this limbo we've pushed ourselves into in the quest of wanting to know. Maybe it doesn't need to be about knowing for sure, but about the act of it. Would we be extended that mercy?

September (from something no one will ever read)

October (from a private blog post) (it was post-prelims-pre-IB period; considering the mindset I was in at this point I'm surprised I could even get a coherent post out)

I'm getting quite sad and unsatisfied with studying plays for literature now. We should be watching these plays, not just reading them. Just reading them does not provide the same fruit for the untrained, inexperienced, unimaginative eye that seeing actually does. Unlike novels and unlike most of the poetry we do, we are studying these plays out of their natural habitat. I feel robbed, somehow.

November (from my personal statement for my application to the University of California)

This is the friction that sparked the fire in me that day. It wasn’t rebellion or even outright disagreement, but simply a stimulation of a nerve rubbed raw. It was a symptom of what has become my continuous quest to find myself. [...] Perhaps changing my environment will help me in letting me be an outside observer of this world and all these opinions I grew up with, and to let my own be shaped. Maybe I will finally succeed in balancing these voices in my head and making a life out of them that I’m happy with. Then I will return, and give my parents a real answer.

And just for fun, something written for ridiculous purposes on November 25th (my birthday) at around midnight (bonus points if you know what I'm basing it on):

This is some really densely-worded volume by German philosopher IMMANUEL KANT. You have never read it, but you have listened to your sister wax lyrical about him many times.

You’re really not sure about philosophy. You just don’t understand why things like MORALITY and HUMAN NATURE and FEELINGS need to be so complicated. It’s quite simple to you, and it’s simple in most things you read, particularly your SHOUNEN MANGA, and particularly NARUTO. It’s simple in a way you quite like, actually.

Your sister says it’s another thing you’ll grow out of, and you’re inclined to trust her. One day you will understand the UTTER BLEAK TANGLE OF MEANINGLESSNESS THAT CONSTITUTES THE HUMAN CONDITION.

Interestingly, this means that I've written on my birthday four times in the last five years, the last three being a streak from 2010 to 2012. I missed 2009 cos I went to New Zealand c:

December (from my personal essay for the Amherst College supplement)

I would rather my words be used as a vessel that others pour themselves into to look at like a mirror. I want to evoke them in them, not myself in them. That’s why acting brings me as much fulfillment as writing. Perhaps my name won’t be carried into the future, but I’m satisfied with simply living in many, many presents. Whether the ideas I inspire are mine or not, I still inspire them, and I know that, no matter how imperceptibly, those ideas last lifetimes. My ashes will line the lungs of those that see me and read me, and be breathed into those that come after them. That’s death overcome enough, for me.

January (from a collaboration with one of my closest and oldest friends) (it's, I quote, being written according to a "blah-first-edit-later" policy) (expect it... I don't know when it's gonna be done) (I wrote this yesterday after a month of writer's block)

“I mean, man, I bet that’s the reason why you got accepted so quick, you know? I... I dunno, I just... I’m not gonna sing praises or anything, but I stayed up pretty late reading that thing. And even now, it’s... I still remember it, like, I’m usually no good with words, but it’s stuck in my head. Visually. I can’t even say if it was good or not but I saw something.”

Aaaaand yeah! That's about it. I'm quite surprised I was actually able to complete the whole thing, though I had to halfway-cheat at least, like, three times. Oh well.

I don't think I've really improved at all. Which I guess is my fault. Maybe I improved from 2011 to 2012, through my mentorship and IB-level literature classes and reading, but that isn't what this meme is tracking. Also, the meme represents writing in all stages of drafting and editing and post-editing (the ones on my Clippings portfolio, the assignments and the essays were edited thoroughly; TLQ, the unsourced passages and the collab weren't edited at all) so it's inaccurate in that way too. Still, I get the feeling I've reached some sort of plateau, and possibly, if I were to put it arrogantly, a peak. I'm not sure where I'm going from here. I hope it's good, and I hope that progress is on the horizon in ways I can't even foresee right now.

Anyway so now I've self-indulgently celebrated the end of my writer's block, time to hopefully start writing again and figure out what to do with my life <_<