Winter of Our Discontent |

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My thoughts race ahead of me. I’m already out of breath, and my thoughts are already out of my view. I am the tortoise. My thoughts are the hare. I hate waking up in the middle of the night like this. It’s almost 2am in the morning, and I wake up with a burning chest trying to grasp onto the remnants of a dream I just had. No luck. No pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Just a hazy mind – a burning heart – and the desire to rest my head yet again. Frustration is not the right word to describe this feeling. The word to describe this feeling with its multiple layers is simply out of reach. The only consolation that I have is that it is Friday – the threshold into a 3 day weekend. Let me try to go back to sleep…

I’m back again, and it’s 4am. I live close to an area hospital, so the majority of the residents in my building are actually residents (in the medical sense). As one one would expect, these residents work fairly strange hours. Between the hours of 3am and 4am, a female resident enters our apartment building with a slam of the front door and plods her way upstairs to her apartment. I do not mind her slamming the door so much as her heels pounding their way up the stairs. Maybe she is not aware of the stairwell’s great acoustics. Maybe this girl does not care if the rest of the world is sleeping (excluding me of course), and she is merely cut from a self absorbed lot. I don’t know; but, if this happens again, I am going to peak my head out and let her know that someone is ‘sleepless in apartment 1R’ because of her. At the moment, I have so many thoughts still racing through my mind. Maybe that is why I cannot sleep as well. I’ve yet to master the technique of ’quieting the mind’. My thoughts linger as to preparing for a much needed trip, worrying about my parents in Texas, being a better boyfriend, job hunting, writing, photography, resumes, internships, graduate schools, civil service exams, exercising, what to cook for breakfast, new movies, new apps, my birthday, Bill Clinton, and Alexander McQueen…

Alexander McQueen. A damn shame. I was never one to keep up with fashion trends, but I have been familiar with his work in numerous passing glances through the years. I’m not a fashionista or designer by any stretch of the imagination and spandex, but the works that I had the pleasure of witnessing were quite simply the work of a visionary. I never knew that clothing could bend, mend, and transcend in such a fashion. He created moving art rather than simply ‘clothes’. It’s frightening to know that a sadness so deep could reach someone that has attained such heights. Many designers continue to strive to the heights that McQueen was able to reach, and many of them fail. Wealth and fame do not fill the void or nurture the spirit it seems. My intuition and suspicion tells me that McQueen’s mom was his compass and north star and to lose her caused him to lose his way. On so many occasions, you come across individuals who appear to be living the charmed life looking down upon the rank and file only to realize that they’re merely standing at the edge of a cliff – waiting to fall at a moment’s notice. When I heard about McQueen’s suicide, I thought of another figure in the fashion world that committed suicide – Daul Kim. I hope to never know the sadness that these two have felt. I wish those two were here to overcome their depressions and immerse themselves in the beauty of life. All I know is that the two of them left the world too soon like a few that I’ve known. All I know is that I hope they have found peace on the other side even though they had much to live for on this side.