Nevergirl's

WARNING: Picture-heavy post. Might nuke your browsers, especially if you’re running IE.

Happiness may be good for my heart but it isn’t good for my creativity. I write best when I’m unhappy or discontent. Iris made a point about this before. “It’s drama that fuels our writing,” she wrote to me once. “We write best when our hearts are not at rest.”

‘course, I could have gotten the line wrong, but I’m sure I got the sentiment right.

Back when Iris was a single girl with a single toothbrush in her Bangkok flat and back when I was a 24-year-old who secretly cried in the office whenever I felt overwhelmed at having to play boss to 70 people or so (it was sudden; I wasn’t ready; no one prepared me), we wrote frequently and we wrote memorably. Now, I write without cheek, without color, without soul.  Sometimes, things get so mundane I even write about blackheads on nose. I’m not sure if I should be grateful or alarmed. On the one hand, I wish I wrote like I did before. But tell me, how can anyone complain about running out of angst?

This place—it’s too beautiful to stay indifferent to for too long. When I first moved here, I vowed this would never be home. But every day, I wake up to a pond lush with lilies, to a garden that charms and beckons… and it does not help at all that all this postcard perfection lies just outside my window!

In the mornings, there's a symphony of blues and greens.

In the afternoons, I wake up from my nap to THIS beautiful play of yellows and browns.

We'd frolick with the kids by the gazebo.

Or read until it gets too dark to see the pages.

Who could stay unmoved by this? It’s quiet here… but in a good way, and on days like this one, this place feels amazingly, startlingly a lot like home.

(Note to self: Don’t be sad about the memories you left behind; make new ones.)