I can listen no longer in silence

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago… I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant…For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this?” – Captain Wentworth, Persuasion

It is as if nothing ever existed. There were you and me, and then there was emptiness all around. Emptiness can be scary, but if tolerated long enough it comforts, even satisfies. No blissful ups, no heartbreaking downs, no never-ending hopes nor crippling betrayal. As time goes by, you learn to live with yourself, you learn to rely on you and grow happy with your freedom. You think that you are so mature, your heart so strong now that nothing in the world can hurt you as it used to, and more importantly no one.

But one day there comes a storm. A lighting strike illuminates the world around you and you see the things as they are, naked of illusions you’ve created. The reality breaks through the walls of your beloved emptiness and erases the boundaries of your comfort zone, ripping the protective wire you spent so long wrapping around your heart. And there he is, standing in the rain in front of you, and he is the same, and you find yourself utterly unprepared, not strong at all, in fact the weakest thing in the entire world, and it’s as if the last two and a half years apart were never lived. It’s as if you never let him go, as if you never ruined your happiness and his. 

 

I felt my heart skip a few beats and my body shake profusely the minute I heard he was in the country. Memories started flooding my head and the more I remembered, the harder I cried. The room went dark for a second and I had to grab the nearest wall to maintain my balance. Not only have I felt every emotion possible, but I was utterly unprepared to feel so much and so suddenly, and worst of all, I had absolutely no hope of any of these feelings ever being mutual again. I knew he had every right to distance himself. I suspected he’d never forgive me and I have come to terms with losing him, or almost have. I thought I had all the strength in the world, but I had none. I thought I had no love left in me, but I had it all.
 

So I gathered a few bits of courage and wrote to him. I dropped only a couple of lines, asking about his trip, staying neutral in tone and struggling not to give away any signs of my pain. The rest of the day seemed like forever. I heard nothing. I cried more, I drank a bit and I cried again. The following morning I woke up to a note from him. There wasn’t much said, but he responded, and that fact alone made me grow wings and fly through the day. We exchanged a few more words and those words gave me more hope than is probably healthy. I am no Anne, he’ll never be my Captain Wentworth and real life rarely grants us with happy endings. But a girl can dream, can’t she?

Abre los ojos

“If your knowledge were your wealth then it would be well earned,” I heard as I woke up this morning. It played in the background of my dream, and those last few minutes in between pressing the snooze button, I whispered along.

Erykah’s songs pull me in, and I keep falling into them, absorbing some new emotions along the way but never really hitting the ground… Just hanging there and thinking, how in the grand scheme of things I still have miles to fly to grasp at least a little something in this world.

It’s good to wake up believing you can change something for better. It’s harder to sustain that faith as you go through the day.

Image credit: vhm-alex

6 a.m.

I long for other you
Unable to release
This grip
Of fingers turning blue
I act at ease
Then hide to weep
Under my skin
From hand of fate
Its painful scratch
For I have seen
Your falling state
Please stay and catch
Day's quiet cue
Please try to be
For sunrise longer
The other you
Hold on to me
Till I grow stronger
And leave behind
This place
Its dust
My lover’s mind
His fading grace
His lust

Your face
My past

Fire, fire

I see your sky is coming down
with the same color as mine
Oh, it seems to me
you and I are not safe to combine...

So you sit right in front of me, the pupils of your eyes bright, the flashes of your smile sincere, our thought exchange meaningful... once again. I can’t help but wonder, what should I do with you? Should I put you in my pocket and carry around like a notebook full of quotes from a read I want to remember even as I put it away? Can I keep the book itself or will the life library charge me life if I don’t return it 30 days from now? Should I close the book as soon as the words I want to hear become a distraction from what life says should be heard and done or can I flip the pages for just a few more bittersweet hours till the candle buns out and the dawn strikes my eyelids with the sharp awareness of reality that’s so unreal? Can the book be recycled after pages were torn out, torn apart, thrown in the trash and taken out just to be used as tablecloth in the attic of secrets, to cover things that would otherwise embarrass the collective perception with their nakedness?

Or maybe, just maybe, I can put it in the drawer by my bedside and make it my Bible, and take it out each day for a stroll on a path where flowers are grown not of seeds but of minds, and the rain is soaked not by skin but by spirit itself. Maybe I can keep it in the inner pocket of my jacket as I take a bus ride on my escape route from life, seeking the inexistent yet place where the hearts above guide the stalled ideas below, leading them away from being as told to be by life, reminding them to listen instead to the whisper of the single shivering leave on the tree that grew upside down in the most real of afternoon dreams.

Even though this chapter of us may be the shortest one yet, all that matters is how much meaning we are willing to put in each word, how loud we are eager to yell over the gray habitual buzz to help the world hear our voices, and how high we’ll strive to fly to touch the rainbows... even if only once.

...As thousand days roll by
Come for it
Come for it again.


Lyrics used in the post: Fire Fire by Asha Ali

Not in love

“Most affections are habits or duties we lack the courage to end.”
~ Henry Millon De Montherlant

I stopped a breath short of loving him in a room where love was no longer present. Only a hint of it has remained, not in his look but in the little heart drawn on my window, long time ago, with someone else’s finger. His attempt of a touch was cold, it was late, it wasn’t sincere. I shivered. Sobriety was filling me up with every new hour of dawn. No matter how hard I held on to Saturday night, Sunday morning was dragging me into its empty stomach, into another time, another room. I choked on the air thick with things unsaid. As I lay there staring at the ceiling, I realized all of a sudden that I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t want to say.

So I let him go.

There goes the story of the night I found out that broken heart doesn’t mix well with tequila, but also discovered the strength in me I didn’t know I had.

I am now free.

* * *

Once in a house on a hill
A boy got angry
He broke into my heart
For a day and a night
I stayed beside him
Until I had no hope
So I came down the hill
Of course I was hurt
But then I started to think
It shouldn't hurt me to be free
It's what I really need
To pull myself together
But if it's so good being free
Would you mind telling me
Why I don't know what to do with myself…

~ Emiliana Torrini

* * *

To me, the image in this post symbolizes freedom. It’s hard to explain and might be even harder to relate to, because no two images are alike as perceived by two minds. I think uniqueness is not cherished enough. I think the gift of it can be most truly appreciated when we’re hastily poured onto canvas of life, mixed with other shades and brush strokes, spilled over blankness of fixed misconceptions and covered with layers of floating understandings. When engulfed by such vortex of existence, blending in means disappearing behind brighter colors of others, dissolving into nothingness. When stirred by trouble, it is our own inner tone, the color of that dream, the melody floating over this thought, the feeling evoked by yesterday’s rain, the way to lovingly wrinkle one’s nose in anger … the only one and impossible to repeat in a million years … that helps us survive.

What do you see?

To my best friend, my dream, my inspiration

We should have never said a word. We spent most of the evening in comforting silence, emerged in our work, feeling a quiet bliss in the air radiating from your art and mine. Your heart and mine.

You swore at me for judging you. You said you love me a minute later and that hurt too, because I felt I didn’t deserve your love.

We won’t remember it as that one night on a curb under a cloudy moon. We won’t remember the quiet music of wind chimes on a dark deck where the only light came from under our eyelashes. We might not even remember working together in a tiny room filled with the air of spray-paint and gentle thoughts. What will stay in mind is how mercilessly we dared to wound each other. Do you still think we aren’t better off keeping some thoughts to ourselves? Forgive me for making your heart bleed. I regret trying to change you in any way, but I also don’t seem to be able to change myself. Where in the world is the way out of this?

I know exactly where you come from and you don’t have to explain a slightest thing to me. I know perfectly well that for every opportunity I was given in life, the door was slammed in front of your face. I made tons of mistakes but I always seemed to get a second chance, even when I least deserved it. You deserve so much more than you were given.

Why does the world put this impassable void between us, these layers of life, this divide that none of us is able to cross? Why is it that our hearts fly over this abyss like two swallows, meeting happily in midair, while our bodies stay put like stones, not moving even to the wind of circumstances? We’ll grow into the ground if we stay, you know.

I don’t want it to be this way. I fall for you over and over again every time I see you or hear your voice. And then I tell you again and again that all I can give is friendship. I quietly despise myself for that. I really can’t think of anything that would give a happy ending to this post. Erykah Badu’s song is all that comes to mind. I guess I’ll see you next lifetime… You know I want to stay around… I guess I’ll see you next lifetime… I’m going to look for you.

I’m going to look for you, my love. I’m going to look after you, too. Hush, no more words, let our hearts sit together in silence.

Almost there

I didn’t dream about you last night. I haven’t been thinking about you during daytime for a while now, but I was afraid that I wasn’t really getting rid of those thoughts and only suppressing them. I’d fight so hard and you would defeat me again and again by showing up in my dreams.

Well, I had a good nine-hour sleep last night (I barely ever make it over 5 so this was really good), and guess what… You weren’t there!

Is it really time to say good-bye? I still get flashbacks every once in a while but they are minor and they make me angry rather than sad.

I guess I am in a blame setting stage right now. I read it in “Loveshock” by Dr. Stephen Gullo, the tiny book that does miracles when your heart is broken. It might be the reason I am moving past all of this so quickly, it’s much easier to do when you understand all the little emotions you are going through. I found myself leaving that state of constant sadness, distancing myself from everything that happened and critically evaluating things. How foolish could I be? Of course I deserve better!