Once upon a time

I wrote this a while ago but never found it good enough to post. It's not my best piece of writing but it's an honest one, hence I think it deserves the right to be.

He is no longer in my life. I have worked with others since then, I had better friends since then, I've loved stronger since then, and I laughed, and cried, and lived, and broke hearts, and was left brokenhearted. But an occasional thought of him still brings that bittersweet smile to my face, the one that holds both good memories and bad, neither of which I would want to trade for anything in the world. We grow through our mistakes, our experiences and our feelings; we are shaped by what we love or hate, who we love and why we choose to forget. He was only one part of my world during the two years when our lives intertwined, but a tremendous part nevertheless. We put our time and souls into the work we believed in, and we made a great team, but our feelings got in the way. I'm sure there was love among all the fighting, and enormous friendship that struggled to step over our egos, and the two people trying really hard to overcome what made them human, for the sake of that beautiful goal that they always had in sight.

* * *

I don’t want to think where he is right now; I don’t want to think at all. All I want is to break free, fly away from this place of uncertainty and fear. I don’t know him at all.

He calls at 3 a.m. "to check on me", then again, an hour later, asking me to open the gate. One hug and things are back to normal. What a fool I am.

* * *

We run into a little diner in the slum, the one I know is actually good and safe and all, and giggle while standing at the counter. We talk of feelings for some unknown reason, the distant and abstract ones, and he suddenly tells me he never knew how I felt about him. He says that I never told him nor truly showed it. Is he for real? I'm lost for words, only able to produce a silly smile, trying to shake off the weight hanging above us, to change the subject, to say something, but all I hear is the very loud silence. And the moment passes us by. We get our food and walk out, back into the car, back to work, and I am still lost for words.

I kept thinking why I never told him. It was the perfect chance to let my guards down for once. It was either then and there, or never. And I was too proud to go first, or too scared of what it would do to our work and friendship, or both. So I chose never.

* * *

We walk out on each other. We don’t listen. We don’t apologize. I don’t know how to mend this anymore. I am probably able to, but I’m not sure I want to. I am tired of fighting. These arguments grow stronger every day, their roots reach deeper inside our heads. Every now and then I grow so weary of them I reach for the suitcase, only to push it back under my bed; only to convince myself I can endure these things and grow stronger through them.

* * *

I’m sitting outside; it’s a bit chilly these nights. A cheap cigarette is burning my lungs. Heck with it, every cell of me is on fire. And the sky, the sky is the same everywhere. I miss home, wherever my last home was. I miss my family, and the rain (we haven't had any for what seems like months here), driving in the right lane, coffee shops, my girls, having time to write or to think about myself for once versus everyone around me, and the snow. Come to my home in December, I blurt out one evening, in the midst of a quiet talk in his room. He smiles and asks for five reasons why I want him to go. I don’t feel like reasoning anything, so I walk out.

* * *

We are stuck in traffic on our way downtown, an hour of talking, laughing and singing. He presses the wrong buttons as he tries to roll down the windows, he always does that, making me laugh. He buys peanuts from the boys on the road, without taking the actual peanuts. We throw rhymes back and forth and some poetry is born in the midst of traffic, hawkers, beggars and thieves on the road. There’s an unbeatable energy inside of this tiny car. We can change this place for better, we can help the people and learn from them, but only if we are able to sustain this harmony; if we can respect each other and humble ourselves before the other. If only there were more days like this.

* * *

I feel my heart jammed inside, pumping wildly as if ready to jump out through my mouth. I am pressing the tears back in as they burn the corners of my eyes, my arms numbly folding pieces of clothes into the suitcase.

He’s standing in the doorway, the founder of this drama, the perpetrator of this pain. Out of a moment’s anger, he asked me to leave "if that's what I wished for" just a minute ago, and now my pride overwhelms my reason and pain as he’s securing the door with his tall self, begging me to stay. "You can’t leave, this is your home," he insists. "I didn’t mean it like that. I suggested you take a break from work, not leave this place." The arguments keep pouring.

As part of some self-defense mechanism, my memory seems to be erasing the corners of such days, as I can’t quite remember what it is he said that made me stay after all. I do remember a tight motherly hug and a whisper - please don’t give up on my son.

* * *

What roles do we play in this twisted storyline? Why is it that despite the lowest times we’ve been through, the undeniable truth remains the same? We are around each other 24/7, and we fight half of the time, but we need each other only more each day. It’s as if we share this subtle knowledge of something that is not yet, but has been written. It’s something bigger than us, but not until we manage to completely diminish our egos that it will reveal itself to us.

* * *

We spent months at a time in each other's company, making mistakes and laughing at them, pushing each other to be better, wanting to be better around each other, sharing secrets and dreams, crying on each other's shoulder, being best friends, enemies, lovers... and then one day we peacefully parted ways. I don't want to ever go back, but I will always treasure it as one of those experiences that shaped me into who I am. I will always treasure the memory of him, and of the world he let me be part of, beautiful and miserable at once, filled with tragic past and high hopes for the future, but his world nevertheless. I took the best from it... and I moved on to build my own.

Image credit: *duchesse-2-Guermante

Where do you live, Peter?

“Second to the right, and straight on till morning… I'll teach you to jump on the wind's back, and away we go.”

I feel like Wendy right now. You are my Peter Pan, the boy who decided to never grow up. You make faces at me. “Do I look like a ghost?” I giggle and close my eyes, pretending to be scared. You plunge forward at once, trying to pull me after you, off the window overlooking this troubled world. Let’s take a flight, you say, and see where the wind takes us. Let’s see what beauty we can create. You have to trust me, you say. My hand will be here for you when you need it.

I hesitate with one foot floating in the air, another unable to let go of my safe haven. I would love to jump after you, my dreamer, but I am so afraid. What if one day you let go? Will I fall through the darkness, into the world unknown to me? Will I look around and see a crowd of strangers in whose eyes the reflection of war is still flickering? Will I make my way home, up that window, and cry myself to sleep until I have no tears left in me? Or will I stay and carry on the fragile work of peace we have started? Will I be strong enough to one day take that flight on my own?

But you already have, you say, rolling your eyes.

Never this far, I note, sticking out my tongue to taste the rain drops.

You will never grow up either, you say.

I take a deep breath and push the bricks away with the tips of my toes, falling upward.

In my heart, I know I can let go of your hand and do this on my own. But it would be so good to know that someone is there to lean on when I grow weary. After all, it’s not the Neverland we are heading to.


Image credit: Frixin

Pearls

You are humble, and brave, and full of understanding, and laughter... And sometimes I sit there and reflect on how exceptionally lucky I am to have you as a friend. And then I can’t help but wonder... what have I done to deserve you in my life?

Image credit: Inominatus

Currently listening to Pearls by Angelique Kidjo & Josh Groban

True friends stab you in the front

Why are you making it so hard to be friends with you? I tape the cracks in this relationship and pretend that I don’t see the mess they create, acting as if it’s whole again. But there is only so much fixing one can do before finding the thing completely useless and throwing it away, right? Is that what awaits us in the end?

Why do you have to pour acid into the drink you are offering me? Do I really evoke that need in you? Do we have to put this strain in our conversations? I force my mind into giving this situation a comical angle (think Coffee & Cigarettes by Tom Waits & Iggy Pop).

Why is this happening, out of competition, jealousy or pure lack of understanding? I was containing myself all day yesterday, but at the end, the emotions I stacked on top of each other reached the tipping point, and I responded to your bitter remarks with my own. It didn’t make me happy. Whenever negativity boils up, I close my eyes and think of the good things you’ve done, reminding myself that minor conflicts should not ruin the major trust we’ve built over the years.

Why don’t I just let this one go? When in doubt, I reach for that (hopelessly naïve but intentionally so) belief that people are inherently good at hearts, but the situations they face in life sometimes make them act, or more often simply appear, adversely. I know you’ve been going through a hard time lately – another reason I should have just let your remark slide by, but I didn’t manage, and there goes my darker side.

Why don’t I write to you? I read somewhere that the best rule of friendship is to keep your heart a little softer than your head. I reach for the keyboard but find that you beat me to it. You feel me, girl, and that’s another reason not to throw us out of the window.

* * *

The title of this blog entry is a quote by Oscar Wilde
Image credit: vassiliki

Hide and seek

I make the last weak attempt to get a flame out of these wet matches before my shaking hand lets go, the tiny carton getting a stronger grip of two thin pieces of wood in a cold puddle. My attempts to pick up the pace meet resistance of the sharp needles of water cutting into my cheeks and equally painfully protruding my mind.

I am sick of this crying-in-the-rain shit. I am sick of this determined turning-the-other-cheek situation. I am sick of friendship that loses its value faster than the houses on the market. I am tired of being kind for the sake of righteousness, helping for the sake of the higher goal, trying to step over the dirt thrown on my path and looking away for the sake of staying pure inside.

I woke up today and felt like seeing you. I threw on some clothes and ran a quick conversation scenario in my head. It didn’t glue itself together. Nothing with you and me in one sentence makes sense any more. Why would I even bother to show up, to show that I care? I changed back and got to work, which didn’t glue itself together either. I have to get though this on my own. I can not let myself slip, even occasionally.

Can you really befriend a purpose if the carrier of it contaminates its sanctity with his repeated (frequent enough for them to perhaps become intentional) mistakes? I am walking away, my friend, to a place where you, pretending to close your eyes and ears on anything under the top layer of my world, won’t matter. Once again, I am choosing to stay me.

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

Light and Dark

I used to scan through your hints like one scans through a book with pretty pictures, without diving in first ... I did not understand. It sank in all of a sudden as I was staring blankly at the clouds beneath, flying back from the place in between the mountains where you were born and lived for one day. I had just closed the last page of Mandela’s biography, which took boredom out of the forever I spent in the airports. I was done hiding my tears from strangers, wiping them off the pages that struck me so deep. I looked into the thin stripe of blue light, the place of safety above the storm. My mind was wondering. I haven’t been thinking of you for weeks now, but somehow you have ways of intruding my head when I least expect it. "I am crazy," you whispered once, and "I am light and dark," you wrote another time using those little magnets on my fridge. Of course you didn’t mean the surface, the mere pictures in your book, the outside that sometimes fools us into walking in circles around the meaning that is so obvious. How blind was I to never dig deeper?

I dropped my bags in the doorway and rushed to my desk, frantically reading words and faces you put on the screen. There it was, sitting in the open, yelling at me for taking so long to hear. Forgive me my blindness. I would have strangled my pride in its cradle if I only knew how much of you I misunderstood.

One half.

I wish I could go back and touch your life, my dear friend, the way you touched mine. You woke me up like the rain wakes a leaf in a desert, helping it fight the draught for the right to grow again, washing its memory clean of the dry comfort of the sun, bringing back the time long forgotten, when it first tasted the storm and danced with the wind and bloomed so carelessly, when it wanted to live for the sake of the landscape around it, not the survival itself.

So does my mind.

Currently listening: Vuli Ndlela (Accept the Situation) by Brenda Fassie

The book mentioned in the post: Nelson Mandela: No Easy Walk to Freedom by Barry Denenberg

Grey’s the Color of…

Under frowns of clouds
Through the whisper of leaves
I reach out for your mouth
I’m not finding your lips

Knitted sweaters, wet air
Your stretched arms in the rain
You try touching my hair
I fall back through my pain

Words are lost in this weather
Puddles eat your reflection
I feel wind in your blazer
Seeking summer’s affection

Warm time’s over, I hear
Trees are wearing gold
When precisely, my dear
Did our hearts turn so cold?

Love Implied

“Do you know what happens when you hurt people? When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

– Ammu in Arundhati Roy’s "The God of Small Things"

It was so easy to forget and forgive this weekend. It was so easy to ask and be forgiven. I don’t think there is a reason in the world to close your heart to either one of those. But then again, is there a reason to hurt anyone in the first place?

Leaning forward to give a hug to a friend Saturday night, I heard a single sentence that was deeply carved into my memory.

“Be good to your mothers,” he said quietly to a group of us leaving his place. His mom passed away several days ago.

The whole world changed its colors as I walked back to my car. I wasn’t driving home, I was floating slowly on a helium balloon, looking at the world below from a new angle.

Down under the streetlights, I saw a dark figure with a grudge on her heart. A mean little person who wasn’t good to her parents. Why is it so, I thought, that I will let friends’ mistakes slide so easily, yet I won’t forgive the two people who love me so unconditionally? Is it just me, or do you let this happen to you as well? Do you ever take love for granted? Do you ever let yourself be mean to someone dear to you, thinking a couple of fights won’t change anything where love is implied?

* * *

You said,
“Even in the hardest of times,
No one will erase this kind of friendship
Off the face of the earth.”

I walked through the dance floor Friday night and my eyes, once again, met his. A friend so close and dear to me yet so far away for what seems to have been forever. It was only about a month ago that we stopped talking, running past each other in awkward silence. His eyes would always tell me he still cared. His actions would say otherwise.

His greeting came out of nowhere, followed by a hug. The conversation was flying like a bunch of little flies above our heads, I could hear the buzz but the meaning seemed out of reach. He hurt me with his harsh words last time we spoke… afraid to approach me after that… he didn’t really mean any of it... He didn’t??

…when weakness turns my ego up
I know you'll count on the me from yesterday.
If I turn into another
Dig me up from under what is covering
The better part of me.

Once again, he spoke of that implied love, that unbreakable friendship, that tie that is supposedly always there, and I was expected to know that it was... Was I??

However far away, I will always love you
However long I stay, I will always love you
Whatever words I say, I will always love you
I will always love you…

How was I to know? For a moment there, it made me think of my parents again. How do they know that I still love them as much, if I ignore their phone calls for days after an argument? Why do we expect others to know we still love them? If in our hearts we truly do, then any pain we cause is consciously temporary, right? I think this awareness only makes it worse; it gives intention to our actions. Emotion alone can’t be blamed for it all. We’d cool it down and think 10 times before hurting someone if each time the love of that person was at stake. The problem is, we think love will always be there, no matter what we say. There's always a way out, a "sorry" somewhere out there to lean on and "it's ok" to follow, both of them worn out to the extreme, overused.

Look me in the eye,
And ask for forgiveness.
We'll make a pact to never speak that word again.
Yes, you are my friend.

If there were no hurts, there would be no sorries. I think the reason I forgave my friend without a second thought was because my own heart wasn’t clear of guilt, a different kind, yet as strong.

* * *

This might seem like a mix of thoughts about a string of unrelated events but that’s not the case. The thinking they brought was similar and the outcome was one. I called my parents. My mom can never be mad at me for more that five minutes so the negative things were easily left behind. I need to learn her ways as I struggle toward becoming a better person.

I felt the bitterness of what it’s like to live on that implied love for a while, and I didn’t enjoy it for a minute. If there is love, I want to know that it’s there. If everyone always showed that they cared and never implied it, the notion of forgiveness would slowly become obsolete.

Lyrics used in this post:
Incubus - Dig
311 – Love Song
Kvitka Cisyk - Where are you now?

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.

In between

I found two great friends this summer. One corrupts me. Another one tries to save my soul.

One tempts me with new experiences, unconditional freedom and the joy of surpassing conventional wisdom. Another one refuses to repeat any irrational ways of mine but does not judge me either.

I sense animosity between them. Each one thinks of the other as an extreme, and I am caught in the crossfire.

I need both of them very much. I grew so close to them, I care for both, each one gives me comfort that only a good long-time friend can give, and I feel I can keep my balance as long as I have them both in my life. But I also feel that the darker side is so much easier to fall to. I would like to go there, it seems, stay for just a little, and then come back. When I look that direction, however, I don’t see a turning point. I try to stay on the safe side, but I easily get bored.

I believe people don’t have to adjust their characters in order to be good friends. Minor improvements are good; becoming something you are not isn’t. I feel like I need to stay where I am, in the middle, and I hope it won’t cause losing any of them. I need some moral incentives though, and I need them bad.