A wolf

I hold a wolf by the ears. Nor do I know by what means I can get rid of him, nor how I am to keep him. ~Terence

I wanted this wolf so bad but there was one thing I wanted more. I needed to stay free. I could not submit.

I wanted to be around and learn from him. I wanted to know him but even more so, I wanted to know myself. He sparked the little whys and hows that set my mind on fire. Why live? How love? Who are we? Whom do we become as we go? Whom do we take with us and what do we leave behind? How do we improve the chosen path and how does the path improve us?

Did you ever know it, this freedom? Did you ever feel a single raindrop fall on your goosebumped arm and dive in, through your skin, to the very essence of you? Did you ever get your wings soaked yet chose to keep flying till you couldn’t breath? Did you ever have your heel sink in the softness of the morning just to keep jumping and sinking deeper and playing with your toes in the mud? Did you ever walk on petals and realized that they are but blood on the pieces of broken glass, and closed your eyes and turned them into petals again, in your head, and kept walking, and bleeding? Did you ever want to be so absolutely free as to turn down passion and eagerness and immense desire, only to remain you?

I get nauseous when thinking of settling down-getting into a certain role-staying true to that role type of scenario. The mind put to sleep gets comfortable and comfortable mind is a dangerous one. It goes in, closes the door and stays put, hanging the gun over its porch, ready to scare off intruders.

I want my mind broken into, again and again. I want to keep its door open and let it wonder as far as it will go. I want to fly and crash and fall into pieces and get myself together again as many times as it takes to learn to fly higher and watch closer and truly see the tiny creases in the palms of the world. I know it’s about time to let my wolf go for good, but it is so difficult to let go of his mind. I will, eventually, because I know that this journey through the rain, make-believe scent of tulips, broken glass, muddy terrains and some crazy tunes in my head, toward freeness… is the journey I must take alone. Like a wolf.

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

Stop

Stop chasing your shadow through dreams that are mine
The other you’s pondering crossing the line
Through nothingness rolling uphill in my sleep
The tracks you are leaving are twenty feet deep
I shiver, I stumble, I’m not in that dream
I run to the places that get what I mean
I crash into people that play it just right
I back out, I burn out, I’m dying tonight.

A little lost

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

~ C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

How do people say things as pretty? Can I do that... please? Sometimes I think my words sit under this huge rock in the sea that is my thoughts, ideas, feelings and desires. The category five storm needs to happen for them to be thrown out to the surface, spit out by the waters that are too dark otherwise to tell where the sunshine ends and the abyss begins.

Sometimes I think lack of pain kills inspiration. Sometimes I think pain overdose does it too. I find chapters of comedy and tragedy as I try to frantically skip any prosaic pages in life. Slowing down seems to be a sure motivation killer so I run fast, and bump into walls, and get hurt, and get up again, and keep running, and bump into walls...

I jump between extreme thirst for social life and desperate need for solitude. I think we give up part of our freedom the moment we choose to depend on others, be it for attention, time, means to survive, understanding, kindness, affection... But then, if others choose to depend on us, do we fill that gap with some of their freedom? What right does anyone have for anyone else's freedom? Being part of society automatically means being, in one way or another, unfree. Being absolutely free then... means being unsocial? And then there is solitude, which takes away the freedom to be loved.

The only true way to be free as I found it is to be free within. It is that type of freedom that I seek out and fight for and worship.

* * *

As I get tired of this buzzing world I take a stroll to the land of no emotion, but I get too restless on my way there to ever reach the illusionary destination of absolute personal strength. Few days into my "independence" I feel the prose of reality crawling at me like a giant heat wave, leaving no air to breathe, no shade to escape to on the surface so hot it melts dreams.

That’s when I take a big breath and dive deep into my poetry, finding there the only relief and a place of safety.

Sometimes answers are hidden in words. More often, words bring out more questions. Sometimes I wish I had words when none come out. At other times I wish I could just stay silent for hours... days. I think good words are hard to get and it probably only adds to their beauty. Then there are angry words and words that are empty, and I haven’t decided yet which one is worse.

* * *

"Why don’t you go blog about it?" I heard last weekend, and thrown into the heat of an argument, it was meant to sound offensive. I'm afraid "it" just doesn't do it for me, my dear boy. Hey, look who’s stronger now. I am on one of those freedom strolls and you’d better not get in my way. I don’t mean to sound amazon-ish but then again, I am so tired of fighting you. We’ve been barking at each other for so long, it started taking a shape of some sick entertainment. Another round, and we might as well start taking bets. At times, it boiled blood. At this point, it tires me. I am not meant for hatred, I don’t like harsh words given or taken, even if, especially if, they are empty shells thrown one's way to offend rather than convey meaning. I am no angel but let me dwell on it some other time. How are YOU going to find your way through such darkness into which you let your thinking wander, such anger with which you let it out? You can’t make a real difference, you can’t right the wrong if you fail or refuse (which is it?) to draw the line between passion and fury. You can’t be truly kind nor loving when you let your pride guide you, wherever it is you are heading.

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?

Second chances?

She wants to be like
the water...

I can’t speak. I close my eyes and I glide on a smooth surface. Downstream. I can’t think. I am just lying there, letting the current pull me wherever it chooses. I can’t write. My words are sinking. I can’t fight. It’s as if my hands and my feet are tied with some invisible water bonds, which I can’t resist. I have no will to swim against the tide. I watch the waters get faster, angrier. I watch small rocks lurk out. I am still on the safe side, I can still turn around and swim back, knowing the danger is ahead, knowing I should not let myself rush through these rapids again, knowing there will be pain of falling. Please don’t pull me toward you now that I am almost cured of this pain.

...wish it were simple
But we give up easily

I think I reached a shore at some point, back then, after fighting so hard with the cold of the river. I think I actually sat there for a moment and let the water dry off my face. I heard the quiet music in my head and I sang to it... and danced, and watched the clouds gallop by, and smiled at them... I smiled! But then I saw you swim by and I plunged in again. Am I really going to let go so easily of all that I fought for? I don’t want to feel comforted by your presence. I want to be able to make it on my own. Was this new strength I thought I gained just an illusion? Here I am, not swimming forward, not swimming back. Floating.

You're close enough to see that
You're the other side of the world
to me...

Why is it so hard to just close my eyes and pretend you are not here? Why is it so hard to listen to reason and decide what’s right to feel? To feel what’s right... What’s right? The thing is, in my mind, I don’t want you back. I just have to negotiate it with my heart somehow. It is tricky, because heart wants reward here and now, it wants redemption for its suffering, it wants a blanket tucked around it, it wants to go to bed cozy. It’s like a child, demanding attention, thinking of itself as the center of the world, not knowing it can’t really see further than today, further than the chest it’s in.

Can you help me?
Can you let me go?
And can you still love me
When you can't see me anymore...

People who saw us last night might have thought we are a happy couple. But that's what they thought back then too, while we were sticking knives into each other’s hearts. Back again? And you really think you can build something steady on a pile of ruins?

I subside to the sound of your voice. My strength withers and I forgive easily. I know what’s right for me, but I don’t seem to be strong enough to act upon it. Maybe not quite yet. I am afraid of the mistakes I am about to make.


Lyrics from Other Side of the World by KT Tunstall

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?

You look, I die

I can write a pile of sentences, reread them and don’t find myself. They are often not good enough. They lack the strength to dig deep, take it out and spill it on paper. Bleeding heart calls for writing in blood and all I see is black ink on a dull white paper. Nonsense. Friday was good and I even believed I was getting better. And then came Saturday. You looked. I died. Again.

I want to take you off
Like summer hat in fall
Throw off your arms like gloves
That wouldn’t keep me warm
No more
Shake drops of voice
Out of my ears
Soaked in the cold
Of ruthless storms
Your words
Wipe off that touch
Out of the creases
Of my palm
You stick to me
Cling to my thinking
Roll down the spine
With drops of sweat
Making me shiver
In aching dreams
Can’t loving die
So I can live
Instead
Wait not just yet
Resists the heart
In which small room
Is filled with charcoals
Blue and orange
And amber
Like your world
I throw them in the fire
Where your ice
Is melted
Your picture out of the corner
Looks into me
I read a smile
In picture’s eyes
Half-closed
Half-opened
Hate never came
Into this room
It never will
My eyes meet yours
Half-closed
Half-opened
Was ever love
Inside your look
Did I misread it
Did I
Just throw your picture in the fire
My shaking hands
Are burnt
But it won’t burn
I cover it with charcoals
They turn to flowers
You still look
Right back into me
Your eyes
Half-closed
Half-opened
Your soul
Half-naked
Half... I’ll never know
And of that look
I die.

The music in my head

"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

– Rob in the High Fidelity movie

I experimented by switching back and forth between sad and cheerful songs and found that upbeat tunes generally make me happier for about three minutes but are often hard to relate to. It is not because I am some kind of a sad little person, I am generally perfectly optimistic. In a way, life reminds me of parents. I love it despite all the crap it gives me. Then why do I keep listening to music that makes me cry?

I think maybe it is because there are so many sides to happiness while the pain of loss is generally one. I think there is a certain threshold of grief after losing a person, a place or a battle that was fought so hard… After crossing that brink of a primary shock, for a while there the pain becomes so strong it blurs the differences of all the initial reasons that hurt… It becomes all-engulfing. Excruciating. So similar to other pains. The melancholic words coming out of the headphones suddenly rhyme so perfectly with emotions… It brings a sense of a pleasant surprise amidst the ocean of sorrow, making you wonder how in the world someone else could put your heartache into their words so perfectly even before your heartache existed. It’s that easy-to-relate factor that makes sadness so listenable. In the words of one dentist I interviewed recently, “our market is essentially based on pain.” I know the producers of sad songs will make sure I stay miserable a bit longer and I know I won’t put up too much of a fight against it. I guess it’s all about the core. As long as you keep it strong, all that wavy stuff like the music in your head won’t really matter in the long run. Like a storm in the sea, it will stir you up and subside. And then comes new happiness, new pain and new music to complement them.

The God of Loss

“He tried to hate her.
She’s one of them, he told himself. Just another one of them.
He couldn’t.
She had deep dimples when she smiled. Her eyes were always somewhere else.

“That afternoon, Ammu traveled upwards through a dream in which a cheerful man with one arm held her close by the light of an oil lamp. He had no other arm with which to fight the shadows that flickered around him on the floor.
Shadows that only he could see.
Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate.
He held her close, by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as if he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.
He could do only one thing at a time.
If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her.
She could have touched his body lightly with her fingers, and felt his smooth skin turn to gooseflesh. She could have let her fingers stray to the base of his flat stomach. Carelessly, over those burnished chocolate ridges. And left patterned trails of bumpy gooseflesh on his body, like flat chalk on a blackboard, like a swathe of breeze in a paddyfield, like jet streaks in a blue church-sky. She could have so easily done that, but she didn’t. He could have touched her too. But he didn’t, because in the gloom beyond the oil lamp, in the shadows, there were metal folding chairs arranged in a ring and on the chairs there were people, with slanting rhinestone sunglasses, watching. They all held polished violins under their chins, the bows poised at identical angles. They all had their legs crossed, left over right, and all their left legs were shivering.

“If he touched her he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.

“The God of Loss.
The God of Small Things.
He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.”

- from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

It’s ironic that you lent THIS book to me. It’s ironic that YOU lent this book to me.

It’s a great book. Life is ironic.

Not only good dreams come true, you know. I had so many nightmares about you and they all became a reality. This book of yours brought out a feeling of sad satisfaction in me. Sad, but satisfying.

The part above is so deep in its tragedy yet so beautiful. I reread it many times, receiving a bit of a gentle relief each time. It reminds me of one of those soothing melodies I listen to when riding my bike late in the evening. They blend with the freshness of wind pushing against my face and give me that tickling sensation of a flight above all the insignificant things in the world. They only matter if we choose for them to matter.

The part below is more earthly, but still captivating. It made me think a lot, but not about you any more. It made me look into me. I think it’s better this way, to finally think about me for once.

“In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous acceptance of herself.”

Despite all the pain I felt, I won’t deny that you played a significant part in my life, a role in my world that made me stop abruptly. To think. Although you’ll never know it, you helped me find the sides of me that I haven’t yet discovered. You helped me realized new truths and dig out the truths long forgotten, the ones that were covered with dust somewhere in the deep corner of my conscience, behind the shelves of doubts and stacks of fears. That corner was so dark it took the light out of my dreams. It made me want to postpone them until better times. Until when I’m strong enough. Until later. Lay Ter. But there is now, there’s today and I want to live it to the fullest.

You didn’t politely pat me on the shoulder, asking me whether by any chance I took a wrong route. This isn’t your way. You kicked me hard, pushed me against the wall and slapped me in the face, calling me a fool for not noticing a one-way sign for so long, jumping out of our time, onto your street, slamming my door, never to travel with me again.

I cried as you left, but then I smiled. I started accepting myself more and more each day and I liked it.

You reminded me who I really am and then you set me free. Always look for the positive side of things. They will only matter if we choose for them to matter.

I matter now.

Before Sunrise

I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.

- Celine in Before Sunrise

I was standing outside last night, looking at the man on the moon. An insignificant spot on the face of eternity, he’s larger than us in some ways... smaller in so many others. I was looking at a swallow’s nest over my porch. I’m not sure how long it’s been there but the birds are long gone. They must have flown away to a better place, carrying their dreams on their wings, leaving my porch with an empty nest. My dreamless porch.

I am doing better at times. I think my mind is ready to move on, telling me there’s no reason to cry over someone who doesn’t care. But the pain still wakes me up in the middle of the night, every night.

I look back at this summer. There is a strong temptation to forget certain people, moments or days; but I don’t give in to it. It might be good to not have lived some of those days, but would it be right? I believe our mistakes are there for a reason. They remind us of our human flaws. They help us grow.

I look back at the day of the big fight, when I stood up for your right to take the opposite side and, as a result, lost my friend. There is another painful memory from that night, that of you slamming the car door and walking away. But you know, I wouldn’t change a thing. I wouldn’t skip that evening even if I knew what was coming. I wouldn’t try to save my friendship. I wouldn’t stop you from walking away. Because when you caught up with me at a stoplight a minute later, you told me that you loved me. I will eventually forget the tremendous negativity of that night, but I will treasure the fact that you and I were able to leave it all behind so easily, driving away into the night.

I look back even further and I see us in a friend’s garage at 7 a.m. in the morning, after just talking the night away. I see us going through a car wash twice, enjoying the little streams rolling down the windows in this rainless land, lowering the backs of our seats to lay down and listen to some quiet music, savoring the simple bliss of the moment. I see us walking through the farmer’s market closer to noon, without a single hour of sleep the night before but with our reflections still fresh and clear in each other’s eyes. You carrying the fruits for me. Your smile a reflection of a morning sun. I see us in your room, going though your family photographs. Your books. Your paintings. You making hot dogs in the kitchen. Me drinking juice from the bottle. You had no cups. You lying on the floor in an empty room, looking at the sun caught in the texture of my dress as I stand in the doorway. That dress looked tired of your witty remarks over the last 24 hours. I wasn’t. Remember? Us sitting on a staircase in your hallway, speaking about the meaning of life. You handing me a book to take home with me. You waving goodbye to me on my way out, then rushing down the staircase to give me a hug. One perfect hug. My hand shaking behind your back holding the heavy fruits. You releasing me just to ease my burden. Our shadows crossing one last time on the pavement, one unwilling to leave, another unwilling to let go.

That was our own Before Sunrise, wasn’t it. That night was the whole world, the perfect world in which we had lived and breathed each other before the real life began. Before your friends didn’t get along with mine. Before I pushed you away. Before your heart grew cold, unwilling to forgive my fear of love. I think it will take me years to get over that one night, an eternity to forget the perfect fusion of our thoughts, ideas, feelings and dreams.

I don’t want to remember anything else from this summer.

Dreaming with a broken heart

When you're dreaming with a broken heart,
The waking up is the hardest part,
You roll outta bed and down on your knees
And for the moment you can hardly breathe...

- John Mayer

I roll out and I wonder... were you really here?

You were, just the night before, and after two long weeks of excruciating pain that burned my body and engulfed my thoughts every minute of every day, for a moment there I believed we could actually be happy together. Were you really here, holding my hand, or was it just a sweet dream, a short flashback in my crazy imagination... You came back into my life, but how could I be so wrong as to think that you came to stay? We walked on the grass barefoot. You told me about my nose in your paintings. You reminded me once again how you can touch my heart with the simplest things that you say. As I drove to work, the morning sky reminded me of your palette and I wished I could blend in with it, becoming the perfect tone of your skin, the shape of your cheeks when you give me that kind smile of yours or at least a note in one of your favorite melodies, so you could hum me every now and then.

You gave me hope but you wouldn’t let me anywhere near your heart. I felt slowly falling — the wind rushing though my body like the tiny pieces of broken glass — all the way down, to the very bottom of my pain.

Have I pushed you away that far? I wish you knew all the way that I loved you no matter what I did or said. I wish I didn’t do or say the things that made you run away. I’ll go hide my tears behind the rain, wondering how many more nights I will have to die before I can let you go.

Don't look back

I slowly peel the label off a beer bottle. Alone in the dark, my beer bottle and I, and added to our company are now the hair-thin pieces of paper. I asked you that last night, when you were still around, not to do so. Why did it matter? I don’t know why.

I walk around the patio philosophically holding my cigarette, just like you did, pretending to be a smoker. I take off my shoes and walk across the lawn barefoot. I taught you that one and you liked it. We both leaned to the ground and I told you the grass on that lawn was fake. You agreed. Did we really have so little in common? I made mistakes and you might not ever give me a chance to correct them. I was tired and unsure, but did I really take so many wrong steps as to deserve the ice-cold bucket of harsh words you poured on me that Sunday morning? The world gets wet and salty every time I think that you might have gone from loving to hating. I am so angry I’d jump at you and beat you up the moment I saw you for what you did to my heart, and I’d beat you even more for doing it intentionally. I’d beat you till you bleed just as I have been all these days. Yet I am so scared to even think I might never see you again.

As I send a little smoke puff up into the sky, I notice a trillion stars up there. I find the brightest one and wish, almost beg the fate, the sky, the summer wind and anyone or anything in this world that might listen, I beg them all to make you look at it too. I don’t know why.

I walk back into the room and leave the patio door open. My heart falls down each time the wind touches the blinds, sounding just like you coming back from one of your short smoke breaks… The loud music wakes me up from this conscious dream and sadly, it’s your music. My eyes make a frantic attempt to run away from your shoes in the corner, but like a helpless child in the dark they stumble upon your book on the coffee table instead. There's too much of you in this place, reminding me constantly of the friendship we didn't treasure... the love that wasn't ours to keep.

Unable to tolerate the loneliness of the room and the wind’s foul play with my senses, I take off into the night. I don’t put the seatbelt on. I used to get angry at you for not doing so. Why did it matter? Wait, I know the answer to this one. Because I didn’t want you to leave any time soon.

Here’s what I want to say…

Why would I wanna see you now?
To fix it up, make it up somehow.
Baby I'll try again, try again,
Baby I die every night, every time.

But what comes out instead is…

You're leaving so soon,
Never had a chance to bloom,
But you were so quick
To change your tune.
Don't look back
If I'm a weight around your neck,
Cause if you don't need me
I don't need you.

Thanks, Keane, for the words that give meaning to my pain.

Another thanks goes to...

Stock.XCHNG

The majority of the pictures I use here are from this free stock photo site. It's such a great resource and I am tremendously thankful to the Web site and to all the photographers who shared their art.

A butterfly and a coffee house are the only photos I took for this blog. I promise to switch to my own pictures one day as photography is one of my passions. But for as long as I lack the time to do so, it's either Stock.XCHNG or the images in my head.

Broken

Sometimes words hide from me when I need them the most. Sometimes I wish I could speak in tears, in looks, in songs… in silence. If you ever listened to my silence, I mean really listened, you’d hear the beat of the loneliest heart in the world. You knew I was vulnerable but you chose to hurt me nevertheless. I get up and I fall again. I lean on walls. The world is spinning. I hear your voice, again and again. In songs...

I wake up, it’s a bad dream,
No one on my side,
I was fighting
But I just feel too tired
to be fighting,
guess I’m not the fighting kind.
Wouldn’t mind it
if you were by my side
But you’re long gone,
yeah you’re long gone now.

It’s Your world, isn’t it. It’s Your freedom, Your fight, Your thirst for Your life. What about My pain? "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed," said Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's fox in the Little Prince. You ran thousands of miles away from responsibility, you ran toward your freedom. I only wish my heart, too, could be free again. I wish it could be untamed.

I need a place
That’s hidden in the deep,
Where lonely angels sing you to your sleep.
The modern world is broken.
I need a place
Where I can make my bed,
A lover’s lap where I can lay my head,
Cos’ now the room is spinning,
The day’s beginning.

I don’t want to live, I don’t want to wake up into this new day. I don’t want to die either, I just want to slowly cease to exist, fade away like your feeling to me, turn into a fox and run. I think you might respect me more as a fox. I won’t have to worry about money as a fox, because that’s what I worry about, right? I probably won’t feel love, because that’s what I’m pushing away, right? In a simple world of foxes I won’t feel lonely any more. I will feel at ease, because I’m sure foxes are so much more human than many-many humans in this world.

I hope you fly free, if that’s what your freedom is all about. I hope you win your other battles, those you actually believe are worth fighting.

Why do I have to fly
over every town up and down the line?
I'll die in the clouds above
and you that I defend, I do not love.

When it rains...

The clouds dragged themselves with a certain difficulty this morning, as if trying to make it home after a night of partying. They struggled to keep their tails above the treetops, slowly pulled west by the wind.

It’s being storming all night and the morning didn’t look like morning at all, I told you as we drove through the wet sleepy city. Distant thunder broke the silence between us, raindrops cut into the windshield like a thousand little needles and the shiny road reflected the streetlights, a wild dance of red and green, and red and green again.

I dropped you off and ran away at 86 per hour. My thoughts were pressing me down to the slippery road, heavy like the clouds over the treetops.

As I sat next to you on the couch last night, I cried inside. I cried because of longing to be with you. I wanted more than anything to hug you or hold your hand but I couldn’t, I had no right. I gave up my right to love you as soon as I chose to follow my reason and silence my heart. I pushed you away pretending to kill my feelings, but all I really did was chase them away into the deepest corners of my heart, making them hide temporarily. They now lurk out in the shape of little flames that burn so painfully. Whom am I fooling?

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.

Thanks!!!

I just wanted to thank someone from EatonWeb who took the time to look at my blog and write this review. I know it’s just a couple of sentences but they mean so much to me! Thanks EatonWeb!!!

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On the edge between friendship and more

You lie on the edge of the roof, your body stretched on a narrow surface between the short concrete wall and the abyss. You look down, then up at me, then down again. It’s crazy, you say, how it just goes straight to the ground. There are some 12 stories underneath us, and the shoe you were tempted to throw down would have ways to fly.

I trust your words yet I have a strong urge to check it out myself. I lean forward. Careful, I hear from a couple of friends behind, who grab my sleeve as I continue to lean toward the edge. It’s only when my eyes run down the vertical wall below — all the way to the treacherous pavement and the tiny shadows of parked cars and streetlights — that I fully comprehend how high we have climbed and how real the danger of falling is for both of us.

We ran many flights of stairs and climbed some shaky ladders to watch the city lights one night, eager to find adventure on the bleak streets of reality. As I looked down and felt the cool breeze hit my face, the solid roof under my feet started to fade into the unknown, reminding me of my life. I closed my eyes and pictured what would have happened if I leaned too far, the tingly feeling of free fall in my stomach. I’d open my eyes in midair and see you falling right next to me. I’d scream inside, trying to rethink the whole scenario, trying to erase the idea of reaching the ground, because somewhere in the back of my mind, through some inexplicable vision of the future, I knew the landing would be deadly for one of us.

You might say it was your idea to climb up here, but I have to point out you were careful about the ascend, watching your step and mine. I was the one whose walk turned into a sprint as I got excited about reaching the summit. It was me who took you to the edge and it’s me who’s about to take you over it.

Please take the stairs and walk off this roof, down to where we started. Run away from me. Don’t tell me we’ll fly together, because you know neither of us is an angel. Don’t let me pull your sleeve, because I can already see the pavement below.