White whale

I was on way back to the apartment, quietly riding in the backseat of the uber, when it hit me. I really don’t wanna go home. I don’t want to go back to the place where the smell of our failure is pervasive and poisons my lungs every breath i take. I don’t want to worship a shrine built out of dried-up bones and pretend we’re still alive and well. We’re not well. 

I don’t know if we’re still alive.

I didn’t want to get back to you, because there is no solace in either your silence or your smile anymore. It hurts to see you drift away, it hurts to see glimpses of you clinging onto us. You could cut the disingenuity with a better knife on both ends, and there’s nowhere to hide. When love becomes a requirement. We both lose. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma’s worst outcome where we both cried out and got the maximum sentence. 

I did not want to come home because seeing your face is painful. Hearing your voice is painful. Thinking about you is painful.  No matter how many seeds of pre-emptive loss I plant in my skull, I can’t seem to get numb to the prospect of its death thereof. I pace around in the office, I crawl around in my head, and your being here is emotional waterboarding. I can’t recall how many times I have stared at my suitcases this week, trying to muster the cowardice to pack up and leave. 

I did not want to come home because you were here. 

Which is also why I couldn’t wait to get home.

And that’s the very crux of the conundrum. I don’t want to lose you, but I’ve lost you, and yet you’re still here. And I can’t help but want to cherish every second of that, despite the trail of sanity I leave in my wake. My rational brain is clamoring for me to call it, but the rest of me won’t budge. Because at the end of the day, once you’re gone, what am I going to be left with 

But those moments spent with you?

And as counterintuitive as it sounds, life is still churning out tons of them. Ungrateful trade-off or desperate plea to make sense of it all. I want to say I wish we had more time. That’s not true.

Because I wished time would never be our enemy ever again.

Just like the dead battery running my watch stopped its hands in their tracks, I hoped we could be suspended in time. But I foolishly forgot to factor in growth. 

I grew closer to you, you grew apart. 

And as fast as I am trying to run towards you,

You’re running away faster.

So when you’re finally out of sight and I’m off your mind, what is left of us? What is left of that piece of life we shared together, of the smiles, the tears, the laughs, the resentment, the fogiveness, the love, the friendship, the kindness, the bursts of anger, hope, doubt, loneliness, happiness? What will be left of us beyond the innumerable pictures that captured people we no longer will be, a reality fabricated to fill the hole we left in each other’s past? What will be left of us but those souvenirs I wear on my body, on my skin, in my head like talismans to ward off the part of me that yearns to devour us whole and leave nothing behind, except for a gaping hole replacing the painful yet beautiful? 

So beautiful. 

In the end, what will be left of you

But those memories to be?

 https://youtu.be/YJ35gwz7AS0

Bojji

I don’t buy into the healing properties of writing. After all, no utterances have never soothed my pain. The words that remain too often have the opposite effect - like a pernicious fire that turns things to ash without cauterizing the wound. Yet spewing nonsensical subjectivity has always been the only way I know how to catharsize, as made up as it reads. The only chance I get to give my woes a distinctive shape so I can visualize what I am afflicted with, to try and understand what is causing the autophagy. What’s the diagnosis doctor?  It does not help solve it, there’s no cure, no remedy. But it helps come to terms with all the ugliness inside.

It’s therapeutic verbal acrobatics is what it is.

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I shouldn’t be missing you while you’re still here.

The arrow of time is all fucked up. The timeline is all tangled up. And I can’t live in the moment. 

Because the moment hurts too much. I am conflicted between hanging onto our past as tight as I can, wrapping that security blanket around me to protect me from the bitter truths and harsh realities, deafening me to those memorical soundbites that I can’t shrug off - How could I? When you get stabbed you’re not supposed to pull the knife out 

Lest you bleed out - 

And looking ahead to a foggy, murky horizon that looks as unwelcoming as the mess in my head. You’re here but you’re really not. I’m here

But I no longer feel like I am.

There is such a thing as overfeeling. As wearing your heart on your sleeve not by choice, but out of necessity. I am not cut out for this, and neither is it. 

What am I but a kaleidoscope of my past mistakes?

I don’t consistently see the glass as fully empty for the masochistic arousal of self-pity. It’s because I can’t do otherwise. My crippling fear of abandonment, covert social inadequacy, and inability to put a leash on my feelings make it impossible for me to entertain hope. 

It would quite literally kill me.

I don’t know how to express love the way I am supposed to. It inflates like I’m high on helium, too quick and too big, to the point that it slips out of control before I even realize it. Maybe my love suffocated you, or maybe it stifled my growth. Maybe it got so big it flew away before I could give it to you properly. Or maybe it blew up in your face without your asking. At the end of the day

I don’t think I’ve loved you right. 

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There is this game, called Passage, that lets you simply walk through life for a handful of minutes, from the moment you take your first breath to the moment you die. It is one of the most straightforward, unadulterated piece of existence one could experience and presents you with one singular choice: do you want to go through all this pointless, morbid irony alone, opening more paths for yourself in a maze of identical possibilities - or would you rather have someone by your side to hold your hand, no matter the struggles, no matter the closed doors or slow pace. 

A few years ago, when I first played that life a few times, I would consistently pick the easier option and explore as much as I could. After all, why shackle yourself to a lesser future?

I don’t think I quite got the point back then.

There is no satisfaction to be found in an experience devoid of challenges. Easy does not, actually, does it. It has been difficult, it has been challenging, it has been fragilized so many times I have forgotten half the times we should have shattered. And yet that’s exactly why it has been rewarding, why it has led to so much joy, what has made us grow.

Together.

You can’t truly know the other without staring at the swamp of ugliness within, and accept that it is part of the background. There is no understanding without temporary disconnection, because it’s impossible to fix what does not appear to be broke. There is no love without flaws. 

We have survived each other as much as we have life’s curveballs. 

That’s why I really wish I could have gone through Passage with you a little longer.

Cheekbones

I’ve forgotten how to start these

Phew…

Here goes nothing

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It has been a challenging three years,  on the macro level as much as on the micro level. A time during which fleeting happiness and temporary bliss have too often had to share a house with underlying despair, unrelenting pain and unspeakable guilt. Papy is gone. Half my dreams were buried shortly after he was. But in all of that, you have always been my constant. A defective beacon whose light shines haphazardly, dangerously, radiating the place over like a feral beast. Yet, thanks or despite all the hurdles, it always allowed me to bask in the embrace of safety.  

Things have not been perfect. After all, they say that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

But what about two broken clocks?

We’ve made do. We pushed through. Against all odds we made it past every conceivable ordeal life was ready to throw at us. Like puppets we danced, patiently, hoping that the strings would bring us closer together, time and again. We were right. Until we weren’t.

Until I no longer was. 

Or until I was no longer right for you.

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I can’t wrap my mind around the concept of a dying love. I have seen the kind that ends up in fireworks, multiple successive arsons that ripple through the heart and bleed it dry. I am all too familiar with the implosion that wipes out everything and reshapes the landscape in ways you couldn’t fathom. But never had I experienced the cold embrace of a slow death, when love fades, gradually, like a dying houseplant whithering away. It’s silent, it does not make a sound, it does not cry out for help. It just goes into the night. I guess it is akin to what scientists refer to as heat death - stars slowly dying around you, one after the other, until you are inevitably, eventually

Left alone in this cold, deserted universe of yours.

Is that what happened to us? Is that what is happening to us?

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Since you uttered those words I can’t find myself anymore. If it’s not my fault, if you still love me, then why? I know I am shortsighted, and probably still see the world through a kid’s heart, but how can we turn into broken memories if we are still holding hands? How can our future vanish if we’re here?

How can I lose you when you still smile like this?

I know I’m not exactly perfect. I am plagued with the survivalist selfishness and artificial self-centeredness that result from an overdose of introspection; I am not impervious to occasional bouts of  cockiness, stubborness, and other hubris-related diseases. Too rarely do I lend a listening ear or offer a helping hand, because I am clumsy, awkward, unfit and I’m scared of pretty much everything in this world. 

Everything but you. 

We created a bubble that let me be happy. Nevermind the bursts of anger, the violence of words that pierce like daggers when we cry for help but things get lost in translation, or the misery of daymares. I am happy. I was happy. Because at the end of the day, I got to hold you, look in your eyes and see honest, genuine love. 10 years running after something so elusive, so precious that I had started to gaslight myself into believing it was a myth. But it’s not. Because you’re here.

But I guess the bubble is not making you happy.

I know I am far from perfect. I took you for granted because deep down that is probably what I wanted, to believe I no longer had to fight for something. I failed to pay enough attention to your needs because I was too focused on my fleemsy desires. I looked inward when I should have peeked outward, swallowed the bitter pill and accepted that I couldn’t do it alone. It takes two to tango, but I guess I never could accept that you would know the steps, that you could take the lead and we could face the music

Together.

That’s what that happens when the hero complex metastasizes. It refuses to die and starts spreading to every facet of the relationship, turning us into me, turning me into a hypothetical savior.

And a real-life asshole.

There is nothing perfect about me. But I tried. 

Simply not hard enough.

Yet you’re still here. And my heart can’t compute. How can you be here and gone at the same time? How can there be a countdown to the moment you are no longer by my side? How can the outcome of love be uncertain if it’s still here with us?

I wish I could carve the sound of your voice saying I love you on my eardrums before it fades away. I wish I could store the sight of your smile behind my pupils to replay it forever, for it is the most beautiful thing that I have ever been given the chance to lay my eyes upon. I wish I could etch the exact hues of your hazel eyes onto my brain, let them plant never-ending butterflies in my stomach forever. I wish I could brand the feeling of holding you hand onto my heart the way you tattooed those dotted lines on my arm, for it is about as close as I have ever been to experiencing true happiness. I think it is true happiness.

The second tattoo you gave me sits on my wrist, hovering above my pulse. I don’t know what that means. But it’s here. And I can’t erase it. It will forever remain unfinished, it will always feel like something is missing, that something about it is not quite right. But it’s always going to be right there, reacting to the drumbeat of my heart. There will forever be room on there for you, just like there will always be room in here. Because it’s you. You.

I just wish our love was enough to make you stay.

https://youtu.be/ixP0PZZx7t4