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?
No comments:
Post a Comment