You hold me now, even if I am wrapped in the suffering of sorrow, that is but a blink to Your time. What feels like a free fall is only but a moment, but You still take the chance, the opportunity, to acknowledge the minuet lost and mist.
You hold me now, even when I am drifting off shore.
I see you
In the flitting sunlight as the sun whispers against your face
I remember you
In the quiet turn of rain running down your chin
I miss you
In the wake of a time that rolls back every year
I know you
Cannot come back anymore but I still wait in unreciprocated hope.
Hello grief. By now surely, I have become a face familiar to you, as you are to me. I feel loss in all sorts of ways and it becomes an echo in this vessel, and though my mind is inwardly vast as an ocean, I still hear the call of yesterdays. I cannot outpour the sand that heaves into the soles of my feet.
Some days I feel the pain of losing you (and you, and you, and) terribly, whether it was a disease, a disagreement, and many more. It feels like I have turned the blade on myself unknowingly. Why do I fight for everyone’s corner except for me, in the way I embrace everyone’s loves and hobbies, but see hardly a person hear the rhythm of my wordy melancholy. How do I begin to explain that I do not vie for the attention of many, and yet wish I am not too far lost and gone in this hedge of illusory smoke and fog.
It is dreaming of things no longer; it is seeing something up ahead and wishing you were here with me. It is knowing we will continue growing apart even as time has stalled your being entirely. I have gone on so long before you and so I have to after, and what is after but an aspect of trauma for having that which you endeared robbed completely? I was once told that memories are like bullets: packed, deadly, and able to render you helpless. But maybe they are pills, wander in them and you could lose sense of reality.
Again, again
Calls out a little girl to her parent to raise her up in the air once more
Motions the bewildered heart of a boy who receives a confession
Whispers the one in disbelief at the exam slip
Are the cries of the person who is losing a faded memory
Hopes a boy who finally saw the sunrise beyond the hospital window
Desire for a time that would not unfold the same
Goes the war in one’s head
Does the world turn even with turmoil and uprisings across the crater of its skin.
Drag out your body, it is long overdue since we last talked. Scrub the moss out of your eyes and twigs nestled in the swivels of chestnut silk hair. I have seen you through these many seasons now and I no longer find bewilderment in the shapes or shadows, as others often do. You have always wandered out past the wooden post and sometimes I lay in your spot, where you used to breathe into a quiet hollow.
Fight with me, say that you will outrun the races we put to the test. Let us make crowns out of wild dandelion and skip stones into sunken waters. That you had a hint of mischievous magic, simply for the fact that you once caught a stray fruit that fell forward into the ground, as though it was meant to split apart.
Don’t go away, don’t crumble back into sleep now. I will keep on sharing stories just so you can keep awake. Is this grief I hold, for always leaving the woods as one? Here, you can keep. I bring my gifts, throw them high into the mouth of boughs and crevices of trees, so that you will never be alone even when I have to — against my will — one day leave.
It is June now and sometimes I still look into the rear mirror of yesterdays, at risk of crashing into what is hurtling before me. I try to keep my eyes from wandering but I see outlines of the past at turns and twists, marked porcelain. I see beauty in what is here and yet all that is ugly. Because not everything comes without blemish.
I am trying against mourning. The feeling of time running out when I am more than misguided, watching anomalous sands drift into the void. My mind is filled with cacophony that translate into garble. How do I string words into coherency when they appear dull clay.
Despite all the affection breathed into lost vapour, crimpled leaves underneath, I hope to have still the sufficiency to carry. I am trying to let go even when my hands want to hold this tightly, to a wave uninterrupted, a butterfly net warped with holes.
Some days I am washed with emotions that do not belong. It is finding a coat not mine, it is looking at marked walls, it is the smile not for me. Even then I reach out. I try to grasp and wrestle with the alien that is here. Rather than ask if it is here to stay. I make it a cup of coffee, of tea, of chocolate or of anything remotely suitable.
Some days it is the noise in your head. A cable gone loose. The wire electrocute. Why is it that this frayed thread is only but a sign of what is to come undone. No matter where I cut it desires to continue breaking apart.
Some days it gets better. Though there is no way to completely distinguish grey from grey. I will stare at the face of the unknowable until it becomes a friend.
Already nine years but it is just like a drop in the wasteland because some things don’t seem to age, even when everything else wanes. I used to think of you everyday and now not so, hedged by life’s ebbs of sorrow. But I remember still. In an attempt to fill the gaps I’ve created more memories of us than that which have truly existed. There’s too much chance that I’ll never hear from you again.
(So why do I keep on waiting?)
I do not know how to grow my capacity to love. I seem to have left portions in old vessels, in ships that no longer sail. I seek to never repeat my form of affection, simply because I loved in such a manner, but in time surely I will begin to lose all the ways.
Here’s to April. After all this time, I’m still the jester of this court.
So that’s it.
A whisper breaks and ripples into a tidal wave. I’ve set in motion a force no longer stoppable because suppression only made the pressure worsen. There’s no more grief to spare. Your face is shrouded in smog and I have no inkling to stay in this place.
Blink; 