(Home) Alone

What a creature life has made out of me.
Sadness does not destroy me, does not even scare me, because I have survived it time and time again by coming back to a certain place. And it didn't take a lot of effort on my part to reach that place. At least not in sadness.
No, it is joy that terrifies me now. In how much I am mesmerised by it. It is more difficult to find my way back home from there.

Years ago, when I tried making a little nest for myself in sadness, this place came along and gave me a whole mansion in alone.
And I think that's the essential task of a human being... Learning how to complete themselves in themselves. And until life can prove otherwise, I am not privy to believing anything else.

It explains a lot, too. How sometimes even suicides occur, and the unsuspecting significant other is left perplexed in how they never saw it coming from the distance they were at.
Because alone is not measured by distance. It's in the intensity of this being here now, this you experiencing yourself. It can be a beautiful or tragic experience; you get to choose, and also understand that it is an ever-changing one, and it can't be experienced with another.

In the past, I have answered calls without initially wanting to. I have put a smile in my voice while there were tears in my eyes. But here's the important thing: it wasn't a lie. You probably did say something funny. We probably did have an amazing conversation.
But I am only too aware that the line must be cut at the end of the talk. Regardless of the fact that we may talk again, it's the in-between moments where we're most ourselves. Where we get to grow. When we come back to alone.

It is home. You are responsible for it. So do it up. Decorate. Hang beautiful memories everywhere. Put up some curtains so the world doesn't get in. Take care of the foundation. Protect it, fiercely. You will never want to leave it. I don’t.

Like I said. Sadness does not terrify me, because my home has always saved me, sheltered me.
It is the opposite extreme I'm still learning to cope with. How to accept joy. How to leave it as easily as its counterpart.
How to remember again and again that we are put on this vehicle of life all together, with the same destination, but the journey is never the same.
It is experienced individually.

Bold

I was 19 years old when someone asked me how bold I could be.
He himself was old, but not old enough in his mind to understand that bold was a subjective term.
In his vocabulary it meant one thing, and in mine that one thing spelt weak.

I think I am the most fluid person I know—I say that like it’s a terrible trait. I know how to adapt myself to a person’s language, their vocabulary, the meanings they ascribe to words. In the end, I am playing too many parts, and the one I want to play is felt by me alone because it is still wrapped in silence.

The term goes “to come up for air”, but for me it’s always been a plunge within. So I keep coming back to alone. It is a state without language and only meaning—so much burden lifted off already.

There is one common meaning ascribed to boldness though—to expose oneself.
There are many ways to do that: sometimes it is simply in words.
But there is a kind of nakedness I wish I hadn’t seen. It is when bold became a fad rather than a dare to dream—and then make that dream come true.

For me, there is much more boldness in concealing. In waiting.
In saying, I hold this to be of highest value, so I’m not giving it to you.
There are stories so sacred, I will not tell them to you.
I will hold on to these secrets for someone not you.

The Story

August began with a rush but ended with a howling wind that blew us astray, and it’s uncanny how we’re all just trying to find our way back home.
There are stories of the storm crawling under our skin because we won’t let our thoughts near them. This disacknowledgement festers in a silence so deep, even the echo of a care no longer reaches. And that is the biggest crime you can let happen to you.

You go on, experiencing the world through the vehicle of this body, and wear and tear is inevitable. But the bigger shock is learning there is intended hurt. A violent chase. Pieces stolen and ripped right off…

But you are more than just this vehicle. I want you to remember that.
When all you can see in passing your reflection is all they took from you, remember there is a part of us—and thank God for it—that exists so deep inside, you couldn’t give it away if you wanted to.
It is the I.
And though we too are guilty of judging books by their covers, we know that’s not where the story came from.
The truth is, we don’t know where stories come from.
Even these words, I don’t how they flow through me, and I don’t know if they’ll flow again. I have made my peace with the uncertainty of art. Which is really just the uncertainty of life.
Embrace that mystery. Milk the moment; you don’t know that you’ll have another.

I know it’s easier said than done. Believe me, I know. Because when they scribble profanities into your narrative, it is difficult to remember you were never the words on these pages but the thought, the idea behind them—and ideas are intangible; they cannot be destroyed by human hands.
I realise that’s not what comes to mind when mind is forgotten, and you feel like limbs and unclean skin dirtied by their intentions, and intentions are so much harder to wash off than stains. I know.

Repetition has always created monsters out of men—hear a scream long enough, and your ears eventually tune into everything louder or softer, but not the cry itself.
But I will not try to understand such monsters. Not today.

Today I just want you to hear that you are not what you were used for. You are not who you were treated as.
You are not the sadistic instrument of a twisted fantasy nor the careless jest.
You are beauty in form, witnessing a cruel world, taking the blows, feeling them too (because you have a heart)—and I believe in you. I believe your kindness far outweighs their cruel intentions.
You will survive.
You will not let the things that happen to you become the story of who you are.
You will write.
You will rewrite the damn rules of this world.
You will be strong for another you, because you understand the pain of surviving it alone.
You will make this place a little more bearable.
And, love, you already have.

Fragile

I knew we would break one sweet afternoon as I sat by your bed and watched you fold your shirt, and I was smiling, but I can’t say why something in me was crying that the someone who would someday do these things for you would not be me.

But knowing does not happen all at once. It is fragmented premonition of blinding light from a shard that pierces so deeply, we inevitably look away. Until we can’t.

I had known once before—nay, many times before—like when life filled up with things beyond my knowledge, but you’d known me longer than that.
You were building a house, and I was never home.
And I never liked being surprised by things not picked for us.

I knew we would break in the beginning too. When I finally understood that phrase from that book, “a part of me is made of glass…”
Because sometimes it takes someone to hold you carelessly before the fear of shattering reminds you that there is something in you that is fragile.
There is something that needs to be saved.

From now on, I want to be held like glass, because I do shatter.
I want you to love yourself, so I’m not just your mirror.
I want your insecurities left outside my door; I am not a personal soother.

I know all these things.
Still, I gamble with my self sometimes.
I hold an image too long, and too tight.
I open the door too wide…

I need to be alone for a while.

Clean-up

Today has been a busy day indeed. I was reaching at the back of the darkest closets because the doors wouldn’t close anymore, and things I didn’t mean to show kept spilling out.
So much has collected in there… Webs of hope and despair so intricately settled upon both old and new, I couldn’t distinguish a souvenir from a dream.

So I had to take it all out.
It is the only way to decide what must stay and what must go.
To put each thing back where it belongs, understanding its place anew, or else to say enough, you’re just taking room, and I need some space outside of you.

But it isn’t just closets that get too full; sometimes I do too.
Old thoughts linger and cloud the new, and my mind sees a picture that’s far from true.
I think. I can never know.
That is the price of identity, memory—which by its very definition is the past acting as a reference point for every present experience.

All I can do is try to stay young in a body that withers and wrinkles like discoloured scars refusing to heal. To stay believing. To stay sweeter than the bitter in my mouth I can still taste from the last bout of living. Or trying to…

But someone told me I must break. That life was the thing we’re not meant to survive.
“Give it another year or two.”
As though blue would finally paint me too.

Well, I am blue—forever reaching for yellow, then merging into a forest of green thoughts, dotted in red from where the growth keeps pricking… I guess I never liked painting with just one colour.

But mixed all together, they too would turn black.
Like a shadow. Like a dark closet. Like a mind too full.
You see how necessary it is to clean up?

Original

I’m an unoriginal being, I’ve always known.

I knew the first time I found a poem for the unsayable way I’d been feeling.
I knew again when I read a book, and someone said something I thought only I’d been shown. Then I’d look at the date: from a hundred years ago…

I’m an unoriginal being, I’ve always known.

A child in feeling for the first time, but life was bitter and yawned indifferently at my woes.
It’s been done.
It’s been felt.
All this has happened before.

But if the world were truly hopeless, what did it gain by saying the same thing over and over and over again?
When has repetition ever gained anything?

If I were hopeless, I wouldn’t be writing.
If I didn’t think there was a solution, I wouldn’t keep coming back to words.

And so I hope it is with living.
That we come back to life because there is still something left unlived.
A stone yearning to be turned.
A problem wanting to be figured.
There are still words anticipating their own release for a story that plays out differently than the rest.

There is a chance, still, at being original.

The Truth-Sayer

"They find us amusing,” he simply stated, the one who wakes me every night.

Not surprisingly, he is usually a bitter pill to swallow, but I see him try very hard to carry on with hope despite some shackles that do not set him free. So I listen and try to relieve him of the weight, even if it’s for a moment in time.

“We’re spectacles to them,” he continued, annoyed. “They’ll watch, then carry on.”

That was many months ago, when I could not yet fully grasp what he had figured out.
I used to think we were different; now I know we share a cross.
You see, he had jumped without the safety net of norm, and there were many who had pointed to the sky as they watched him fly; some even applauded at the sight.
But no one flew with him.
And when he began to fall, no one tried to catch him.

And that’s the price of living outside the lines: you exist in such space alone.

I am nowhere close to the heights he soars; my wings of illusion disappear easily with every ruffle of doubt. I fall many times. It is a journey taken on faith, and I am not yet so strong. It is like walking on water, but the price of a moment’s disbelief is to sink to the depths of despair.

I am not like him. I do not know my spectators from my friends as simply as he does.
But I have him, this voice of certainty, albeit tortured in his tone, and he never stops reminding me: we are only passing by.

Organised Love

I never thought I needed you until you held my thoughts, and suddenly the burden was off. You held memory for me, and I could trust things big and small in the space you gave me.

Still. I never thought I’d be this old. Not in years but in emotion and all that’s taking a toll. And it is strange, so strange, that it comes down to saying this:

Remember to love.

Remember to love yourself.

Remember to care.

Remember what made you.

Remember not to break.

When did I begin to forget?

When did it stop being second nature?

Life is like the first book I finished reading, and as I read on to the sequel, I must remember certain things. But it is difficult some days to wake up with the weight of all that’s yet to be done, pressing against me and pushing me down before I ever stand up. It is difficult to leave behind others.

Sometimes I want to be empty. Not to erase or fill myself with something else, but just to breathe in white, the blank sheet of a new leaf of paper, the rest before I begin the next chapter.

But I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust my mind; I think it will repress even love, because love has started to hurt.

And that’s when I met you. The one who gives me the freedom to let go. Who holds me without judgement and gives me back to myself when it’s time, when I am ready to take on the next line.

I give you all the things that make my life what it is, and you give me the assurance that I can survive every task.

Whatever makes the burden a little lighter, right?

Breaking the Rule

I have a rule these days.

When something strikes a minor chord, I wait for emotions to progress to a major chord before I let them sound.

Not this time.

Sometimes a sad song is a sad song, and you can't make it better. You can take what you want from it, but it will not change its tune or the way the ghostly fingers pluck at memory. 

Sometimes gone is gone, and there is nothing to be salvaged.

Sometimes bitter is bitter, and no amount of sweet nothings can dilute the somethings.

Sometimes a bad day is a bad day, and sleep is your only out of it.

Life itself is a sea of metaphors now: of longing and separation, and I could write them endlessly.

Mostly because I am terrified to undress their speakable coats. Because who can stomach their nakedness; I couldn't. 

Stay silent about the screaming images in your mind and speak instead of something similar, but not quite the same. 

Because there is no metaphor for this. There is no metaphor for watching the blood pool in hands that held me. For leaving a hospital from the back door when you came in the front. For driving at that ungodly hour, the irony ringing in my head that it was at ungodly hours when you taught me how, except this time, this time you weren't in the passenger seat--and it is the only time in my life I despised driving, as if it could have been different if I hadn't known how. 

No metaphor I can think of for watching cinders fly, but I remember thinking how you love steam engines. 

No metaphor for the weight of regret and the decisions that haunt. 

God, forgive me. 

The easiest thing in the world for me has been to be yours, "100%", like you said. The only love where I have never had to try because every act was carried out before it was thought, propelled from its force within. 

It is much harder now. To feel it, and to hit a wall with every want to act on it. This urge as though to run, but there's no path ahead. 

I don't know how to show this love now. But I'm trying. Every single day. 

It's possible to fall apart with a smile, I'll tell you that. To have breath knocked out then caught the next second. But that's the thing. It will be knocked out; I will fall apart. Again, and again, and again. As many times as I come back. 

But even a swinging pendulum eventually rests. 

Then, somewhere over the rainbow, where bluebirds sing, where troubles melt like lemon drops, I'll find you there.

The Secret Ingredient

I've had some tiring few days in a row, the kind that would have you believe opening a stubborn jar of jam is life expecting more emotional strength than you've got. And I can't say it isn't true, because I'm still very deep in the forest of such tight-lidded bottles.

I'll go hungry, I think, rather than open that cocky piece of...
But I know my anger runs deeper than appetite.
You see, I haven't been speaking to life.

If I really think about it, I've got a pretty tight lid on myself too. I've painted the outside, proclaiming sweet flavours you'd like to know. Just so I can sit on this shelf. Be back in the business.
But, and this is for your own sake, I stubbornly keep the lid on.

When I was younger, I read a book I should not have been reading. It spoke of emotions mixing into the recipe. It described the devourer's agony and ecstasy, transferred through the contents of an innocent enough meal but one prepared in the midst of a particular affliction.
Now I'm afraid of these ingredients. Of the conditions they were mixed in.  I cannot name plainly what's inside; they would be useless nouns missing secret adjectives you couldn't fathom unless you'd been there, partaking in their brewing.

I suppose life has become the meal I would like to have lived with those who made it what it is.
There is a banquet in front of me, and it is untouched whilst I sit alone. And I see the stares and I hear the whispers: what a waste, and what a shame. 
But I have simply lost my appetite.

Unchoosing

A paper boat does not carry you through a storm just as a house of cards cannot stand in the wind.
It was magnificent while it lasted of course.
Colourful, alluring, pretty to look at.

Then the winds began and the rain fell, and all my words bled into elements beyond control.
I’m tired of dreams; I’m tired of their ethereality while my heart is subject to the physicality of being alive in form.
The most vivid imagining is sometimes not enough; just ask the Little Match Girl.

But the world doesn’t hold the form I long for.
So I strike match after match after match, letting moments of pretend keep me alive.
For now.

Because the alternative is darkness. The alternative is ending instead of finishing (there’s a difference).
I could never choose to live in this reality that became a mistake the moment you were gone. I’m incapable of it.
But while I’m here, while there’s work to be done, the way I carry on is through little acts I call unchoosing. There is nothing I could want now, but I know what I don’t want.  And that makes the choice for me indirectly.

Do I have it all figured out?
Certainly not.
Each act is the strike of a match; they are limited, and they will end, but perhaps by then they would have lit some lasting kind of flame.

Survivor's Guilt

As constantly evolving creatures, our biggest folly lies in our expectation of another being remaining the same. The same as when we met them. The same, before life changed. The same…

What does it mean to survive an ordeal?
It is a storm of rapid, violent change; you will not be left the same.
To have survived does not ensure intactness of who you used to be.
Surviving never promised preservation.

Because how could you not be completely destroyed by the event?
How could you possibly continue?

The simple answer is that you don’t.

You are glass that cracked, shattered, was melted, and came out changed in new form.
You are made of the same stuff, but the glass blower’s breath has pushed the experience so deep into the essence of you, you carry the weight of its blow.

It is this new version, solidified, that is able to endure what you never could have before.
It is this creature, remembering, that pretends lighter days around outer forms yet unchanged.

And for once the mask of memory is a bit of aid while rough shards in unsettled edges take the time to smooth themselves out against some remaining purpose.
One tries very hard not to give in to the fall,
the one brought about by this imbalance,
this weight of absence,
this shift from all that stopped being there.

The View

Ahead; that’s where it feels like the ‘solution’ lies. The next step (not where I am). Tomorrow (not today). Another person (not you). Somewhere else (not here). The alternate scene in my head (not reality).

Is it any wonder, then, that this grasping forward always leaves one empty-handed?

I am trying to teach the palm of my hands to close upon what I do have. Not to keep it (we own nothing; but that’s another train of thought). But to experience it being there, like I am being here. I am trying to teach my soul to sit still in the shell where it resides, and learn to make it home (for a while). To kiss sensation against the weight of bones as if to finally say, all right, I will hold you till you die. I will not fight this being alive.

I am learning to carry the grief instead of running from it.

Give truth the spotlight; come out of parenthesis. Out of subtext. And live directly into now.

I used to think it was true what they said: like attracts like. What you think is what you get. Think it, and it will be so. And it all seemed to work.
For a little while.

Polishing the outside, making up a face, putting on a smile, wearing the attitude—all these things are necessary at times. But if you never stopped to also clean out the inside, all that decoration is only added weight on a surface starting to crack from a lack of something fundamental. The brightest décor is useless on a foundation giving way.

You are not weak to have stopped. There is distinction between premonition and fear. You didn’t think this into existence. If anything, you simply avoided a greater disaster.

And if that truth can change so easily with perspective, maybe truth never had a single face. And if it has many faces, then there must be many points of view to it.

Which one is yours?

Constants

Years ago, a friend once told me I had so much potential but that something was always holding me back from meeting it. Back when she said this, it was usually a boy. She went on to draw me a picture—after the everyday consumption of energy post our dedication to our daily tasks and responsibilities, the hours spent simply working to sustain our lives, etc., we have very little time left for ourselves, as little as 10% of a day—that is it!

She described a scene from her balcony one day—looking down upon a young couple having an emotional fit on her street. That was easily me all those years ago, just on someone else’s street. What a waste of time. What a waste of this impermanent life.

And yet. “I fall in love with everyone I meet.”
(Do you remember that line? It’s from a movie I absolutely adored.)

It is years now since my friend spoke those words, and I didn’t know how deep the issue ran, but this is what I do—I still fall in love with everyone I meet. It’s not even a romantic kind of love; it doesn’t have to be.

It is listening, caring, getting involved, worrying about what they think, weighing every word I speak, reading too much into theirs, putting them before me.

It was a while before I realized not everyone lives this way. That when someone else speaks, it isn’t always a heart to heart—it’s just a learned conversation at times. A repetition of things they’ve allowed themselves to say, while the rest stays guarded. That’s also when I realized I had no guard. If I spoke to you, I was an open book, not pausing to wonder if you would want to read. Most people don’t, by the way. And rightly so. It’s their 10% to keep!

People come, people go. That’s how it works. To every story that begins, an end follows. Because that is life too. The only thing to hold on to is a constant. Constants aren’t forever either but just that: constant—the only something to remain with you through every storm or calm; the thing that gives you back your breath after life knocks it right out. Also—and this is the important bit—constants are usually not a person.

I’m learning now to acknowledge mine. Words, stories, art—they all coalesce to form a record of moments in life. To say, this happened. I was there; I felt it with my every sense. This was not just in my head—but even if it was, it was real to me in every way.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to write something longer. Something more raw than the momentary rush of a poem, and something a little clearer than the ambiguity of metaphors.

This is my record of forming stronger constants during my 10%.

Until next time.

:)

Instagram Updates

I thought I'd mentioned it , but clearly not.
You may now (finally) find the links to my Instagram page(s) on this blog (it's to your right).

The past year, I got on Instagram for the first time and tried to stay consistent with whatever projects I was taking on. In an effort to streamline things, I have ended up with three (yep) Instagram handles (dedicated to art, crafts, and writing). And while this does keep thoughts looking organized, I might have complicated things for myself personally--it's just that many more passwords to remember!

Go ahead and follow the Instagram pages for more regular updates (it's just easier).
But something tells me the old-school itch to drop a line here might kick in from time to time.
So see you here, too!

And as always, thank you for reading.
:)