(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.