hello, stranger.
so much has changed - for one, I feel particularly constipated to the thought of writing. I seem to remember times ago when writing came to me like an arrival of a calm sea, when symbolism curled into the central dip on my tongue and low murmurs pieced words together inside my head. Now, I sit and attempt to summon them.
Nothing much makes sense: the 10 tabs I have for that presentation next week, that language dossier, that reading I have to do. Moments of confusion, a feeling of a distant memory that these were once important. I grow more and more convinced that we live within an illusory world we have to fight to emerge from with our own will. We tread a deceptive line where the daily endeavour is to reach such recognition. I don't know whether to be sympathetic to myself and the people around me. I don't know whether it is naive to hold hope that we know, that in our own ways we will supplant it.
As for now, we are still caught. Day in and day out, the same worries and frustrations. I struggle to find a voice to drown out those loudest, amplified by the very things that I have grown accustomed to believing.
Dear you,
The environment seems to have become averse to me. In places where I had found most support and stability now present threats and sources of disconcertion - in worse cases, agony. There is a feeling that I hold which I am not sure whether can be simply called stubbornness. There is a feeling that they, their opinions and preferences, do not matter. That they are simply in passing, and that they have not gone through as much consideration as I do.
The rain begins to patter and I wonder if hope it's in reassurance.
Of course, I steady myself. Caution not to become ungrateful and selfish. These are the people who care... But I also have to set my own boundaries, conquer my own battles and learn for myself. And this is where I am at. Such an uncomfortable position, so tenuous that the very ground which I place my feet seems to beg me to find someplace else.
Is Love worth this? Is Love manifested in such fickle and transient a thing as a fellow human being worth some things that might never return? Worth poor impressions and waning relationships. I suppose now it is to ask, which ones? Whose impressions and which relationships? I ought to say more to my mother. But it seems to take so much from me. Vulnerability has been ringed to its maximum, bravery finds 'better days'. More than once it feels like my blood has become only a dilution, everything has lost its density. I float and hope for somebody to hold me.
writing seems foreign and forced, I have come to the stage of having too little time, energy and bravery to traverse the limitations of language and thus put all my thoughts and waves into script. here, tonight I try again. I am thinking about wild abandon, about short-livedness and youth, and about the way in which I want to live.
from the kitchen I hear my mother speak of her angel, sensible and unproblematic, me, and tears arise with as much thought as when my body convulses on its own will. how fright and vulnerability overtake me, the kind which I can no longer rationalise away or at least alleviate through a next course of action. I lay there sprawled out and naked, as the grey seeps and colours over and as my heart swells such as to be felt as far as to my left hand. so different and yet so similar, and I understand more clearly the disjunct between life and heart. the latter does not seem enough. a year ago I argued otherwise, and today I seek reasons to support this wavering conviction.
i have learnt a little more about the present moment, about listening to my body, and about doing away with the impressions of others. and with it it seems that the notion of forever is fading. the things we do that secure this illusion of forever strikes me as tenuous, almost frivolous now. for instance, marriage seems to be a convenient settling, or a dulling of some sort, the attempt to hold on when everything is meant only to pass. why keep it in your grasp only for it to wilt between your fingers? it strikes as a forced delineation around something as vast and as irrepressible as love. it assumes that people cannot change beyond recognition, if not that then beyond what your love can tolerate, or beyond what your own needs can be neglected for.
is this an inescapable human dilemma? we have learnt about utility and self-preservation, but there is something about society, empathy and a love for others that has not yet been expounded enough, in my personal knowledge and experience. I had never before realised the extent to which one can love and forgive as to run contrary to the self. where another can supersede the self to such degree, and internal conflict can so arise. sometimes when that seems too much, when it feels like the self is such an impenetrable and formidable barrier, i wish to collapse into myself, fade into oblivion. i wish for ignorance, a stubborn resistance to the future, for my body to be a mere rag doll thrown and flung along with the whims of life, for my thoughts to dissipate as fast as they form, without a trace.
but i am not so. the times i am able to pretend, i rise again. "i'm weak from all the things that i know," - how things ought to be, what about the self to protect and preserve, what to accept and what to object to, they flood my mind and do not seem so instinctive anymore. what defines a human being? everything seems to be getting thinner and less substantial. what can be counted on?
lovers, side by side
in bed with fingers curled around the others
inching ever so closely to the poignancy of a pain that we cannot take away,
questions that we wish we could answer for each other
things we wish could be made simpler with a gentle kiss.
he caresses my face
i realise after a while when everything else boils over
all the spark and passion simmers down into the slight shake of the hand as it slides over skin
an exploration of terrain we often think already familiar.
But no, you don't know the earthquakes
I didn't know until it shook through my body and made my nerves jolt out of character.
I say "oh dear, oh dear"
how deep the wreckage,
i try to turn away to save you from drowning.
xx
I miss you -
I really only miss a possibility. Servants, we are, to possibility.
What I said was true, I will always love you. I will always love you for the fact that you are human, that I saw and understood. I will always love you for the fact that I cannot separate the layers of fear, ego, trauma, selfishness, awareness, chosen ignorance, love, selfishness - the layers of the things that I forgive and those that I cannot. Too much they are to decipher and say for certain, too many conditions to hating you so instead, I choose love. A product of confusion and resignation, cowardice and fatigue.
I'd like to be there for you. To an extent I see that there is a saviour complex of mine that I seek through you, I will not kid myself. I think I am strong, mature enough to help you in the capacity that I hope I can, with a dynamic between us that will be a constant struggle for us to maintain, 'friends'. But the truth is I will hurt to see you with someone else. That now, as long as I am by your side, I will want you to myself. What in this world can we really own? Not even ourselves.
So you are figment. My capacity for imagination in full swing. I grasp onto you in my dreams -literally-, my heart aches and I inhale smoke for a void that I deceive myself into thinking is only the absence of You. I think all the questions will be answered and all the pain erased if only I could hold your face and be in your embrace. How absurd a thought. Dancing in your bedroom, soon I'd melt into the floor and soon you'd look through me just like you did when you got what you wanted, when we want only what we can't have.
xx
I
everytime i want to smoke but have run out of cigarettes my heart skips a beat just like the second time i met you.
it is quiet, begs no attention from the unacquainted, for a moment fools me into thinking I could be ignorant.
but the gaping sits and leers the way the smoke curls around unseen drafts of air
its lightness and translucency so easily mistaken
look closely – the two ends of a noose.
It descends and tightens around my windpipe,
sends my heart into shatters,
dances among them, veering in and between.
a celebration of their diurnal work
a ceremony of deadly love
to me, their king
II
this time there are none and I exhale only the stale air that has caressed my lungs
i resolve to the touch that will never have the warmth of yours
i resolve to the disillusionment that has made that warmth only of your mortal blood.
my heart skips a beat and i try to hold ground as something tremors,
excruciating,
white-knuckle sobriety.
III
it is true you have defiled even the lightest parts of my body
with your nicotine stains and all your mind games
I, a willing participant.
from your parted lips I mistook the smoke for life force
an exchange of gaseous hopes
Ingestion did not happen. I had wondered why I still felt empty.
But I sit with the stale air,
And now, let the words flicker and curl
the beginning of healing
xx
the night comes and the midriff becomes the instigator
i walk around the playground so he will not see me
another! and i curve inwards only to walk into a post
for a split second i think he is not the sort, not tonight, not one after another
but on his bicycle he does not look down, only straight at me.
i recover from the concrete pressed into my toes
just as he murmurs a suggestive hello.
does my knit cardigan have too many holes?
i wish to disappear
to deny a gaze, to be seen any longer
who do i think i am?
what flattery you give yourself.
moments after
and i am still contorted
limbs crossed over each other as if that would help force me into non-existence.
