Saturday, February 25, 2012

Bookshelves


You've been there, countless times, head cocked to one side, looking for something; hoping for something? The opportunities arise, they dance tantalisingly in front of me, little imps crying in high pitch mocking voices "catch me if you can", but I cannot reach out and take them. They dance into the distance, laughing in delight in my regret as you walk away, gone until the next time, where the process is done again. Rinse. Repeat.

You appear so close. My brain knows that the time is now, but my chest tightens until I cannot breathe, my hands lose all strength, they shake, weakened by the sight of you. Words congeal in my throat, stoppered; I cannot speak to you. There is a moment, a pause, every cell in my body screaming at me to take the next step forward, to take the next breath, no matter how much it hurts, to force out the words, no matter how impossible. I look away. The moment dies. You leave. I'm left, standing among the stacks, breathing in the scent of books, feeling the sympathies, the disapprovals of the people inside them. They seem to whisper 'you could have done it. Why didn't you do it? One day she won't come back.' as if I didn't already know that I might not get another chance. I whisper back 'I'm sorry. I can't.' and they all shake their heads in disappointment; Elizabeth Bennet who doesn't understand what is so difficult, Jane Eyre, who sympathises, knowing that relationships must wait for the right moment, and Heathcliff, who angers as he thinks of all these lost moments, how he would not have wasted them. I turn my back on them and stalk out of the aisle, standing where I can see you, brushing your dark hair out of the way, tucking it behind your ear; the gesture I've seen a thousand times, but would see a thousand more, so endearing it is.

I sigh and turn away, regret like an acid in my stomach, burning a hole of shame and disappointment through my middle. My feelings drip out, pooling on the floor in a pitiful puddle, all longing and shyness and disappointment. One day my life will spill out with those feelings, and I'll convulse, lying on the floor in the feelings I couldn't express. The murmurs of the books will be my epitaph. People will stop and stare, and say 'that poor girl who died from too much unexpressed love' and you'll look over and wonder what the commotion is, but won't come to see. You won't know that I died because I fell in love with you among the bookshelves.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Walk Alone


Four walls are four too many, too closed to the world I must quietly tread. Four walls amplify the artificial sounds shrieking from ever-growing boxes with flickering screens. Four walls push down all the feelings I must rip out of me. 

What I need is a walk, a stroll through the suburban streets, stalking from shadow to shadow, flitting through the yellow puddles of light. I need to flirt with the stars, asking them to help me purge myself; I need them to help me articulate what I feel. I need to be alone.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Foggy Midnights


Don't we all dream of foggy midnights and puddle reflections? Of hazy clouds of luminescence and quiet towns? Don't we all dream of life, simple, easy, where daring is never difficult or prone to going wrong, and fun is easily found?


Don't we all dream of lives we'll never have?

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Light. Dark.


Slowly consuming, a disease eating from the inside out. Sweet intoxication fuelling this demise. I wouldn't stop it, not for the world. Though in the face of one door opening, a million others have closed, my mind narrowing its focus to a singular point, I would not give it up; I could not. This is the darkness with a single ray of light, this is the taint on a clean sheet, this is the torture we put up with for pleasure.

I want to lie on the floor with this feeling, basking in a thin sliver of sunlight streaming through the dark. I want to stare at the dust particles which swim through the air, caught in the gaze of the sun. I'll sigh, wistful. Maybe I'll lie there forever. Maybe that's what happens to those who start to fall in love in the dark - they're all burnt to cinders in the sun, forever doomed to float heartbroken through the air.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Luminescence, Love, and Longing


Luminescence, a glow in a dark place. Isn't that what we all find so attractive, the light at the end of the tunnel? The curtains of light in the sky on a pitch black night?

Of course. But that is not all. It's the magic that it entails, the terrifying, yet soothing notion that there is something beyond, something bigger, something that can force us to sit down and appreciate; something akin to dreams coming true. It's like being in love. It's like catching your eye unexpectedly, and feeling the guilty pleasure spread from my chest to warm even the extremities of my body. It's like knowing that you're watching, and trying to be nonchalant and impressive all at once. It's like the anxiety of wondering whether any of it is working.

If I can fall in love with the stars from a distance, if I can fall in love with fireflies in a black forest, if I can fall in love with foreign sunsets, or in love with white rifts of lightning, then who's to say that there isn't a chance that you might fall in love with me?

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Breathless Moments


Incredible, is it not, that something so fleeting can inspire something so remarkable? Yet this is who we are; people staring out through windows at the lives of other people, imagining ourselves elsewhere, the heroes of our own adventures.

It's sad, wouldn't you say, the way life seems to evolve? One could almost say it devolves. We begin as children, the heroes and action figures of the stories of our lives. We turn backyards into faraway planets, living rooms into battlefields, and our bedrooms into castles and forts. We grow. As teenagers we sink into a state of feeling; everything cuts more sharply, colours blind, emotions are rampant and occasionally toxic. As teenagers, we bare the souls we shall seem to lose as we mature; as teenagers we are the generation who feel that we grew old before our time. We mature. We settle into a pattern of life, and like water which flows along the same path for years, we carve a niche into the world. The world fades from a hub of colour and excitement, where everything can be imagined as something else, to a world where everything is the same, and we ourselves are as indistinguishable from one another as ants are to us.

Sometimes, in those rare moments of pause, when life is not consuming us, we find that we are alive. We stare out the window at the rain or the snow, at the leaves as they turn, or as the traffic as it rushes by, and we are taken aback by the breadth of life. Suddenly, we feel small, tiny, a speck of dust on the planet's surface; but the smaller we feel, the more aware we are, the more alive. Sometimes, all it takes is a moment for us to remember that there is possibility after all, that we are allowed to admire the rain, or surrounding architecture, or the life of someone else, recorded in breathless images across the pages of a book.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Tyranny

Somehow they manage to forget the important things in life when they're teaching you how to live; they neglect to mention that innocence is corrupted, that happiness does not last forever, and that sometimes, a situation is not all black and white. But the worst thing they ignore in their mundane outlines of life, is that love is a tyrant, gripping you in its impossibly suffocating grasp and killing you slowly.

It consumes your every thought as you descend into its abyss, which promises happiness, but seems to bestow more misery than it absorbs. It infuses you with passion, a lust for life, an impatience for everything you knew before, until, palms itching, body burning, breath labouring, you stumble outside, compelled to kiss your lover, to paint with furious brush strokes, to write in an untidy scrawl; you can escape it no more than you can escape the skin which stretches over your bones.

Love is a tyrant, an unrelenting ruler, never wavering from its demands, but as you obey, it rewards. It may twist and pull you, and poke you and torture you, driving you over the brink of madness, but when you look back to that time Before, it seems that you have since accomplished great deeds. Passion is the only cure for the insane, and though your madness drives you to lie naked beneath the stars, it is love, the grateful tyrant, who urges you to take the moment and immortalise it; thus ideas become revolutionary, thus do emotions become poems, and thus do the stars live on for eternity in art. Thus do the dreamers live.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Gangrene


There's no such cure, is there, as the one I seek? No opiate to sooth, no morphine to numb; no hallucinogen to make me dream of another place.

Drip. Drip. I'm so hollow inside that you can hear the obscene echo of my thoughts as they melt from my brain, pooling into a noxious waste somewhere near your feet. But you don't care. To you they're beautifully, but tragically tainted - a puddle with an ugly streak of oil which casts pretty colours if you happen to look the right way; fleetingly beautiful, but ultimately hideous.

Don't look too hard; you might see that these words are rotting - bleeding ink looks like gangrene, all purple and black and green. Tragically, disgustingly beautiful; and utterly wasted on you.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Star Paradox


I wonder if stars ever stare down at the earth and hope that someone is looking back at them. If you were a star with such thoughts, I would fight with every last breath in my body to show you that you are seen, that you are admired, and that you are loved.

You possess a quiet beauty, a subdued radiance, shining through in unguarded moments and lighting up the shadowy places in my heart. With the barest flicker of a glance, you stoke the flame of hope in me. Hope is a ruinous, beautiful paradox; strong and strength-giving, but fragile; uplifting, but heartbreaking. With the barest flicker of a glance you empower me as you destroy me.

But such is the way with stars; enchanting from afar, but dangerous too close. Still, I would swim through the Milky Way to find the one which is you.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Eye of the Storm


There's a painful calm in not knowing how things will go. It tears at your chest and weakens your muscles till you can't even fold your fingers into a fist; there's no fighting it. Everything blurs by, bright and mocking, never still, never clear, and you sit at the centre, the eye of the storm, watching it pass, unsure of how to proceed from where you are. Too afraid to get caught in the rush, too restless to sit by and do nothing. Too young to be so tired.