Saturday, December 29, 2012

Dashed

What if I leave and it turns out to be just another city?

Someday

For fear of my pulse fading, I sit hunched over a tiny notebook, dipping into it with a black pen, skimming the thoughts in my mind. One day they'll be pieced together into a story. One day.

Someday, when they're finished.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Smiles

When your time is cut short, you learn to appreciate every second you have. And so it is with you. We only have moments, if that, to laugh, to talk, to smile, to inquire about the wellbeing of the other. Somehow in those few moments you've collapsed into a niche in my heart and planted a flag in the ground, proclaiming it as your own. When we miss our time, I miss you. When I don't see you, I miss you, like the you in your niche is tapping your fingers impatiently against your knee, wondering what's taking us so long.

And sometimes I think it doesn't mean anything. But then I'm leaving, hands full, and you're walking past. You catch my eye and smirk, and every part of me wants to drop everything I'm holding and wave. But I can't. So settle for trying to give you a smile back, though it turns out to only be half the one I'm giving you in my heart. But I hope you know anyway.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Breathing, Sleeping, Dreaming

You're sitting on my chest and stealing my breath away. I want it back; it's tiring going through life panting with every step. But I cannot wrest it away from you. You stole it from me, but I let you have it. I could not have stopped you if I tried. And that's the truth.

You're crashing through my dreams. I want them to be strange and crazy, and to help them assuage the loneliness. But you're there and I'm weak. You've cut me off at the knees and I don't want you to leave me alone. You're out there, swimming on the backs of turtles and screaming out from a stage, and I'm always here watching, listening, reaching for you. And when the morning breaks, I find myself alone in a too small bed, cold and with an aching hole in my chest. But that's what my life is now.

You're sitting on my chest and I want you to grab me by the hand and show me how your lips work against mine.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Big, Small

I am small and feeble and you are big. But you too are small, so you puff out your chest, raise your voice, and make enough noise for a whole army. It's in these moments that I realise that I am bigger than you.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Dwindling

Time, time, it's slipping through my hands, dwindling even as it stretches on into forever. I cannot grasp it, I cannot look back either, and tell you what I have done with all my hours, my days, my years. I could not tell you what I did with my last minute. Because what if it amounts to nothing? What if I go back and try to add up the sum of my life and find the number piteously small? Wouldn't it be better to never know and think you achieved something, rather than die knowing that you didn't?

Friday, December 21, 2012

The Apocalypse

The clock struck midnight and it was unremarkable. The seconds ticked past, then minutes, an hour, two, more. Nothing.

No one really knew what it was that was supposed to happen, only that something might. Some thought it should. Others scoffed. Some shut their blinds, locked their doors and huddled down in their basements, among their supply of canned foods. Most threw a party to celebrate.

Celebrate the end of the world, isn't that strange?

We could have ended in fire or ice or dust or water, all of a sudden. It doesn't seem a thing to celebrate. All of life, gone in an instant? It's a tragedy. It's nature. It's the only way the Earth can heal its wounds. But people celebrated their demise. We celebrated our own deaths, knowing there'd be no one left to throw us a funeral.

We didn't die. But what if we had? People would have died with smiles on their faces instead of worrying, sick with fear. It's not a bad way to go, not with a scream, but with a chortle.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Fragility

It's the thing that leaves you quivering, shaking from head to toe. It's because you know you cannot ever attempt to make something so delicate. You're afraid to reach out, even with one finger, to touch it, in case you shatter the entire fragility of the system. Someone beat you to it; someone else wrote the thing that could break your heart. You wish it had been yours, but you know that you're big and uncouth and bumbling beside the small, intricate, finely balanced piece you're looking at, listening to, feeling in your soul.

Maybe one day you'll find your own fragility and let it shine through to create something beautiful, but right now, you're too afraid. It might break you in half.

The After

Your hand reaches out across the bed, only to find it empty. It takes you a moment, but you remember that she's gone. The bed is too cold, too big, too lonely and your heart breaks more than a little when you remember that she is never coming back. Can never come back. Because she's cold too, and too lonely, but she's so small now, pale and hidden where sunlight will never touch her again. Her big personality cannot brighten the room and fill all the corners, and she will not brush your lips with hers. But at least you know, even if she's not here, she can still make you smile, even if the tears sting your broken heart.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

A Word

I feel like I should spare you a word, just in case you're out there and listening. So here it is.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Stuck

I think I better keep walking because there isn't a light burning in your window to draw me in. But every time I walk past, I'm going to check, just to make sure. I cannot deny that I'll be hanging on everyday, hoping you'll change your mind.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Solemn Love

I caught sight of you when I least expected it and found that I bore an anger in my heart. It isn't aimed towards you; it reflects inwards, on me, stabbing me with its refined point, driving the feelings home. I was trying to stop my feelings for you, but the anger reminded me that I could not. They're still there, stifling my breathing, roasting my soul above an open fire of self resentment and blacking you out as an impossible hole in the universe.

It's an inevitability that you know that I exist, who I am and what I do, but more importantly, it's an inevitability that you were never going to look at me the way I look at you. I'm drawn you to the way I'm in love with my melancholia; resentfully, but addicted in such a way that I am loathe to give you up.

It would be less painful to drive a literal knife through my heart.

Oncoming

There are thoughts I'd rather not have, but they're sloughing through my head and with their heavy arms, are knocking aside any others which try to raise their heads. It's a landscape of destruction and death and heartaching loneliness and it's eating me away, leaving me facing the trolls with the heavy arms, until they fill my vision and I'm consumed by the sight of them. There's nothing I can do. I'm alone at the edge of the battlefield and the destruction is coming towards me.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Nicotine Dreams

Today I woke up yearning for nicotine. I wanted the dark toxins to coat my fragile lungs and tinge my blood with acid. Lying in the half light seeping through my curtains, I could almost feel the smoke curling down my oesophagus and wrapping itself around my bronchi. The phantom cigarette sat in my fingers, comfortable, as though it had lived there all its life. When I breathed it in, my body knew what to do, as automatic as blinking.

Today I woke up craving a cigarette. But I've never picked one up before, never even tried. Yet after today, I cannot say that I never will. The balance is tipping and I'm falling.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The Razor Edge of Midnight

She's a dancer. If you weren't already in love with her, this would have done the trick. Somehow you cannot stop thinking of dark back alleyways in the middle of the night where she stumbles through, drunk and dizzy, her smudged mascara masking her eyes from the light. You think of the leers she might get, and shiver because she's so tiny.

But mostly you can't help but think of her in bed, tangled between your sheets as you run a hand along her stomach. She's a dancer, and you hadn't noticed it before, but here, alone without the barrier of clothing,  you feel it in the defined muscles on her abdomen, in the way her firm legs wrap around you and pull you in, in the way she arches - off the bed and into you.You taste the alcohol on her and pretend that drunk isn't the only way you find her in your bed. Lie, and tell yourself that next time you won't answer the 2am knock on the door.

When she comes down, she tells you she loves you. But she's a dancer. And you're inadequate.

Back of Beyond

Restless hearts are never still and their beating always urges for another beyond. Slowly, fumbling and clumsy, I can feel my fingertips brushing against the wall of this beyond and my heart screams for the leap into another before it's too late. But it's hard to broach the void when you cannot find the door in between the worlds. All I'm left is an imagination whispering about what the next phase of living will be like and another tiny voice telling me I'll never see it.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The Howling

I fell in love with the howls of wolves at the end of the earth, the way their solemn cries echoed over the mountain tops and through the veil of the night. I knew I wanted to run with them, that if ever I were to find my soul in another animal, that it would be a wolf. Because they knew what it was like to feel loneliness while surrounded by a crowd. And they knew the beauty of the wilderness which raced through their veins. And they knew that the only way to assuage the things that kill us, you have to scream into the night.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Potholes


This road is full of potholes.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Right and Wrong

Wrong. I've always known what it's felt like to be wrong. Every twist wasn't an opening to a new horizon, it was a brick wall with a mask that laughed at you, the sound echoing in the quiet alleyway so loudly that it didn't fade from your ears for days. It was a sense of confidence being shattered into a billion pieces to be ground into nothing, overlooked and uncared for.

Someday I'd like to be right. Someday I want that pit in my stomach to flood with relief, with pride and with the knowledge that life wasn't turning around to slap me in the face. Someday I'd like to be right about something major.

Today, all I want to be right about is thinking that we're not wrong.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Another Soul to Carry on my Heart

The truth be told, I wasn't really falling in love with you; you didn't give me enough to fall in love with, except a beautiful smile and a quietness. The trouble is, I could fall in love with quietness and a beautiful, rare smile. But the rest, I have to admit, was all imagined. If people were personalities only, I couldn't pick you from the next stranger who passes me on the street, and it saddens me to admit it, but you and I perhaps have little in common. In another life, another situation, maybe I'd be brave enough to say something different, and you'd be brave enough to reply. For now, I'll acknowledge that this feeling isn't going away, but it's not one that's going anywhere else either. I'm going to let you roam the halls of my fictions instead.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Not a Precision Tool

I keep meaning to come out and write something, but it seems the words are forever going to be elusive, writhing out of the grip of the pen which struggles to pin them down to the page. Instead, I sit and think about what I want to say, letting the thought remain abstract, a vague feeling in my chest, rather than a series of imprecise words tied together in awkward, ugly knots. One day I might be able to touch them and have them rearrange in the right order, but it seems that today is not that day.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

The Potential Something

You like me.

Maybe it's not completely romantic, but it's better than the cold indifference I'm used to. And maybe it could be romantic. Maybe we're sitting on the cusp of friendship and romance - two almost strangers tying knots to each other as the waves of life tumble us around.

It's just that you and I make a moment last longer than the twenty seconds it ought to and that's not something I could accomplish on my own. It makes me think that you're putting some effort into making the conversation last too, so maybe there's something to this after all. I know I want there to be. I want this sitting on the cusp to tip into romance. Somehow I think you and I could co-exist independently of each other while still existing together in a relationship, and that's not something I've managed to think before. So either you're the first person I could actually have something with, or I've matured more than I thought, like a leaf turning brown before realising it had even turned orange.

And if it's nothing, at least I'll have a friendship to fall back on.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Recording

Whenever I feel a moment, I scratch it down into my notebook, recreating it in lines and words and a tiny picture on a rounded-corner page. Supposedly I'm a dreamer. I like to think I'm a recorder, adding my own hand to reality and putting it down as I see it. It's not a crime to represent the world as you see it, and I like to fixate upon certain things, staring until their details are impounded into my memory, never to be forgotten, even as they lie sprawled across off-white paper and are held together with a black elastic.

I'll never stop putting life down in books.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

In the Wake of Dreams

My subconscious dredged you up again from its depths, and pranced you around in my dreams. You're like the silt which keeps being upturned by the ever crashing waves, never settling to be buried the way I want you to be. To its credit, even my unconscious self wants nothing to do with you and I leave you behind, watching after me as I go my own way, but it's strange to have you there at all, with all the details of your face still clear. That's what happens when your mind can't help but dwell on its scars. I don't know what it's going to take for you to be gone, getting your twisted hands out from under my ribcage, trying to pierce my heart, but I'm hoping I find the cure soon.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

No Fake Laughter Here

I could spend my whole life waiting for the day I next see you. I don't know if you feel the same, but I know you haven't thrown me out of your heart to freeze to death on the street, and it gives me hope that you and I might have a chance. After all, you manage to be there every time I am, and we always manage to share our words. And you laugh and I laugh and my heart reverberates with the knowledge that I'm the one who gave you your smile in that moment.

Giving Up the Ghost

We're going to pretend now, you and I, that you never meant a thing to me. I'm going to stop looking your way with covert glances and brief periods of staring when I think you're looking the other way and hoping that you'll turn around and catch me. Because you didn't. You didn't care.

I came to the realisation that when my heart starts beating faster, yours stays just the same, a regular pump of oxygen and blood and iron and all the other things your cells need to keep you alive. You never looked at me and saw in me what I saw in you.

And so we'll never speak of your beauty again, because it breaks my heart.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

December

I hadn't fared you well before you had gone, leaving a trail of memory and lost moments in your wake. I had wanted do bid you goodbye, but you had no time for that.

Instead, I'll greet the new month and hope that it will be good. After all, hope is all we can do. And December marks the beginning of the heart of life.