Something in the Way

It's all air between us; air and something else, like half smiles that turn to grins and beating hearts that start to race. Resistance stands in the way, bearing down on us with a malicious sneer, daring us to step closer to one another. This is fear. I know it is. But it's hope and it's wonder and it's the way your pupils dilate and your mouth twitches with amusement and it's the way hours pass like minutes and sunlight fades in the evenings. It's wanting you close without you ever being close enough.

Some Times and Some Days

Sometimes I'm lost, crawling through a heavy fog that dampens my senses and steals my sense of direction. Sometimes I run and wake up in the morning with bruises. Splotches of purple and blue and red, splattered across my skin, and I'm reminded of the time I spent with you. Before you went away.

Sometimes I scream. I turn the music up too loudly, letting it thrash the walls and burn my ears and cascade around me in broken fragments of melody. The neighbours don't hear anything but the beating drums and the guitar riffs that scratch the calm from the air. Eventually I lie down on the mattress on the floor, the place you wanted it to be, and try forget that my head throbs with words that remind me of you.

Someday it'll be gone, those last slivers of you. Someday I'll not lie in the dark and remember all the times you smiled at me, or the way it felt when your arms enclosed me. Someday I'll forget.

Intangible Losses

We all lose things along the way. Sometimes they're small things,  like toothbrushes and pens and socks that disappear without a trace. Sometimes they're larger, like car keys or credit cards. But the worst things to lose are the immaterial, the things that were almost palpable, but hovered just out of the reach of your fingers. Sometimes it's deliberate.

We shed, you see, the way snakes and cicadas shed their skin, leaving imprints of ourselves behind, even as we venture on, altered. Humans are volatile things, and sometimes will try rid themselves of things that aren't ready to be gone; those people are left with gashes through their flesh and thoughts that run around in circles.

But sometimes people will lose things they weren't aware they had, those intangible things that sit in the back of the mind, ghostly companions to the conscience. And those people have lost the most grave thing of all: themselves. But not all who are lost need to be rescued. Some just need time to reorient themselves.

Tabula Rasa

It used to be there, hovering in the periphery of your mind, a blank shape in a squalid landscape. You used to trip and stumble and find glittering things in the grass and hold them up to the light to catch the colours. Now everything is being erased. Because that thing that used to hover is growing, rolling over the desolation and swallowing every blade of grass and every glint of silver and every hint of sky. It's washing away everything. You're turning into a blank slate.

Same Coin

Mistaken and Hoping are the two friends you wish you never made; one is a certainty you would rather not face, and one is the impossibility, waiting to happen.

Organic

An organic mess curled up in the dark, weeping tears of tar. Because nothing produces darkness like a fragile, broken soul. Held together by tape and weak glue, your soul's leaking out the edges and pooling around you on the frozen cement. You don't know what day it is anymore.

Weekend Midnights

If I could sit outside in the freezing cold every weekend midnight, I would. And we could talk about books, literature, travel, the corners of coffee shops and the niches of ruins, the gibbons in the trees and the rivers you can kayak up in the Pacific.

But whatever you do, don't mistake it for something it's not.

Because while I'm sitting there, shivering in the cold and laughing and talking and theorising, I'm waiting for the morning, when I'll see her.

Pretty Misery

She's the kind of girl you fall in love with, over and over again, until your heart is so full of it that your chest constricts and pain shoots through your lungs. And it's the kind of love that will slowly kill you, because you're a statue to her, a furnishing, not a person to be considered as a lover. Because you're you, steadfast and protective, and she's flighty, a butterfly that flits from beautiful thing to beautiful thing, and sometimes even to the bad things, so that sometimes she finds herself crawling back to you with broken wings. And you always heal them. Because you're in love with her and that's what you do; you heal her and you hope that she'll thank you in kisses one day instead of smiles.

And you hope that the restless soul in her finds what it's looking for, because she's down in her pretty misery and you can't lift her out of it, though you try and try and try, tugging at the ropes that she reluctantly allows to bind her to reality. But really, she's gone. Some days she doesn't come back. You worry that one day will be the last day you ever see of her. And you know this should carry you backwards, away, but it doesn't; you're drawn ever forward. Because you too are drowning in your pretty misery.

Straight On

You're just a mess that needs cleaning, a shriveled heart that needs watering. A ticking brain that needs winding. And an empty soul that needs illuminating.

But you walk down a road with weeds growing through the tarmac, and no one seems to get through. So you're alone in the middle of the highway, and you're not sure if the way you're going will lead you straight to hell, or to another dimension, but you know it's too late to veer off it now.

Capture the Flag

Oh, you clever girl. In the game of subtlety, you're winning.

Roads That Lead

I'm  sorry if you ever felt that I left you on the side of the road, howling at the tail lights of my car as they made white streaks into the distance. But the truth is that it would have been you leaving me sooner or later. And then what would I have done? It is the manner of my existence that I cannot bear the thought of being left alone by you.

In a list of things that would kill me, that would grace the top spot. So excuse me if I seem distant when we talk, because I'm really dreaming about a world where you and I coexist as entities free of the fates of one another. But I'm also dreaming of a world where I wake up next to you and not have to wonder if we'll share the same bed again.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm just a deer caught in your headlights. And you're hurtling right at me.

The Only Things We Remember

The months went by and I didn't spare a thought for you. I've no doubt you did the same. But walking through a familiar place, seeing a familiar face, is as unexpected as awaking in Wonderland. The brain didn't register that you would still be around, that people didn't cease existing once they'd left a room.

So you caught my eye for half a second, while I pretended to be engaged in conversation with someone else. And now I wonder if I should have said hello. Now I wonder whether you really wanted me to. Your face was saying something, but I'm terrible at reading the map of someone's soul. And then the moment passed.

There are questions running through my mind, tripping over one another; like, 'can we transgress who we are?', and 'what was that look in your eye?'. But the biggest question I ask is 'am I seeing light where there is only shadow, because I don't want to admit that I'm afraid of the dark?'.

Poetics

Everything I wanted to say is tricking away, diffusing, like fragile light. The tongue cannot push out the correct words into the loaded air, for it won't take anymore sounds, too full have we made it in the afterglow.

Instead I'll take a camera and have it focus on the sheets tangled around your legs, and then the way the light pierces through the curtains to trail over your hips, highlighting the ridges of your ribs. I'll take a photo of your ear, for all the things it has heard, and your eyes, for all of me that you have seen, and your lips, for all the places they found that I did not know existed.

Or maybe I'll leave the clicking shutters and whirring of film canisters for another time and simply lie by your side, my fingers entangled in your hair.

Ghostly

It's been months and months and months and I've spent all this time with words dripping through my mind, but drying up at the tip of my pen. I crept through the corridors of my thoughts, trying to find from whence they came, as though I could trap them at the source and have them gleam back up at me from the paper's surface.

I found naught but dead ends.

And then I came to the realisation that they are an embodiment of all this time that I have spent chasing you through my dreams. I cannot hold them, because like you, they are insubstantial.

Time It Goes A-Changin'

Oh, I used to think myself so clever. Nowadays I don't think half so highly of myself. But perhaps that makes me a little more wiser.

Half Real

The words in my fingers and on my tongue disappeared, caught off guard by the sight of you. Now everything's on fire and burning, my ambitions of words and worlds and half real people crumbling to grey ash. Now there's only you, the only half real person. Everything I dreamed. Everything I despise. Everything I want.

Mind Tricks

It's all over from where I stand, isn't it?

But it won't ever be. It's an ongoing battle between want and need, and cold rationality. It comes knocking and my mind during my waking dreams, barging through the closed door and painting my world over with white. Erasing you.

Somehow my subconscious tricks it away though, like a will o' the wisp taunting and teasing and flirting across dangerous moors, until it's far enough away that you return, draping yourself over the neurons of my brain and filling my synapses with nothing but thoughts of you - your smile, your hair, your light dusting of freckles, the dress you wear and the coffee you drink and the books you run your fingers over but never buy. Inescapable.

I could lose myself in losing you.

Characters

You're really just a character in my head, playing the part I assigned to you. But the strangest thing is how discontent with this sits on my heart, and all I want is to know what you're really like. What is this charade? Won't you take off your crown of silence and let it sit on someone else's head for a little while? I'm sure there's much to say if you let yourself be free of silence's curse.

Squabling

Giver, Giver, Taker, tell me, are we on equal footing now?

To Be With You

Wherever you go, I'm stumbling after you. And though you don't make me quiver and shake, I think it means I'm not afraid of you.

In the dark, my heart is whispering "you've haven't known each other for very long, but it feels like a lifetime. Don't let this go."

Pickings

One day while we're driving through the clouds, chasing the road through the mountains, I'll turn around and ask you why you came. If you smile and say "because it sounded like a silly adventure," I'll know I'll have picked the right person to share it with me.

Where I Go

"Where do you go," you asked, "when you stare out into space?"

I told you of mystical places where the sky was forever streaked with pink and the water always ran clear. Places where all furniture hung from ceilings, and where all beating hearts were connected as one. Where zebras were spotted and giraffes were striped, and where lions had sets of horns growing through their manes.

I told you of lines that never met and train tracks that never ended; of phosphorescence that made our teeth glow green and our nails look like claws in the dark; of dizzying heights where sky became ocean again, and looming depths that crept upon you when you turned your back. I told you of the contours of a body, caught in morning light, and of faceless crowds scrambling up the outside of skyscrapers; of creatures that looked like desks, and desks that looked like creatures.

I described sorrowful music that played from the mountains in winter, embracing the pines with melody, and the tinkle of waves dancing with mermaids on island shores. I mimicked the circling carrion crows that sounded like cockatoos. I spoke of crumbling graves under curtains of light and I danced the dance of the dead. I told how I mourned the loss of it all as it dissolved into dense blackness before my eyes.

You nodded and walked away.

And it wasn't till later that I realised you were really asking if I was thinking about you.

Of Love

What would I know of love, curled into a ball in the middle of the night, feeling the emptiness of where you're not? What would I know of love, hearing a song over the radio and wishing that I was singing it to you? What would I know of love, biting my lip and sneaking glances in your direction? What would I know of love, hoping that today you might turn around and pull me into your arms?

Nothing, I suppose.

The Vagueness of Reality

Neither here nor there, stuck in a vague stasis between sleep and awake, a blurred reality where nothing could possibly be real. There are no chances for moving forward, nor opportunities for looking back, and everything is blank.

I want this cross roads to stop giving me chances and lead me on a straight path, where all the decisions are clear. If you're in front of me, I want to know.

Despite a Quiver

Our skin is fragments of lyrics and musical notes, etched into the pattern of lines and whirls. Some places it glows with the radiance of summer, and others, hidden in the crevices, hold the things we're too wary to speak.

Though your spark shines brighter than the dimness of the crowd, it's not your light that I want to kiss. Where your secrets linger and your lips quiver to speak, I will kiss you. When your body shivers and you're sitting at the end of your bed, I'll kiss you. When you're sticking to the shadows in the brightness of the sun, hoping that winter will never come and shatter the steadfast summer, I'll kiss you. When you're gripped with that nostalgic heartbreak, I will hold you in my arms and kiss you.

When the cold threatens to break the windows, slay the house, capture your sorrowful soul, I will keep you warm. Whatever prince you loved, whomever broke your heart, whichever pieces you're missing, I will love you.

Winter Never Comes, Paper Aeroplanes