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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Who Walk

Wrong side of the tracks, that's always where we seem to walk, apart from the rest of the pack. But throw caution to the winds, we don't give a damn. We'll be who we'll be and not lose any pride to those who try to tell us how to live. We'll love who we love, we'll do what we do. And all the while we'll try make sure our hearts are in the right place.

The Latern Graveyard

Well, I'm sorry I took a breath for a moment of wishful thinking. I'm sorry that I let my mind wander. I'm sorry that I allowed hope to stir within my chest. I'll lock it away, hide it in the graveyard of lost causes in my heart, and pick myself up from the disappointments, brush loneliness from my clothes, and take another tour of the cemetery, looking out for someone who might spare me some sympathy, or some love. I'll leave a candle burning in a lantern for you, dear, and walk in the light which mingles with that from those other flames, already hung, old and dim; illumination to a brighter future.

Thief, Giver, Executioner

Sleep. Sleep, come, arrest from my soul the things I would not miss - memories of long lost friends, whom I could offer no more sympathy for their hardships than congratulations on their successes, steal away moments idled away in days and months and years, and with them those moments when someone's opinion crossed the line from hopeful to contemptuous. If you should want times of false self importance and narcissistic resolve, then they too are yours.

But take not the loneliness, or the invisible scars rent by the clawed fingers of another's ego, the giver hiding behind anonymous bricks and latticed windows. Those things I shall keep. And take not the moments of achievement following self pity, nor the gratitude and relief which follows the completion of a great work. Take not those times which shaped me.

And if that be the case, take nothing from me at all, for I would not be who I am without them. Therefore, one final request, my dear slumber: render unto me the visions which ease my tormented days as they resurface in snatches like time lapse photography. Leave me with everything, slowly fading behind the transparent curtains as the ivy uproots the mortar.

The Incredible Journey

Pack your bags, your old battered trunk, and wait for me by the side of the road in your red beret. We'll go away, anywhere, disappearing into the haze of heat rippling into the horizon, a couple of dreamers with no direction and active imaginations to match. We'll curl up together in cheap motels and complain about terrible food; we'll take the long road, explore antique shops and stop wherever we want, snapping photographs on old film cameras.

It doesn't matter that we don't know each other very well, or that we've exchanged more glances than words. I want to walk the forgotten places of the world with you, and trace my finger along the length of your arm as we lay among tall grass, the crickets the only orchestra we know. We shall learn each other as we learn the country, the sky and the stars; we shall learn each other as we learn ourselves. You only need say yes.

The Vast, Lonely Universe

Solitude. A single dot in the vastness of space. Staring at the beauty that surrounds, there's a sense of wonder, an awe, but mingled with it is a heart aching loneliness. It is one thing to wave cheerily at the stars, and quite another to be part of them. Luminescent clouds of dust and radiation wouldn't be so heartbreaking if there were someone to sit by my side and gaze at them with me.

All alone in the universe, single specks, all alone. How can it be that there are so many who are lonely, and yet will not come together to alleviate the pain? How can it be that my hand will sit empty when we all want someone to find our own?

Our City

The future, can you see it? You, me, and the city of lights, burning brighter as we learn its depths. Regal buildings which guard the streets, history embroidered with revolutions and elegance, waste and creation, and a pull, playing the melody of dreamers on our heartstrings, inviting us deeper, securing our place within its landscape; the carnival with no escape; the carnival with no need for escape - it is escape. In the dying light, as the sky turns to purple, we'll shout it from the rooftops: "We are home!", and the blue and yellow lights will ignite the city, consuming it in glowing, incandescent fire - a welcome parade better than we could have dreamt. We shall revel in the celebrations, the lights dispelling our fear, our apathy, our foolish nonchalance, dragging us into joy, pure and whole, and better food for the soul than the melancholia we are so used to consuming. Together, we shall drown in the pool of lights and stake our claim on the city of dreamers.

Fascinating, Beguiling, Strange

An image, fragile, unfocused, but endlessly fascinating - that is all I see of you. You are made up of colours and thoughts and movements, disappearing moments and never fading memories, and yet I know none of them. What lies beneath the surface of your pale skin? I would like to learn. Would you let me? Perhaps.

I see you sometimes, so distant, and wonder, if looking up, you ever see me. Further, and if you do, what is it you think? Do you think anything at all? Do birds in a flock ever consider one another beyond the strangeness of their belonging to the same family? The thought fascinates me, beckons me, yet beguiles me when it yields no answers. I shall pass the days wondering, and cherishing a small hope that I may learn the answers, and that the answers are of a positive nature.

The Stars and Our Tragedies

There aren't words that you can find, however much you scramble after them, that will alter our opinions of you. Words are meaningless without the intention behind them; attitude is all that matters. And while we have our sights set on the horizon, on the stars, those pinpricks in the universe, yours are on the ground, staring at your feet. You cannot progress, you cannot grow, when you dare not look ahead, further out from the thoughts inside your own head. That is why you are always going to think the things you do, and see the things you see.

Yet, why is that those who see the least are confident the most? It must be that the less you know, the bigger you feel in the world. Is it a paradox of the curious, the intelligent, that we must always feel insignificant with our knowledge, while those who know nothing try to convince us with their ignorance? Another tragedy to add to the list that we keep in the pocket by our hearts.

We must keep in mind that while we are weighed down by those tragedies, we are also uplifted by them. For we are they who shall leap for the stars while the rest of them, the blind, are unable to fathom the courage to do the thing which will shatter their perception of the world. Ignorance for them shall be their downfall. And the greatest tragedy of all is that they shall never know it.

We All Shiver in the Dark

 But we never really know pain, do we, amid these cages of steel and glass towers and cemented ground. Society is the padding. It is the blade which drags itself across our hearts, which makes us shudder, which forces blood to well up where there was none before. It is what we throw ourselves into, hoping that someone will see. Hoping that someone will save us.

And some of us wear scars, crossing across forearms, embroidering stomachs, decorating hips, tattooing thighs; marks of who we really are. Some of us wear nothing, but the scars are there, just as deep, invisible against the skin, scratched into the soul; peel back the flesh and see what's written beneath. And some of us don't know how to get it out; breath in, drown - that's how it goes - drowning in something which nobody can see; drowning but still alive. We keep breathing because that's the only thing we know how to do; the question still scratches at the back of our minds - should we? Wouldn't it be easier? Some do. Lost souls, all.

Can we ever truly realise our pain until we compare it to another's. We all feel a different hurt, a different pain, but we all suffer just the same. Don't tell us that we don't. We all fear, we all cry out, silent screams which echo in the empty spaces, we all shiver in the dark. Grapple at the light, try to touch the pristine, the clean; dirty it with our taint, the grime we can't remove, ingrained into the layers of ourselves.

Remember. Remember it always; whisper it to yourself when you walk past, when your eyes slide away, unable to bear the reality of another hurting soul. Remember: we suffer all the same.

Fuck Normality

Everything we are is everything we should stand to be, forget what came before, be not afraid of what might come next. Stand up, be you. There's no one more perfect than you can be. And if those with spite and bitterness in their hearts try to stop you, let them not get in your way; poisonous plants can only grow where the soil is not pure. Keep true, whatever true might be, whether it be a foot in dreams and an eye in reality. 

Not everything is going to be black and white, but grey. Learn to see the colour. Realise that you aren't what other people tell you that you should be. Make up your own mind. Fuck normality. Just be.

The Fall

Fall. Falling. Topple over. Trip. Find yourself down on the ground. Taste the dirt in your mouth. Feel the ache of bruising skin, blood pooling in irregular splotches as you lie there. Think about how you go there, what went wrong. Then get up and try again. Learn.

Doors

I wonder about you sometimes, about both of you, about what goes on your heads. I wonder if you can even acknowledge that you have problems; hell, that we have problems. I wonder if you know that our problems start with you.

You yell. You never listen. The only emotion ever expressed is anger. We can't talk to you, so we don't. God, there are so many things you don't know. You're happy to assume, even when you're all wrong, so very, very wrong. Doors slam shut between us and you'll never know what lies behind them, which emotions, which devils come out to play while you're not looking. While you refuse to look. Are you always going to refuse to look?

The Stupidest Thing

The greatest insecurity, the greatest fear. The greatest hope. But what are the odds?

The Universe in Your Eyes

You told me a part of your story tonight, and it wasn't what I thought it would be. There was sorrow there, far deeper than I imagined, and suddenly, some past actions became better understood. I'm sorry for you, but glad of you; you're still here, after all.

Life gets better, doesn't it? Those dark moments are fleeting; seconds of terror in the spectrum of your lifetime, testing your limits. Look up, the sky is blue, and it's bright for you, for all of them; for all of us. We need to learn to see it.

But I'm glad you're here. You don't deserve to have disappeared - not while there is life in your eyes, not while universe appears in your iris.

Touching the Sky

Tiny pinpricks in the sky, so far, so small, so infinite. With shimmering colour, you paint the sky with beauty, the dead of the night no longer black, but bright. You watch over us in our gigantic playground, and we keep adding and taking away, creating, but destroying. If you could tell us what you thought, I wonder what you'd say. But you're so far removed, I don't think we would hear you anyway.

We are so small, compared to you; a minuscule dot on the face of the universe; an atom in an ocean. Is it any wonder that we try to break out beyond ourselves? When all seems so vast, the only comfort we have is reaching out to become one with that endless space; to touch something so far beyond us is the only thing we can think of to dull the pain of being so insignificant. We don't like feeling so mortal, so we shake the feeling off by trying to tackle the sky.