it's wonderful how nostalgia, when done right, can draw us to recall the past with tender undertones and eventually inspire us to stash away certain periods of our lives with calm hearts and clear minds. the fondest of memories, we could choose to have only those. i choose to keep only those with you.

the rains have just fizzled out tonight but the cold, damp air remains...enough motive to lament the unavailability of someone to snuggle up with. on another day, self-pity and loneliness would have been recurrent emotions, but today, i'm weirdly doing alright, quite blissful in fact. all's well. and i'm scaling the heights of the world again.

today, I am solitary as well, relinquishing company for the calmness of thought and heart, Fiona Apple singing in the background how it costs too much to love . . .

Chipped

Now, as I gaze upon myself, I realize that every moment, I’ve been chipping away at my heart.

Where it enclosed you from all around, impermeable, I’ve gouged sections therefrom. Each piece I peel off yields a corresponding yowl in my being, and a gaping vacuum in time’s interlocking hands. This I bear with the might of the weak, the optimism of one who lacks foresight, yet with the authority of a tyrant’s obstinate heart: for this, because this is, I love you more. Nothing could be simpler. It is the earth upon which Euclid’s axioms brace their feet. It is the wind that scares away the ghosts feeding off the green of leaves.

When all this is done, and calm reigns again, our hands would have made sense of time’s brittleness. Our eyes would have regained the clarity once, now, ransomed by distance’s irreverence to love.

solitude

i never imagined that i would live without anticipation, without the exhilaration that comes from living, for something. living for something. prophesies mock me with the insides of my optimism, hollow, helpless.i see, and detest my feet. i walk, and abhor my eyes. to learn to become the sun, to be, simply, just by being a routine. to bathe the world in light, without feeling.

i am my friend. i am my emptiness.

my footsteps are graveyards for smiles, for meaning, for warmth. these slide off of me, after having risen to my throat or my eyes and finding no one there to juggle them with. you won't believe how solitary i've become. asking no questions, giving no answers. dreaming, but only in reminiscence. some days, i neglect to bring myself wherever i may go. sometimes i leave myself on my bed, curled up with an immaterial grime.

and when i come home, i tell myself of the graveyards, of the sun and the darkness outside, of words and thoughts divorced, and in general, of the immitigable flatness of solitude. and i would shiver and toss while i listen, wondering which of me would outlive the other, which of me would yield to the wind and become meaningless altogether.

Think about this...

"In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty. The beatific bathe in almighty love, wear smug grins and play their harps and acoustic guitars. Safe in their cocoon from the storms of the metamorphosis, the blessed give thanks for their unchangingness and ignore the leg irons biting into their ankles. It's eternal bliss, but nix nix, you can keep that jailhouse cell. The Beats and their Generations were wrong. Beatitude is the prisoner's surrender to his chains.

Happiness, now that's something else. Happiness is human, not divine, and the pursuit of happiness is what we might call love. This love, earthly love, is a truce between the metamorphs, a temporary agreement not to shape-shift while kissing or holding hands. Love is a beach towel spread over sifting sands. Love is intimate democracy, a compact that insists on renewals, and you can be voted out overnight, however big your majority. It's fragile, precarious, and it's all we can get without selling our souls to one party or the other. It's what we can have while remaining free. This is what Vina Aspara meant when she spoke of a love without trust. All treaties can be broken, all promises end up as lies. Sign nothing, make no promises. Make a provisional reconciliation, a fragile peace. If you're lucky, it might last five days; or fifty years."

- Salman Rushdie in "The Ground Beneath Her Feet"

Your Silence

In your silence, during

your silence, i am a man alone
with no memory, frail
like a browned leaf falling.

No sun and nothing to see,
for mountains of sadness
are shoveled on me. No sound,
no ears; they're tuned to the sob
that knows inexistent hands
will pat it down at the first instance.

Your silence is the crisp blue flame
licking your gift of forgetting,
my involuntary blinks, our night sky
of deafness to everything but our voices.

I am the distance, spanning the highways
of this, your silence. A hoax, a myth,
an illusion, glimpsed momentarily
and gone the moment
you snap yourself back
to the snaking precipice ahead.

Coldness is this itch on my skin,
longing for the warm caress of the ocean.

Breathe unto me
the faint whisper of your exhale
that i may live, dream and feel
this, in this, emptiness filled by my being.
For color. For skies. For joy.