Wilted Words

 When I think about my ideal house. I think wide balconies,  I think penthouse,  I think small yet not claustrophobia inducing.  I think roomy but not huge.  I think large but just enough to house two people and a pet, preferably a cat.  I think walls, muted yellow and forest green,  I think walls that you can pin me against and kiss me. I think walls, unlike the ones I keep around my heart, that aren't prone to crumbling at any hint of tenderness. I think walls I can hang up pictures of us. Crappy art I make and posters of your favorite things. I think of walls that have ears but never heard screaming or anger, I think of walls that have never witnessed disappointment.  I think of warm nights and cool breeze and long hugs and affection unaccounted for. 

My thoughts are not holy, My body isn't a temple It's not a sacred space It's tender flesh and a fragile spine, It's nothing remotely divine, It's belimished skin and visible markings, I know there is solace in metaphors, in similes, in saying things not as they are but as what they're like,  in trying to compare what you can't understand to what you do, Maybe only then it will make sense, Trying to simplify it, pulling threads and tying ends and loosening knots, trying to make it look familiar, But it is almost never accurate, Words are just letters, More times than not they hold little to no significance. Little to no reassurance, little to no validation, Sorry , a half hearted apology Always met with sincere acceptance. 

Turns out I was wrong about quite a few things, But mostly myself, I am bad at begginings, just as I am bad at endings, I am only good in between, I have always been a combination of mismatches, a complete list of incomplete tasks, Like poorly coordinated cloths, made of colors that don't work well together, An outfit of magenta and mossy green. A pair of pants that doesn't fit right, a recipe with imbalanced flavours, a great project poorly executed, An eloquent poem, well written, badly performed. Some days my heart is as light as a dandelion, other days it is a fist of steel, I feel every beat like a punch in my ribs, And I bleed. I know people have walls around them, Impenetrable and secure, I don't have walls, I am surrounded by minefields, And I have lost the blueprint , No one can come in and I csnt come out.  Most of the time it feels like my body can't function without maintaining a certain level of sadness.  That's the only way it kn...

I know regret when I see it, I spot it easily on your grey blotted aura. It glistens through your bloodshot eyes,  the windows of your soul, one glance is more than enough to recognize it. You have taken it upon yourself to seek redemption, From things you have no control over, but it never hurts to try. The sought after resurrection of what have been long dead will drain you, yet, you carry on, with a broken compass and a useless map, determined to revive what was once alive, reclaim what was once yours, But you can't seem to find it. That missi ng thing. You tell yourself that you've got nothing to lose and maybe Just maybe This time there will be a different outcome. A lie you cradle along with the truth. And when you go back to where you started, You swallow your pride and  disappointment, Like splinters of wood,  But your insides are lined with sandpaper, your spine is made of steel, and none of it longer fazes you.

In the early hours of tranquil mornings, I see everything clearly, It's like someone has removed the lense I normally see things through, The cool air seems to understand the importance of its duty to wash over the dimly lit skies, Like tides, Gentle and patient, Unlike me, My patience run out like blood gushing out of an open wound, then dripping lazily as I watch, with crippling helplessness. I suture it with feeble threads of lies, I am saturated with okays. An hour, A day, A month passes by, This impatience, This eagerness, This hunger for something more doesn't subside at all, It only sublimes into frustration. An emotion suppressed always turns into a negative feeling, It becomes stagnant like still waters, Love suppressed becomes obsession, Anger suppressed becomes rage, Fear suppressed becomes terror, Sadness suppressed morphes into dread. I carry these sorrows within me like organs vital to my existence.  Wrapped inside my bones, streaming i...

The little girl on the swing across from me looks a lot like me. With her unruly hair and crooked smile, She notices me watching and her smile only widens. I remember a time when our resemblance wasn't just physical, I remember a time when I skipped light as a feather instead of walking, constantly humming happy tunes, I remember a time when I was all smiles and vibrancy of existence.  When I look back at it I can't tell if it's real or a made up fragment of my memory. Because all I know is this reality,  Where my colors are faded, my outline is blurred I am a shadow of burned out flames. I had been the flames once.  Now my bones are made of steel they're too heavy to carry,  my spine is made of chalk there is always a chance that I'll snap in half, my skin is thin and doing a poor job of containing my insides I am always on the verge of spilling all over the place. The mayhem inside always on display.  my chest is a black box where you can see the truth ...

Time will freeze And those stolen hours will pass so swiftly like summer breeze, That, I am sure of, What I don't know is, does it always feel like this? You're holding my hands and they don't fit perfectly into yours, Our fingers aren't intertwined but it doesn't seem to matter, No one has ever held my hands before, that's what I want to say but instead I bite my lip and I kiss you, My clumsy hands roam freely on your body making an invisible trail on the map that is your skin, I want to memorize this path and go over it millions of times except that I have a poor sense of direction, and I get lost often, but I'll try not to lose my way.  The clouds covering the sky have somehow manged to cram inside my head, I can't seem to get enough, I have never knew how starved for affection I was up until this moment. The only thing that matters is the feeling of your arms around me, Strong and steady, My heart is anything but. Your patience i...

I no longer feel a thing. When I am with you, my body is heavy, my mind is blank. My heart only pumps blood and my feelings are no where to be found. It is not a horrible thing, really it isn't. Is the absence of love worse than overwhelming hatred? Is the engulfing darkness worse than the blinding white light? I am no longer myself but you wouldn't know, that itself is not such a bad thing either. I study my palms like they're someone else's. Trying to recognize the outlines and comprehend the shape of my fingerprints, I try to reread my eyes, maybe they'll give away glimpse of something, I am becoming a stranger to me, Detached of my own world, An outcast, locked outside and inside simultaneously, floating around, Only debris from my past form, Shedding my skin, An agonizing yet crucial transition, I have no control over this. But tomorrow, the sun will rise again, oblivious to my suffering, Tomorrow the moon will hang limply in the sky, bored a...

He is a story that I want to read, over and over until every word in engraved in my memory, he is a book with ripped out pages, with smudged ink in his folds and crossed out sentences. I desperately want my hand on his spine. I touch it gingerly, and I can sense that It is rigid and strong. Although, I can locate the cracks in it, and I can tell he is tired from holding up for that long.  My fingertips skim through his pages, and they're soft, so soft and thin and delicate like rose petals. they're softer than the words scribbled on the surface. Some of the pages are torn out, some of them have blurry writing, smudged sentences, illegible paragraphs that I cannot make out a single word of. As I read I start to see the reason behind his roughness. His guarded demeanor. I know that he is hoping that maybe someday someone will love him as he is,  that someone would see beyond the anger and the mess he's made of himself. I try to read between his lines and decipher him,...

The sentences we blurt out are unforgiving. Once they're out, they're out. You can't go back and revise them, proof read them, edit them, You can't replace a full stop with a question mark or put a comma, continuing your sentences instead of the already existing full stop. You can't clarify or elaborate. Your intended meaning was lost in the process of forming the words as they roll off your tongue, I know that when you say you love me you mean "this will make you happy, this is the reassurance you need so I am saying it" but it lacks conviction, I know that when you ask me if I slept well you want to know if I didn't stay up till dawn staring at my ceiling. And you halfheartedly want the real answer, I know when I ask you if you're okay you say you are good, even when good and the state you're in couldn't be more mismatched. I don't want you to think too much, And I don't want to dissect your paragraphs anymore, I don...

I know what is going to happen, It plays in my head Like a movie clip stuck on repeat,  I tell myself that I know what's going to happen before it does, With the smugness and pretentiousness of a fortune teller who is just good at reading people. I swear I know the exact arrangement of words you'll use, I can see the posture of your body as you stand across the room, creating as much space between us as possible, I can see the way your lips move as you say the sentence that will flip my world upside down like pancakes of a Sunday's breakfast. Despite that, I choose to tighten the blindfold around my eyes. I pretend I can't tell that the house is on fire. I pretend that I can't smell the smoke, that the heat from the flames isn't burning me,  I choose to ignore the crumbling building crashing down at my feet, I inhale the ashes until I fill my lungs.  Denial is my feeble shield against the cruelty of reality. Every time, I chose to ignore that silence...

I want to talk about my sadness. But my sadness is a rude distant relative that has no business in my house, yet insists on staying and interfering with every small detail of my life. My sadness is a predator that has claimed me as a prey, a malicious vicious killer that hunts for the fun of the chase, and when I finally landed in its clutches it toyed with me, tossing me around, yawning, bored at my lack of resistance. My sadness is the clique of girls who bullied me through elementary school, middle school, high school and when I run into them somewhere a few years later I greet them casually because I am a grown up and I am mature and I have put it all behind me, pretending they weren't one of the reasons I am mesirable. My sadness is a grave I dug with my bare hands in a cold hard ground of a wasteland to bury it but instead I fell into it, and got buried where there is no tombstone for recognition. My sadness is treacherous and cruel, sometimes it allows me to go about...

I adjusted the lighting of room ten times already, changed the place of my chair around my desk, tried different pens, different journals, different words to start with but all I have is nothing. This is the result of a monotonic life. A routine that is comfortable and convenient, yet dull and rather grey. I wake up around the same time everyday, go to work, do the same things, see the same people, do the same chores, walk the same streets, pass the same allies, listen to the same songs, sleep around the same time, when sleep comes, that if it does. I don't knows what it is that keeps me awake, that triggers a cascade of overthinking episodes. For someone who merely does anything new, or feels anything new or exciting anymore, I certainly think a lot. In my transition from an overly emotional and sympathetic person to a more concrete and grounded person, I think I have lost my ability to express myself. I am afraid that I no longer have it in me, the passion that once filled m...

My ink stained fingers tremble as I write this. A memoir for my thoughts, for the empty life I lead, for all the things I felt, the things I never dared to say. Here on this paper my thoughts lay, rest in chaos, intersecting thought, incomplete and confused. I don't think I am making any sense but that is not the point to begin with. The longing to belong to something or to someone is draining me. I can't shake the feeling of oddness and of being out of place. These thoughts are a bed of nails that I sleep in every night. They sting my flesh and I lay there and bleed . I often wonder why does the world hate me so much? Or more accurately why doesn't it accept me as I am. As I take a look back at my weak attempts at anything, I realize that maybe I am the problem. After all how do I expect the world to give me love when I can't give it back? Except that..... I can. I am overflowing with love that I have no one to give to, I am a vessel, filled to the brim with...

fear, is a small creature, A parasite, living off your hopes, crippling you, an ever persistent voice in your head, it's a sly cunning being too, an illusive being, one that will mimic your own voice, and whisper all kind of unkind things to you. I know you are trying to run away, to turn your head and pretend that you don't see it hovering over your head, you try to cover your ears when it talks, to muffle its voice but that rarely helps. you can pretend and pretend but it will always be there, and the worst of them all is the fear of not being good enough, the fear that you're unworthy of what you want, This voice will convince you that it is easier to give up it is easier to not try to begin with. fear, is being locked in a prison of your own making with the keys a few inches away from you but still you won't reach for it. it is the constant reminder of how wrong things could go, it is the fuel for your cowardice. and I am not blaming you here, I under...

I was a quiet child, but I had a beautiful singing voice, Or so I believed. My voice was soft, and my words were shy like a five years old kid hiding behind her mother and clutching her elbow at first day of school, I couldn't hit high notes and my vocal range had limitations but that never stopped me, At least I had rhythm and I memorised lyrics easily, I grew up, and voice submerged beneath all the insecurities, I am more quiet and I no longer believe that my voice is beautiful, And my words, My words almost never mean what I want to say, They are deceiving, Every time I speak they promise that this time they're going to come out exactly as I mean them but they don't, They throw me under the big yellow bus, They cluster in my throat and push other words out, They ring the doorbell and run fast and I get caught, They never call for truce, So I decided to become silent, I nod yes, I shake my head no, I say the bare minimum to communicate, When the waiters...

The world blurs and melts, indicating the start of the ending, the world falls into mass chaos, after slowly dripping into an oozy thick black deliquescent substance, slipping through my own fingers, liquid suffering covering my hands, guilt..  for all the things I am feeling, for all the things I am not, for all the skeletons hanged in my closet, for all the hostages of secrets, terrified and loud in spite of how many times I stifle their noises. for all the dead thoughts, stagnant and sordid in spite of being buried miles within me. I have got miles and miles of skin, but it's transparent windopane, and there is no point of hiding that circus of crazed mess, it's on full display.  it's my shadow of an entourage, it's everything I am, it's everything I am not. it's the things I fear, it's my  loneliness  solitude, I am losing my mind in this murky place, I am on my way I am lost.  with no destination, no direction, I am being devoured by...

With you, it's like every cliche I have ever seen in every chic flick movie. I feel the giddiness of an eleven years old girl when she catches the boy she likes from school staring at her across the hall. With you, It's every cheesy line I have ever heard in a pop song. I become the fidgety thirteen years old teenager when her crush asks to borrow her notes. With you, I am so aware of my being, I am so aware of your presence. When I am in the most crowded places with you, you're the only one I see. When we're dancing clumsily, singing off-key, driving around the city aimlessly, idling around the small park in our town, or even watching some lame TV show that we both secretly dislike, these moments mean so much more to me than you could ever imagine, Because of you. The lulling sound of your voice, The freckles on your face, The way your thoughts form and the way you're so discreet about your feelings, You're so familiar to me now. I have you memori...

It all seems worthless after a while. Remember that well, because it's a common thing to occur in your life span. It is a vicious cycle, constant de ja vu, where things go wrong and then go right, Things go horribly wrong, but then the world tries to make amends by tipping the scale and granting you small victories. Congratulations! You didn't kill y ourself today. Look at you! You managed to leave your house and laugh when all you wanted to hide and weep. Those little victories, make all the difference. Although, often, our battles do not leave us unmarked. They're like a predator marking their territory. They leave you with burdens you can't carry, Secrets you can't share, Memories you're constantly trying to forget, Every time they bring a different kind of ache to your heart, one that you seldom stomach, And I know that you mostly wonder, What's the whole point ? What's the point of wanting what you can't have ? Trying over and ov...

First, I have to get out of this place, I have to leave this claustrophobic room, I am already at the door, Please forgive me. I have only a moment to reflect on the pain before it engulfs me, The accompanying humiliation will not allow me much more than that, A traitor, Who doesn't deserve to live, I am so stunned that for a moment I can't even move, We don't forgive. I am pressing my fist to my mouth, Because truth is, I am nothing but a coward, And some days I wonder why I insist on keeping myself alive. I take another steady breath, You'll be alright, we promise. I am no longer feeling gracious. I am surprised to discover how much I enjoy the bitterness. I fall against the wall and crumble to the floor, I collapse, But now, they're here, They're holding guns, And pointing it at my head, Pointing it at my heart, What is happening to me ?