Posts tagged Untitled
It happens in the middle of the night, when a bad dream suddenly wakes you up, and you find yourself feeling most alone than ever. Your pillows are prepared to be soiled with tears. Yet you are never prepared to cry.
Instead, you watch the beams of light distinctly directed at the foot of your bed, and you try to remember the dream you just had. But only his face contains your thoughts. You remember the way he looks at you differently. You always thought it meant something else.
Did it mean something else? It did mean something else.
The hours eat up the span of darkness and suddenly, your eyes adjust to the shift of colors. The room is filled with tints of a blackened orange, like the fruit dirtied by charcoal. You remember the tone of his voice when he said that he loves you intensely. You remember the tone of his voice when he said that he’s about to leave you for someone else.
It didn’t mean something else. He did mean someone else.
Your room takes up as much sunlight as it could, and you shed a tear or two from the harsh brightness of a new day. You remind yourself why there is none of his solid breathing staining your skin, burning it mercilessly, like an acidic sting on your wounded exterior. You think of it the way you ward off a nightmare the exact minute before you surrender to sleep. And you wish that forgetting him was as easy as waking up from last night’s bad dream.
But it isn’t, is it? He’s a bad memory you’re going to try to forget your whole goddamn life.
His lips were cold; they tasted of milk and honey on my tongue. We were about to go inside the room and lay in bed, and wait for the day for its curtain call until we surrender to the mood of the evening darkness. He said I tasted like cherries and secondhand smoke. His words were like plastic, burning slowly on the edges of my earlobes, introducing a stale odor into the path of my hearing, my comprehension. He was someone I wanted to love, but also wanted to hurt.
His heart was like a tennis ball, and my heart was like the out-of-bounds line. He couldn’t win anything if he stepped into my space. And so we breathed each other’s breaths, only to call them make-believe kisses. We were in the same room but he felt like he was in another continent. I taste his lips once more, and now they taste nothing like sweetness. He was beginning to shed seawater from the cliffs of his eyelids.
He told me he loved me more than everything in this world that exists. I told him, I am supposed to be your everything.
And someday, we’ll be perfect for each other, the way a group of stars form perfectly a constellation drawn on the map of the skies.
This is something that may have come out from the tip of my tongue before I met you.
“So I guess this is it.”
“It - what is it?”
“The falling, the near-landing. The inevitable crash at the bottom of everything.”
“What is everything anyway?”
“Everything! You can’t just not know everything.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t. Which is why you should tell me. Right now.”
“Everything… it’s all that’s remained, all that’s left. Everything is all that you can hold invisibly. Everything is all that you cramp inside your tiny, beating center.”
“Then you’re not part of it — everything. You’re never going to be it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“But I promise you. Everything is still going to be alright.”
“But you can’t promise something that’s never going to happen.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because we’ve already reached solid ground. Which means everything’s supposed to be done. And if everything’s done, really, tell me, what’s still there to fix?”
waiting, finding, losing, smiling.
