I can’t keep grasping at straws for me to become part of your life anymore because I honestly don’t know how much of it I still can be. There’s wrongness at every corner threatening to jump out at me. I know nothing about you anymore, you know nothing about me, and we don’t capture a single inch to save the distance. Do you know? Everyday is another 24 hours for us to become strangers. Do you know? You’re becoming just another stranger to me.
And I’m terribly sorry if I’m yet again at the verge of giving up and I can’t be strong enough for the both of us. I’m terribly sorry that I don’t seem to want to reckon your words anymore, that their glistening eyes are much better to see you, to really see you. I’m terribly sorry that I don’t deserve even the least part of your thoughts because I don’t try, I never try, and you deserve so much better.
We can live in the achingly utopian notion that somehow we can fix this but we have to leave the falsehood that what we can do lies in our hands. It only lies in mine. The fault is all mine. And I don’t know what to do.
I’m terribly sorry that I don’t know what to do anymore.
I hate this. I hate that I’m starting to feel selfish of whatever it is I still don’t have completely. I hate that you’re making me defy all that I’ve ever been. I hate the fact that I have this heavy feeling in my arms, a strained unkempt yearning in my breaths, this never-ending resonant sense of selfishness at the back of my head. I don’t think I want to know if I’m being selfish. I don’t want to be selfish. Not when it comes to you.
It streams from every cell in my bloodstream, your extreme distance eating away at me with every inch taken closer, your shared compliance persuading me to embrace ambivalence with every word spoken gentler. Oh how I hate contingence when every syllable of my name is thrown away to your most unvital recesses of memory. I don’t want to be selfish. I don’t know if I’m being selfish, but I just don’t want to be. Not when it comes to this.
Avarice lives at the bile rising up my throat. The intense warmth of unadulterated fury itching at every centimeter of my skin reflects it and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I live in the fear of losing everything now when I still don’t have it back. I’m so sorry that I’m starting to feel selfish. The word I’ve been constantly repeating in this parchment is losing its meaning, shedding its point but I’d rather take that against the foreboding moment that I might have to ask myself, “What is the point of you?” But what is the point of you? Tell me because I’m blinded by cupidity, stupidity. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
I don’t mean to be selfish but I don’t want to lose everything yet. Not now. Not when it comes to you.
# twenty three
the problem with you is that you’re too fickle-minded with everything. you never make up your mind, not really. you don’t know what you want. rather, you just think you want whatever it is people tell you to want. one minute, you know you’re going left, but the next minute passes with a slight wind and you’re going right. that’s why people don’t ever choose to stay in your life. because they know you won’t stay in theirs. and it’s going to hurt them in the end.
the problem with me is that despite everything you are and in spite of me,
i will always choose you.
i was caught unaware that the second i took your hand would mean another beginning, rather than the closure we’ve been reaching for since it all started to fall apart
people were lying when they invented the notion of sparks and fireworks and tingling electricity when two people touch but i guess it is true in some sort of twisted way, because even after an immediate millisecond of letting go, your skin somehow lingered on mine. i bite my lip and try to stop my head from spinning - no, not because of you this time, but because i don’t know how else to distance myself anymore
when i write, i write with no more certainty because you took every solitary splinter of that when you owned and disowned me so congratulations, but the words i spill are only inches compared to the acres of how much i just want to know where i stand for once, of how much i want to end this too badly
no, i don’t need your touch to begin me —
i need your certainty
it’s not supposed to be this way anymore. not at all. i’m not supposed to smile a minute after you do even though my thoughts are still all cluttered in my head, just because you stole my attention once again. my attention’s not even supposed to be caught anymore. my mind isn’t supposed to fly out the window the second you tell me a lame joke or the instant you grin that charmingly cheeky grin, even though i regret if afterwards because it’s wrong. it’s so totally wrong. many things have changed so how do we act like nothing has? you laugh and i do too and starting over seems so easy but we both know our worlds are eons apart now. you smile and i do too but guilt and sadness fill me after because it’s not supposed to be this way anymore. not at all.
how does that happen? or if i were to ask the real question, what happened to us?
i like watching the way your hands work and the way you don’t even seem to notice them at all. there’s something beautiful about how you flex your nerves when you’re thinking way too hard or how you cradle your chin on your hand and unconsciously lead to biting your nails when your mind is somewhere else than you really are. it catches my attention when you brush your hair off your forehead with those long fingers as though each is more delicate than the other, when you hold the pen so tightly as though a splinter of your strength is needed to hold on to it and yet write with it so gently as though you’re afraid to hold too tight and cause it to break. you never think of it but there’s something incredibly fascinating about how each part of you works and how each mechanism like the stroke of your thumb or the pulse of your wrist means something —
but more than anything else i like the way i can read you with just those beautiful hands of yours
Has it always been this hard to read more than understand, to hear more than listen? We have never realized we were falling into the great unknown, into separate places and separate times where no ends ever meet and no words I ever speak would want to fall to your ears. Painstakingly foreign languages. That’s what we know now.
The words we write and say do not any more make any meaning. All we have are garbled thoughts we can no longer send, we no longer want to send, as truths to the other’s mind.
We are properly sorry for all the filled silences we could only wish were empty, just so we do not sigh at suppressed dreams we once held close. Remember the belief about dreamcatchers we once tied to the splintered bedpost in your room that I no longer visit, but you see how my stream of words go to such disarrayed lengths now?
We are properly sorry for all the silent predicaments we could only wish were voiced out or completely annihilated, just so we do not waste away on the could-have-beens of passed judgment. Remember the wishes we made on shooting stars we once ridiculously thought were planes yet we wished on anyway, though we could only now realize they’re but empty entities of gas in forlorn universes that waste away their lights? Little do we know our words atrophy the same way.
You and I speak different languages now and no history could ever bridge present distance we couldn’t help let our worlds fall in. We never tried avoiding inevitability, did we?
Bottomline is: we no longer understand. We no longer want to understand.
I don’t have time to dress up my words right now, because I’m just so ecstatic. For once. And the thing is that it’s not even about me.
Every single day I can’t help thinking of how much I’d missed out on and how much you would too if you didn’t have enough courage. Time has barely began passing but just this once things are looking as if they would fall into place and I can’t help marveling at this tiny bit of happiness. Only you know how much I’ve wanted this long for you to get what you wanted.
I guess your happiness just means a second chance for mine, like if I salvaged my own, then it’s a consolation as well for you to finally have yours. I made a mess with a person and that led to us destroying ourselves but this new beginning makes it feel like repentance for everything we’ve lost. We hope to do right by you. We wanted this to finally happen because it wasn’t meant to happen for us, and it is for you, so I’m only begging you please, please take this rightfulness into your own story and not wait for it to pass by.
You wouldn’t even imagine right now how much I badly want for your fairytale to begin. For your sake and mine. How much I badly want for your story to take place as compensation for the one we ended. I’m sorry if this makes me more selfish than I already am, but it’s just so moving, to know that a second chance may exist, though not for me.
That finally someone can be happy and maybe, just maybe, life is not all I made it out to be.
