No vacancy

I think I drove him mad. I think I forced him to run out of patience.
I believe I misunderstood him when he was just being his honest, blunt self. I believe I misunderstood him.
I know I hurt him out of anger.
But all of this happened a year ago.
I made someone who did love me, unlove me. In that process I also lost the first person I have ever loved.
In that time, I lost the only person I love.
In that time, I lost the only person I will ever love.
I don't think I am capable of being in healthy and stable relationships. I know for a fact that whenever someone comes close enough, they will eventually run away because I am sure, I am so sure that I am not normal. I think I'm meant to be on my own.
I think I damaged a love, and that's enough for a lifetime. I don't think I'll ever dare to do this again. I don't think I can ever do this again because even though it's been a year and two days less to two months since we spoke, I still love him like I did the first time I told him back in September 2015 that I love him. I know I will always love him like that today, and every other day.
And I'm sure there won't be space for anyone else again because you see, even though it's been more than a year, he will always take up that space. That seat will always be reserved for him even though he will never come back to take that place again. 

Notes on the self

"Something to do, something to love and something to hope for"

I always thought I would be ok.

One year and 11 days but it still feels like yesterday, despite how it's such a cliche.

I always thought I would be ok.

One year and 11 days ago I began to lose sleep:

One hour for each day; 376 hours of staying awake, waiting, waiting to feel ok again.

Waiting to forget yesterday.

Waiting to do, to love again

Waiting for something to hope for.

Notes from the Self

LALALALALALALLALALALLALALALALDESTROYYOURSELFLALALALALALALALALALALALALADESTROYEVERYTHINGLALALALALALALALALALALALALALA

Three Somethings.

Dear S,

Repeat after me:
"Something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."

Yours.

I always thought I would be okay.

I regret that I was not the one to pen these words

I don't know who wrote this but I found this on Berlin Artparasites and I found myself resonating with and within each word and it hit me suddenly that I have stopped writing, writing in the true sense of meaning...

"I’m not good at words so my love isn’t poetry. It’s silly notes in secret places. It’s pointing out every beautiful thing I see so you can see it too. It’s waiting up hours to hear if you got home safe because I worry about you. It’s in lavender nights and making you tea and waiting for you to come with me to see movies and in telling you the parts of my day that made me happy and giving you every tiny gift I think might make you smile for a second like smooth rocks and cool leaves and it’s in letting you choose the radio station and in us together slowly healing. It’s in small quiet things but I promise. I will love you to the end of my being."
— r.i.d//inkskinned

Minus 9

It's only been nine days since I gave myself 27 days to challenge death, but I'm already drained of every little drop of blood called will in my body to live. I can see myself losing myself to I don't even know what but something other than me is winning, winning by strong margins...  Sometimes I think that something is just another me but who knows?

My least favourite.

Dear Self(ish),
Somedays you love me. Some days you don't. On other days nobody loves you. In the past nobody loves you. Today I love you in the morning but I forget you by the evening... so I will never really know if I do love you tonight.
Today I reject you. Today I despise you and your need to love you.
A few days later I have a death wish.
In between one of these Days of Least Love, I want to fulfill my wish and give myself the only gift I ever wanted from me. In between one of these days of Least Love I give me 28 days and 27 nights to fill me full of my desire.

Love,
Deathless and Undesiredly Lifefull. 

If you throw one word, I can catch it and make a sentence of a dozen more words. If you throw a sentence towards me, I will string them together like beads and make stories out of them. Give me stories and I will weave them into journeys and the journeys may resemble your reflection in the clear water of the lake...the lake I find myself drowning into every other time. But every time I have trouble breathing the water through my lungs, I try to drown deeper in hopes that perhaps I will lose all sense of where my feet are meant to fall, in hopes that this water turns into life, just once more. 

Dear panic attack,
Is your severity punishment for all the mourning and tears I skipped at her death last year? Punishment for avoiding all the grief very successfully
so then why won't you let me breathe?

LALALALALALALALALA

The convuluted, moldy, crusty and ancient severity of my abandonment issues never ceases to amaze me.

So if anyone else gets a glimpse into how deep-seated, how murky, messy and mired my fear of abandonment is, to the point that it makes them rethink if they have ever truly known any of the people they thought they ever really knew in their life, if, if, if.....

I will tell them that they're telling me something I know already and all too well; that I got there before they did,
that I beat them to it,
and
 that now, I am invincible-- so invincible
that nothing can ever make my fear of abandonment more worse than it already is.

Whoever told us that having fears makes us weak and vulnerable? I'm untouchable. 

You are the Wonder that Keeps the Stars Apart.

Have you lead a strange life if I said that your first kiss was not your first love? If I told you that your first kiss was the first time you felt what it was like to live, because your first love is supposed to do that for you isn't it? But your first love was unfamiliar like your life so far--unfamiliar and awkward and painful, like your first period when the pain and discomfort of simply feeling something for the first time did not let you sleep?
Would it be just as uncomfortable to hear that your first kiss was the most un-first-like you have felt with a first in your life? That the touch of those lips, his teeth clinking accidentally against yours, the wild yet subtle leaps of his tongue inside your mouth, and the nape of his neck was the name you put to familiarity and home? That you finally fell asleep that night, all through the night, because the memory of your first kiss made you think that there is a whole world of serenity, acceptance and safety in someone's pair of arms--- that the scent of someone's breath and the conviction of his teeth biting down on your lip breathes oxygen into your lungs, keeps your heart beating, thumping against your chest even when time seems to have stopped still.
Would your world seem like a fragrant, vast valley of roses, dull, wine-red, romantically, fiercely, passionately, deeply red, red roses when you fall into his arms and breathe in his warm scent? And would your life seem worth living if his kiss, his scent, every sinew in his body promises to you that the word happiness will be meaningful as long as he is in your life, as long as those arms keep opening wide for you to fall back into? Would it be strange to realise in that moment that every time we kiss, it feels like our first, and that he is perhaps the last person I will ever honestly love?

"I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart. I am never without it. Anywhere I go, you go, my dear. And whatever is done by only me…is your doing. I fear no fate…for you are my fate, I want no world cause you are my world. Here is the deepest secret no one knows. Here is the root of root and bud of bud & the sky of the sky of the tree of life. Which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide. It’s the wonder that keeps the stars apart.
— E.E. Cummings

Note to the Dead Wallclocks in My Room that Hang In Silence.

I think of you at 3am just as I am reminded of you at 3pm. I think of you in the moments before I sleep, or before I take a bite out of a chocolate that I suppose you would've liked to have, or just after finishing my breakfast, or in the moments I step out of the car. I mean to say, that, there is no specific time in which I think of you or don't think of you. You are a fluid, pure part of my mind, my thoughts, just as milk is a component of the tea-- hot, steaming cups of tea you and I shared in the cold evenings along with your stories of the war. You are a part of my most self-like self, as like myself as I can ever be.
In the natural process of thinking and unthinking of you, I question the 24-hours in a day, question...question... question... If the time we measure through minutes and numbers is a measure for anything meaningful at all, meaningful as the pictures and voices of you in my head. What are these clocks and alarms worth really if they do not measure the capacity to feel, and remember, and love you, collect and preserve our memories like the tangible grains of sand in hourglasses-- what are these clocks, what are these numbers that do not measure pain or joy, or the time it takes for love to blossom, to stagnate and finally to fade away-- what are these clocks and calenders if they only predict time and dates but never told me about the day you will leave, and never told me about the rest of the days of my life after that day, where I would find life itself such a fickle, such an abstract concept--an abstraction that I could do without easily if I can do without you?


“The bereaved have no language with which to speak with the unbereaved.”

They tell me that time heals all but why does time not answer my questions? Can you please come back now and tell me why time does not respond to me? As if time itself was now hostile towards me, as if I had offended it with some foolish mistake... But can you come back and explain to me why and come back to make me aware of my mistakes? Because nobody does that for me anymore. Nobody waits and nobody explains all the whys like you did. I don't make anyone want to be patient enough to explain the whys and hows to me, don't make anyone want to stick around and explain the wrongs to me. Everyone has something to say. Then why can't I hear anything more than indifference in the air that carries the voices to me? Even time itself does not bat an eyelash for me, as if everything had stagnated the moment you left. So won't you please come back now and breathe life into us again?

Last night I dreamt that someone came knocking at my door at 6 am in the morning. I noticed the greying strands of hair across my shoulders. Turning towards the mirror, I saw the sagging eyelids, the wrinkled skin hanging in folds around the corners of my mouth. My breath held itself back for a second. I suddenly remembered that I'm not seventeen but seventy. It was as if my body had more control over me than my own 'self', as if I had learned to recognise myself separate from it.

The girl who knocked at my door asked me how much of my life I remembered even now. The apples of her young cheeks grew red with excitement when I finally uttered your name. I felt my heart swell up with joy at the thought of you too, at the thought that you were the first. It was the thought of you being the first one to put up with all the stubborn, tantrums of the naive, seventeen-year old, the first to share the punch of anger and the touch of warm secrets, the first to hear the raising and lowering of voices, spilling out thoughts off the top of our heads fearlessly, recklessly through sunsets and sunrises along with the endless silences our adolescent pride imposed on us through months. I felt the hair on my knuckles stand at the excitement rushing through me at the thought of you, as if time had stagnated for a couple of seconds, as if you would walk back into my life unabashed like this thought, until a snap of fingers and the young girl's voice pulled me out of my reverie. "Tell me everything you remember!" she shrieked, and in the exact next moment the excitement sank to the bottom of my gut with a loud thud, the loudness of which no one else could discern. I felt the grin on my face crawl back into the folds of the wrinkles, sagging my mouth, as I realised that I carried nothing else with me into my seventieth year, as I realised that the only thing I remembered of myself was you. 

I tried to tell you my secret, but you were running out of time.
I tried to be your 3am but you were running out on sleep.
I tried to be with you, but you ran,
Ran too fast for me.
Now I don't know how to keep still.

In A Minute, Now Later.

"I love you?”
No answer.
Silence bounced, fell off my tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
He did not beg,
but blackness filled my ears,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
- Not Anne Sexton

Amiss

I am fascinated.
The faith with which this life stares at me in the face every morning and the faith with which it reminds me at sunset every day that none of it is in my control, it is bewildering. That none of it is mine, that my world could collapse on itself headfirst but not a single leaf on the tree I've grown up looking at will rustle, or even stir ever so slightly in solidarity, fascinates me.
When then did the trees bow down their heads, the breeze blew not against but with us, the sun hid behind the clouds and the skies shed the tears of the gods upon us, as if in shame, in grief, in mourning. When were divine messages then carried on the wind and crooned into our ears? When?

The intensity with which this sadness shakes my entire being... 

When Words Are Lost over Loss, Grief, Bereavement, etcetera etcetera.

Excerpt from an interview by writer Meghan O'Rourke:

After my mother died, I was supposed to be writing my column at Slate, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had thought of grief as being sad, but instead it was like being suddenly aware of all the luminous, fragile elements of existence. It was also lonely in its way. My editor at Slate said, “Why don’t you write about what you are going through.” I didn’t think what happened to me was extraordinary. But it was what I was obsessed with, and so I started to shape what I was experiencing into a piece.

I was very unprepared for grief. It was isolating. There was no language for it, and no language around it—but I felt that I was in contact with all of these deeper realities; even the sky seemed strangely bluer. But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone. I came across a quote of Iris Murdoch’s: “The bereaved have no language with which to speak with the unbereaved.”

I wanted to see you today.

Is there anything more soul-crushing
Is there any feeling more devastating than wanting to see someone, have just one glimpse at their face that brings all the radiance to your world, ache to just put your fingers between their fingers and hold on to them for just one minute, hold on to their warmth
but then remember that
they're
dead.
You will never see them again;
And that wanting something
even this desperately
does not bring it back.