138/365
The heart quitting mid-beat
leaves wilting into oranges and browns
lungs gasping for air that it can no longer inhale
the girl next door’s idea of an escape from town
the last time someone uttered your name
and the first time someone forgot your face
Your death didn’t kill me.
Remembering what once was did.
Everyday I’m still looking for God
and I’m still finding him everywhere,
in the dust, in the flowerbeds.
Certainly in the oceans,
in the islands that lay in the distance
continents of ice, countries of sand
each with its own set of creatures
and God by whatever name.
How perfect to be aboard a ship with
maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
But it’s late, for all of us,
and in truth the only ship there is
is the ship we are all on
burning the world as we go.
Mary Oliver, On Traveling To Beautiful Places
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137/365
My hands are quivering. The skies are clouded, murky—-a witness to the turmoil dragged into my lungs. You always said I’m transparent, that you knew what I felt with a subtle movement of my brow or the slightest hint of a frown on my lips. I hated how easily you could read me. I hated how easily I could fall apart.
I glanced at your direction and caught you staring, concern streaked like dirt and muck on your face. I looked away, tears threatening to fall even as I attempt to blink them away.
“I’m sorry”, you muttered, your voice so low and so soft it was hardly audible. I could hear the waves, the sound of children creating a sandcastle nearby, the traffic from the highway. Anything, anything but your voice. I didn’t trust myself to speak. It was enough to wallow in despondency away from curious, pitying eyes. I wanted the saccharine taste of having my integrity intact. I can’t let you see me fall.
“So am I”. That was me. That was my voice. I sensed the hard edge, the ripple of pain but overall, it didn’t sound like someone whose life disintegrated right before his eyes.
‘Walk away. Walk away.’ My brain was screaming at me. But my heart, my poor, agonized heart wanted answers.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?”, I asked, the sentence bringing tension in the air. I regretted it as soon as it left my tongue.
For a while, you deprived me with your answers. There was you, and me, and white noise. I watched you from the corner of my eyes. Your dainty fingers twisting the hem of your skirt. The corners of your eyes that crinkle when you smile. The pale lips I kissed for the first time under the beam of a lamp post. I heard you inhale loudly, and I knew the answer was only a second away.
“I wasn’t strong enough. I…I couldn’t hold on to hope, couldn’t hold on to us because it was slowly killing me. I stopped waiting because I was dying inside.”
The wind howled and rain fell on my face in furious spatters. I was grateful. You couldn’t see me cry.
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136/365
She wished for raindrops to kiss her windowpane with unmitigated glee as the wind played with the oak tree’s branches like a solemn puppeteer. There was always something about the rain that soothed her when poetry and sad movies can no longer pull her from the abyss, when the anniversary came like a blighted storm.
After that warm, summer night, the sadness has always been debilitating. It ate her, tore her, pierced through her until she was nothing. She understood that it wasn’t her fault, that his hands on her skin or his lips on her thighs were memories that she never asked for.
But there are days when queries fumbled along her brainstem, asking whether she smiled too much or laughed too much or wore miniskirts too much.
She pulled on the rubber band on her wrist, flicking it again and again until her skin was red and her heart felt raw. She closed her eyes, knowing full well that sleep won’t be able to catch her until dawn.
She just hoped, when she finally fell asleep, that the nightmares won’t catch her too.
+Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.
Carl Jung (via veg-pits) +
135/365
Just because my heart beats
or blood rushes through my arteries,
just because my lungs fill with air
or my bones carry my weight
do not mean I’m alright.
Not anymore.
kelly-ween asked: I absolutely adore your writing!
And I absolutely adore you :)
Thank you, thank you, thank you Kelly. This means a lot.
