hesaid/shesaid

The thoughts come too quickly. They could each spawn a novel in their own right and I can’t catch them all before they run away. Each sentence is too beautiful to throw away and yet when I sit down to write the words–that have bubbled to the surface shimmering in the light—disappear again.

I want to give it all away, she thought. Every joy, every sorrow, every fear never articulated and growing ever more monstrous in the mind; every fleeting moment of happiness that seems dangerously close to consuming everything, everything in its transience…but not. Give it all to someone else to live, so I will not have to live anymore. I can watch her struggle, smile, laugh, and cry and think – I will know her every thought and desire – but I will not bear the burden of being her.

The sentences still come, thrusting themselves against all logic of construction, all linearity of plot. Fully formed. Keep typing; for you never know when the words will run dry and the well of thought empty itself from too much use.

—

“I mean what I say”, he said.

“I don’t know what I mean”, she said.

I close my eyes and cannot see your face anymore. In a moment, you can betray. In a moment, you can tear hopes to shreds, throw away the future, rip someone’s memories to shreds.

In a moment, you took my words away.

“You’re too good for me”, he said, penitently.

(I don’t want you anymore, he said, desperately)

“Let me be the judge of that”, she said, hesitantly.

(I still love you, she said, desperately)

“I know I still want you”, he said, cunningly.

“I need time to think”, she said, confusedly.

“You’re the only girl I’ve ever truly loved”, he said.

(You’re the only girl who’s made me feel inadequate, he said)

“You make me feel like I’ve never felt before”, she said.

(I don’t know if I love you, she said)

“I never want to lose you”, he said.

(I’ll stay with you as long as I can stand it, he said)

round and round it goes, every day’s the one before

I’m gonna try anything to just feel better
Tell me what to do
You know I can’t see through the haze around me
And I do anything that just feel better

Sometimes I surprise myself with my own stupidity. You think you know yourself and the limits to which you can descend in those moments of complete… brainlessness. But sadly, you surprise [should I say shock?] yourself too often to even pretend that you have any semblance of perfect control over yourself and what you think.

I’m not good at certain things. Traces of my earlier socially-inept self are always lurking under the surface of everyday conversation and waiting to trip me up.

Thing that are running through my head right now:

- How could I, you ask? It’s not because I’m heartless or insensitive, it’s just because I don’t know how to communicate my own sympathies without appearing hypocritical.

- I’m really tired of “the system” – I have no exams worth studying for and nothing to do, a state of affairs that aggravates this feeling of uselessness.

- God, why CAN’T you see through them? Why do you want to dispense your sympathies so readily when they don’t deserve it? You’re worth more than they can ever know.

- I’m terribly amused, a little unsure and more than a little frightened. But, even if it is just a temporary, random thing, I’m happy.

- I wrote the crappiest exam of my life today. Even worse than last year’s shit on Entrepreneurship.

- If only you’d let yourself be happy.

I don’t really have a point in writing this. I’m just bored, slightly shaken, and… unable to do anything but think. I’m reading a crappy book that’s irritating me with its so-called existentialism and its oh-so-jaded protagonist.

Life is meant to be lived, madly, wierdly, crazily – not drifted through aimlessly.

Oh please tell me soon, I’m painfully curious.

dreaming with a broken heart

It’s so easy to sink into that craving of despair, that feeling of pure, unutterable lack. You only want. It is the only emotion that you have ever felt and that you will ever feel. You close your eyes and all you can see is that one dream slipping away because of something you said or did.

The most painful of realizations is that you were the one at fault and no one and nothing else. You can only hang your head, look at your hands and wish you had done differently.

I find myself wishing I could hold your hand; that I could work up the courage to tell you to hold me like you used to. I wish you’d talk to me, hours of nonsense and words that we threw about with no fear for future or purpose. I never did realise how much I would miss them, those conversations.

Every word now is a precious thing that I want to hold onto for hours after it has been uttered.

You were the only one who ever broke through. I loved you for you, and not the larger-than-life person that they grew into, in my blank, naive mind. Perhaps that is why it is so much harder to let you go.

Do you know? Do you know how much I would do for you? How much I am already doing by just pretending to myself that it’s all over, that I feel nothing but a vague, passing interest in your life? I would tear it apart, everything I can’t help feeling, if you wanted me to. That, I think, is the ultimate sacrifice. I would help myself in the breaking of my own heart, if it meant keeping you.

Oh yes, it will go away eventually. Some day, I will learn to let go and seeing you with someone else won’t make me want to scream and grab you by the neck and make you see what I want you to see. I will learn to take better care of myself, to leave trust out of things and perhaps, not put so much of myself into the relationships I forge.

Until then though, I’ll live like this – with sundry things reminding me of you, with every conversation etched in my mind for days and every moment I see you a blessing. I’ll listen to songs, thinking of you, dissolving in memories of better, happier, simpler times. And I’ll allow myself to think of you exactly the way I want to.

When you’re dreaming with a broken heart, the waking up is the hardest part.

in retrospect

Was it love, or just something that reminded me of
Something that felt a lot like, but wasn’t, love
Just friends, friends then, until the end
You know I still pretend, just friends.

Drifting endlessly on cloud wisps of thought that are attracted by the rainfall of lonely tears. We drifted together, for a while. You crawled in, creeping strictures into my boundless imagination, love love love thrown about like a word unknown. We were children, dumb, idiots without a clue. We played, fashioning out of clay idols of precise proportions, the like of which rarely exist in our world.

Was it love, I think it was but I’m far from sure
I’d never felt that way before, was it love?
Just friends, am I a fool to be asking for,
a fool to wish that we could be more than friends

Fate intoxicates with the promise of promise and I was doubly fooled. Hankering after a feeling that is so elusive you only find it when you least want it. But how could I have known that, when I have never stopped wanting it? Dreams built on hopes are a faulty foundation for anything, but for a person to whom dreams are more real than concrete, perhaps dreaming is the only fault.
The perfection that was, is now forever gone.

Take a step and come out of the shade
I can tell you’re no longer afraid
I’m helpless without your warming smile
Take a step and come out here in the sun
I can tell it’s already begun
I’m helpless without you,
Helpless without you,
Helpless without your warming smile

A dream once dreamt, never really goes away. Metamorphosis carries it for a while, and it is re-born, in a better, simpler form. A comprehensible form, even. Once someone enters your life, they cannot leave you untouched. Footprints in the sand, time after time – a bit of broken bottle glass, tinged green with the sea and the sun cuts you as you walk on by, unseeing. Eternity calls you, seductively, but you resist. Grandeur is attractive but the simplicity of everyday emotion is addictive. I can forego perfection for simple, sweet familiarity.

If you will forgive me, and put away those thoughts that came in the way, perhaps we can go on as before. If not, I will mourn you, but with the heart-wrenching beauty of forgetfulness, I will go away and leave you, even though you will never really leave my memory.

love will keep us alive

…flashes of conversation, hazy with alcohol and smoke and tears and the smell of memory…

we exchange so many words, we pretend to filter through our feelings, only portraying ourselves as those clay images that people will admire – hiding the flaws in the hollowness of the core.

I just want to go back to the beginning. back to the start, when expectation and reason played little or not part in what I saw of you or you of me.

we swim in a sea of heartache and carried-over warnings from past trespasses of the heart.

put it in perspective, see it from above and you’ll realise how needless it is that we force ourselves to hold back.

but conversely, from upside down – i’m glad we did. too much love will kill you, and you won’t understand why. let’s stay this way, loving what we’ve got to offer but nothing more.

i’d do anything for you and that’s just the way it is.

I was standing
All alone against the world outside
You were searching
For a place to hide

Lost and lonely
Now you’ve given me the will to survive
When we’re hungry…love will keep us alive

Don’t you worry
Sometimes you’ve just gotta let it ride
The world is changing
Right before your eyes
Now I’ve found you

Love will keep us alive.