long distance is not easy
it is not easy to watch someone through a screen instead of your eyes tracing the curves of their face while they’re standing in front of you
it’s not easy to have a bad day and not be able to see one of the only people that can make it better
for something exciting to happen and not be able to celebrate about it that night
to not be able to have brunch on sunday morning, or make dinner plans for when you get off work, or snuggle up together on the couch for one of the nights a tv show comes on that you both love
sometimes you miss them so much and it’s like you can’t get relief from it
sure, you plan times to see each other but some nights are bad and you need them right now and you need to touch them or you’ll die and your heart has never felt so lonely
long distance is not easy but one day it will be worth it
one day you’ll live in a cute apartment together where you can wake up next to each other and make love with each other to sleep and a see you later means see you tonight when we get off and it’s time for dinner
long distance is a choice
it’s a commitment to say, “i love you more than all of the distance between us” you will always be worth it
we will always be worth it
details
swimming in a 6ft pool is easy, but dipping your toe to check the temperature – is not.
writing a long letter with heartfelt feelings is easy, but posting it – is not.
driving I5 kms to meet someone you adore is easy, but stepping up to ring the doorbell – is not.
solving for their problems is easy, but sharing your own set of troubles – is not.
going an extra mile on a long drive is easy, but holding hands while walking – is not.
balance
on some days we wish to be known by more people,
and on some days we wish to know ourselves a little better.
on some days, we wish we had a little more to live
and on some days we wish we had a little more to give.
on some days we wish we could travel the whole wide world
and on some days we find our universe within a little room with someone.
between wanting big things we can’t fit within our arms, to valuing small things we keep within our hearts
the balance is what makes us who we are.
lies
You said you miss me
I said I don’t
I don’t miss you
Not the way you miss me
You do not spend your days
Wasting into the horizon
Creating memories of me
You do not walk up to strangers
Tapping on shoulders
Sharing traits with me
You do not stand in a room
Recalling every conversation
Trying not to feel alone
Walking from room to room
Recreating the scenes
Trying to feel it all again
You do not pick up your phone
Scrolling down old photos
Trailing fingers down my face
You do not miss me the way I do
You say you miss me
But I don’t miss you
Not the way I wish you do
just you
If you come too close, love
you will hear names,
echoing from the walls
of my breaking heart.
It has been a long ride,
a barrage of bodies,
a host of lovers
I can’t undo.
I hope you listen to the names
and know,
that it is only
my insides screaming
for you
to free me
of the ghosts of lovers
who died,
trying to belong
where only you,
could.
where only you, ever can.
never
as the night draws to a close
we laugh to our stories,
the days colored yellow with our names,
the dances we had and the ones that danced away,
the words that withered with the ages,
the one’s we let go of, for each other.
and yet
when you talk about her,
your eyes give away more
than my fragile bones can handle.
and once again,
the years in between remind me that
no matter how much I try,
the distance between you and me,
these few metres
will forever remain
an impossible journey.
Misery
Depression does not feel like, being closed in a room with no light, because sometimes, that’s what helps you sleep.
Depression does not feel like, not knowing what to say mid conversation, because sometimes, silence holds more words.
Depression feels like, being closed in a room with no light, and calling it your head.
Depression feels like, not knowing what to say mid conversation, because the worst person you’ve spoken to, is yourself.
Depression feels like, being injured in a part of your body, you never knew, there was.
Patti Smith, in M Train longs for her love to return, imploring – “Just come back, I was thinking. You’ve been gone long enough. Just come back”. Of course her lover who has long passed, does not.
It is a simple moment in time, one that I might have come across more times than I can recall – a burning feeling in my chest in anticipation of impending heartache. I suppose we all learn the taste of pain very early on in life and forever after, we keep practising it so we aren’t caught out once sadness comes calling.
In the midst of this tiptoeing silence, I sometimes go back to when I didn’t know you, a life I’ve lived in waiting for a love I couldn’t name. I do not know how I did it, then. All I know is that if I were to go back now, I wouldn’t survive. Maybe that is how love changes us, as Ms. Smith again recounts, ” Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line”.
She is right. Once you have known what affection feels like, there really is no going back, even when the people you’ve come to cherish have passed. You may choose to no longer keep loving through words, but who can keep you from loving through these silences?
All the things I’ve ever loved, I have asked them to stay – the first person I kissed, the first moment I held a pup, the first time I ever saw the sky turn magenta on a sepia afternoon. Most haven’t. I think that is the law of things here. We have, till we don’t.
And after all this time, I guess the only thing that has moved me more than your love, is your absence.
What does that say about love, love?
It doesn’t.
Where do lovers go, when love dies?
The
answer to this is everywhere. In the margins of books where we inscribe
their names, in the stains their coffee mugs leave on our trembling
bedsheets, in between the hours spent listening to songs out of
earphones, lovers die everywhere, their pieces left, like bloodstains,
on lonely words under poetry-less skies.
I think of how love
feels when we know its dying, the slow surrender to eventuality, a
knowing, an inexplicable doom, an ache that has no name, a longing that
feels a need to be felt, a wait, like in a hospital room, outside the
mortuary, gently knocking on the door, waiting for our lovers to open,
knowing how when they do, it won’t really be them.
Love dies a slow death, maybe the slowest
of all, writing boldly in invisible ink on our skins so we remember how
to bleed without blood.
If they sent search parties down your
throat, would they make their way upto your eyes, the night we last saw
each other. Would they find me there? Would that be the same me? Could
we be rescued?
It is sad that I have all the answers.
Where do lovers go when love dies?
Nowhere.
They merely hide, inside.
Perhaps
A word fumbles out, from behind, the acid tongue.
Love, he loved me once, but not anymore.
A prayer escapes, from these lips, of honey.
Stay, it begs, looking loneliness in the eyes.
So we wrote suicide letters, and called it, love.
You name me Death, and I call you Hope.
Maybe because, in me, you die.
And in you, I finally, exist.
Bleed
They say “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”. I don’t agree.
Some things that didn’t kill me, came so close that they’re still damaging.
They didn’t make me better. Some things made me worse.
Can’t that be okay too? Can’t some things just break you?
This whole world wants you to believe that admitting defeat makes you weak.
For God’s sake, bleed. Bleed openly.
There can be pride in vulnerability. Honesty is maturity.
And really, it’s the things that did kill me, that made me.
Key
Isn’t love supposed to be dangerous?
How else do you explain that wrench in the gut when you pass by some street you’ve always dreamt of walking along with someone who’s riding in some other lane altogether.
How else do you narrate the story of how sometimes, a day without any events in itself sounds daunting, as compared to one you intend to plan out for two people?
How can the same things give ache and comfort at the same time?
Maybe, love is supposed to be the questions no one wants to answer, and still somehow look like the answer to every question.
Lost
I find your name
Etched in the vagaries of my blood,
It flows away,
You’re leaving,
Your stories of me wed my namelessness
And our time together, in its abundance, lies wasted
A road without signs,
A sky without clouds,
A love without you.
For them
What if we simply didn’t meet? If I was dead before you were born? Or what if at the same time you were living your whole life in China and I had never left Europe?
Our eyes never crossed. Our hands never touched. We never exchanged a word. We never made each other laugh nor cry. We never made sweet love nor woke up with our bodies tightly intertwined. We. Never. Existed. And we could, we really could become everything, true everything to each other. If we had just met.
So, why do you suffer so much when someone you love, goes away? At least, you had your chance. Be grateful for it. You shared a moment, one night or a whole year, doesn’t matter. You. Were. Something. And it’s true what they say, everything we love, we will leave behind.
But, what about all those friends & lovers we never met nor will ever meet? For them, I cry sometimes.
DAMN
On some days, I want to tell you how much I have missed you. How it has all changed too soon, and I haven’t made time for you at all. I have ignored you so much so, that I have considered falling out of love with you.
Damn you, words. I am not me when I don’t come back to you, and now I know what I’m missing when I suddenly feel out of breath in this race everyone’s running, ready to outrun each other. Damn you, words. I didn’t know that more than anyone else listening to you on most nights, it was so important for me to just speak out, to get it all out of my system.
Damn you words, for being away from me, for months now.
When I’m with you, somewhere in this little font, I feel at home.
This time, I’m here to stay.
Blues
In the air that fills the world around you, there is a lot of fear. I wander in and out of this place, almost aimlessly trying to carry the weight of your punctual dissonance on my wavering shoulders. We stand here, in this meandering darkness and I know that if ever there was comfort, it is here.
When you look at a stranger long enough, a gradual familiarity descends upon what was and what is. I think somewhere, we were the same way, two unknowns in a sea of haze, moving with the current and somehow crashing into each other as if everything that had ever happened was leading up to nothing but this. Maybe that is how love makes us think – like the world conspires. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. We will never know.
There are these words. And then there is this wait, one leading to the other, relentlessly. Poetry falls from my ragged being like something is broken inside, a leak that can’t be named or fixed. I watch you place your hands on my trembling skin and it burns, a lifetime of longing tapering to this flickering point and evaporating. I yearn for you like the pregnant earth yearns for rain, a procession of silent comfort holding within itself a world of ache.
This life is an eternal sunset, waiting to live on a bit longer. I think our affection is of a similar shade. Your lips move tenderly on me and my body rises to your touch. I become the moment, here, gazing at you like a mad man gazes at a distant sanity. My consciousness betrays me. For once, my years forget what pain tastes like.
You and I are a fever of all the things we buried inside ourselves, of lovers we hid from and slowly forgot. You sit and break time down into the smallest fragments possible. I pick each of them up, and in them, slowly, like the flowing river, I love you.
Departure
It is December now and I can let myself
be a little less affected by
this absence and yet
I’d break my bones to know how your breath
falls wearily on her neck
and how the scent of your hair floats to the ends of the room
in concentric circles I could never be a part of.
in the light of the sun that tiptoes past my window shades,
I’d still hide my aching self
just to see you turn on your bed
and face the crease where I once was.
And it hurts a little lesser knowing how your fingers
will claw into her tenderness
with whatever love I’ve left inside of you,
a broken wasteland of bygones that tear you apart
faster than this slow leaving ever could,
it is just that there are ghosts in this town and
they love in our name
on Wednesday nights, slowly melting
into each other,
their fingers touching chords, this place will never hear of, again.
I saw your mother, the other day
from across the street and it flooded back to me
how stations can be missed without trains even moving
and I wanted to tell her how I missed you everytime the phone rang with a name that
wasn’t yours
and it bled through me
but i guess the only thing left
between the two of us, now
is a lifetime of unbridled affection
that once dug it’s own grave
and settled there,
in the name of this dying love.
Isn’t it?
You and I stand
on sunset’s wings
and watch the horizon
turn a shy orange.
Years pile on years,
and poetry eats away
all that
is left of us.
My eyes are tipsy,
they find you
on every finger
laid on my skin.
A dull ache follows;
your absence becomes a blanket
and inside it,
I keep losing things.
My voice wavers,
a silence speaks,
you’re not here,
but the words keep falling.
It is sad,
that I once loved you.
and it is perhaps sadder,
that I could never stop.
Covert
There was a boy, she called him ‘he’ and in return he called her ‘she’,
Both were so into each other’s sea, drowning became a necessity.
Time spread its wings, flew over the street,
Was there ever time to not think but be?
So we are here, like choking stars, lost in each other’s galaxy.
So tell me, if we twinkle, do we in each other’s reverie?
Is it okay to weep in sleep,
Stay quiet, with secrets to keep?
Is there still an ‘us’ in you and me,
Or we’re poking a separation, in secrecy?
Move
One of the gravest mistakes we keep making is going back to people who do not want us.
No matter how comfortable you might have been, it is in the past. And sometimes, people just belong there.
