I spend a lot of my time thinking about how, next year, I'm going to be twenty. Even eighteen seemed quite young, being an adult was still far away, something in the distant future that I wouldn't have to worry about for a while. I enjoyed my bits of freedom, and let growing up wash over me in a lazy wave that struck every now and then, but never too often.
I still haven't learnt how to drive, or acquired an ID card. The only form of identification I possess is my passport, and my school ID card, that makes me feel like- well, like a school kid.

I realised why, sometimes, people refer to college and university as school when it isn't school. It's holding on to something that has been so important to them. My sister just got to fifth grade, and she's so excited about using a pen to write. I'd have thought "Yeah. A pen. Big whoop.", but I remembered how excited I was as well- being a fifth grader, being allowed to use a pen- these things were signs of growing up.
And now it all seems to overrated, this getting older thing.

I know I'm old enough, but I don't know for what. On a peculiar level, I actually appreciate it now when mum barges into the room at 4 am in the morning and asks who I'm on the phone with, when she refuses to close my door and makes fun of the word "privacy", when she tries to force feed me and when she tells me where I can and cannot go. 

I have, what, four and a half more months till I'm entirely responsible for myself. Where I go, what I do, who I meet, what I wear, my timings, my choices, my friends. I have yet to decide how I feel about all of that.

They don't love you like I love you.

It beats in surrendered corners and
in shreds scattered through the wind and
In ashes that fed the bonfire we lit and
(It was never so bright before)
within us.

An inkling of the cracks,
this is the surface too but
it's just inside, I'm just here, but
it's unknown to you and
you are within me, deeply
as I am outside the world that
is you.

Wait, they don't love you like I love you.

Reach out and extend arms,
inward please, not out,
but no- that's not right-
You can't reach in,
And I can't come out.

I'd explain it if I could, tell you why I write these morbid little monologues about things that were and will come to be. But my job is to reveal how it feels, and not why- ironic, because I'm the ever-unfeeling, the posterchild of heartless and faithless and hopeless. These things you attach to me, without ever asking me to give you a penny for my thoughts. It's too expensive a bargain for most people, especially in these times of recession- our hearts are emptier than our banks. We'd much rather cut forward than let the weeds of our pasts shackle our ankles and drag us into the inky black of memories. What's in it for me?

That's one that always evaded me.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else. -Marilyn Monroe

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing. -Sylvia Plath

Some things just make more sense than others.
Yeah.
If you knew, if you figured out that essentially, there is nothing about me. That's all there is to it. Nothing.

Maybe Tomorrow.

I look around at a beautiful life
Been the upperside of down
Been the inside of out
But we breathe
We breathe

Yeah, we breathe. Every night, every single night, the godless minutes pass with excruciating slowness and I'm left begging to feel. I beg, and plead, and cry- just to be able to feel. Something, anything. Throw a bone at me, give me a little, don't abandon me, Hope, please don't. And even in this numbness, I can't stop deconstructing. Can't stop looking for signs, for meanings behind why I am this way- it just never comes to me. All I know is I find myself being able to empathize with why he may have chosen to die. And I never even knew him, hadn't heard of him till he was gone. And yet, I feel this affinity with him.
Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful for all that I have, because it's a lot more than most people do. But it's a series of pyrrhic victories, pointless battles won, things conquered. For what?
I'm here, but I'm here for them- not me. Because I don't comprehend why. I could be standing at the sidelines, an anonymous observer of my own life. Although I'm controlling it.

I can't-won't- talk. There's little, if any, good that comes out of talking. I've exhausted all I had to say to anyone, and all I do is sit, and wait, and watch. And I still can't see anything.

So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home
So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home

Yes.

An hour knocks on the door and
Upon finding it shut, slides under the crack,
Slithers in uninvited to tamper with my memory
To laugh at some incomplete recollection of
A windy day followed by
A foggy night.

A Mind as hazy, as hazy as that which
Caused these beads of thought to slip
Off a string that came lose with a
Slight tug
At the nape of her neck, that night
That passed so restless and alive
In the solitude of survival,
Of pretending that we are, indeed, alright.


One of the strangest things we, as emotional creatures, do is try to attribute shreds of meaning to our mundane existences. We all bump into mental blocks, fall to pieces, get back up and then- we fall again. It's a lot to process, because when all you're doing is getting through life without ever really knowing what the point is and without even trying to attach significance to it, all you're in for is a tough time. And then one day, as you're staring into space, it hits you, this hollow epiphany- it's not a phase. It's just life.

Desertscape.

It's a wave-no, it's something else- a bubble is bursting somewhere, a song is dying, there's a clandestine parallel pathway that's operating in the very same godless microcosm we call life. I watch you build it up to a perfect falsetto and then, it's sudden, your voice dies mid-perfection. I will never encounter another one like that, never fulfill my lust for the flawless. It was an almost, but it was a not-quite too, and wavering back and forth between the two I see the impossibility of forever.
What is sacred, what has ever been to you, I ask you now as we sit in this cosy cafe waiting for our orders and the pianist's fingers linger over the keys of his bread and butter- like a ballerina, they go back and forth, back and forth, as I wait for an answer that you can give me. But it's lost to you as well, I can tell when I see you, when your voice is a croak that never became you. It always revealed your lies to me.

I would get up, walk away and leave, run into the streets of Amsterdam, Paris, Rome- wherever we sit in my imagination- only to find myself in the Sahara. Because what are you, if not a mirage? Illusory, delusional, a falsification, breathing here to crumble my sand castle. There will be nothing left when the water washes away our lives and our loves, the sea comes back to purge every now and then. This desert was once a sea, an ocean,a habitat. No more now, no more. From dust, to dust- This is us, unhinged and unraveled, as we wait for the champagne and the oysters, over-romanticizing the loss of romance, because an opportunity for glamour is not to be missed.

But inside, here, in my mind, I am parched. I am waiting, and there is an oasis that never was, will never be, calling out.