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I won’t call it love if it isn’t
So it’s Valentine’s Day — a day I’ve grown estranged from, as if it belonged to a language I once spoke fluently and have since forgotten. I scroll past the declarations, the curated tenderness, the proof-of-love posts by couples, and feel an involuntary irony rise in me. Just wait until the blindfold comes off, I think. Not cruelly but with the weary realization of someone who has mistaken dim light for dawn before. It isn’t that I don’t believe in love. It’s that the loves I’ve lived inside have always come up short — reaching toward me, but never quite arriving. I wasn’t always like this. There was a time…
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Radically warm
How cold have we become that some call a genuine smile and human touch oddly warm? How guarded have we become that speaking openly about your struggles sounds brave? We talk about social construct as a foreign occurrence, when in reality, it happens right before our eyes…every day. A conditioned mind programmed to act accordingly and accept only what’s in trend — that’s what we became. We applaud vulnerability like it’s a performance, yet tremble at the thought of being truly seen. We crave connection like oxygen, but ration it like we’re facing famine, afraid someone might take more than they deserve. Or worse, discover our lack of it. When…
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Liberty Land: the side of the oppressed
A period in a short sentence in an epic novel. A speck of dust on the face of the earth. We are all but nothing in the end. My being, my breathing, my bones and my flesh, as far as I can feel, are all the dots I can connect. And with this ginormous heart, that I didn’t ask for, beating hopes in my chest, I can hear the whispers of despair in other people’s heads. I can see the agony in their gaze. I can feel the pain in their flesh. I can sense the call for help. One day my subconscious met common sense, global awareness, and good…
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Led to wonder
On my nightstand rests a sharpie I’ve been using for reminders and as I picked it up this morning I saw next to it some warnings words that played with my head old laments, things you said I looked out the window and past memories flashed by as it often happens when I try to understand why too many a simple thing you could never clarify Instead chose to lead me on when you’d already moved on left me hanging one more time like a seasonal pastime Now my wandering mind sees I was foolishly blind how I ignored my devotion to a charlatan with no emotions and all the…
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Giving Thanks in My Own Way
It’s Thanksgiving in three days, the time we express gratitude for the things we have. But really, how thankful are we when we say we are? I think being grateful to be alive has never been more meaningful than it has these past two years. For a lot of us — who experienced it, had someone who went through it, or lost someone to COVID-19 — the everyday expression “just thankful to be alive” hits differently. It’s so filling when you actually mean it. So that is already a given. But how about the relatively smaller qualities? The things that give meaning to our lives, and which often go unaccounted for?…
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Sleep — An Ode
Of all the things I could’ve wished for, I wished for one thing only: sleep. Not because the bags under my eyes, with every passing night, got darker, heavier, deeper. Not because the world around me slept and, so, it felt like the applicable thing to do. Not because Vogue and aestheticians demanded eight hours in order for my face to “glow.” Not because my autoimmunity begged me so. Not because my civilized brain understood sleeping benefits (I’ve been a caveman of some sort). Not because I cared about the awaiting beautiful sunrise or getting the worm. Not because I wanted it (though needed); the moon and the stars know…
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A Teacher is that Person
A caring teacher is someone who goes out of her way to earn your trust and to get to know your emotional needs as much as your academic needs, in order to better help you. A kind teacher greets you every morning like she hasn’t seen you in a week. Her hugs can be so warm you’ll realize it’s not just a school but also your safe haven. A good teacher thinks of you and of ways in which she can help you even when not teaching you — when reading the news, when shopping for food, when a kids movie comes up, when the radio plays a song you…
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Pride: A Poem
When I think back to all I’ve had and how I blew it and the things they ruined, and how hard it can be to repair a feeling so fleeting but so filling, there’s almost always been this culprit and it’s impulsive and repulsive and most of all, destructive. Some people inherit it and some are lucky enough not to know it or admit it, that they fit in the description and definition of the egocentric. Pride it is called, and you’d be enthralled by the power it has on you and how it’d change your views of a potentially good relationship between you two or the new ones you…
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Stories that Remain Untold
“You miss him?” I tell them not, can’t miss what you never had. Never had a father figure, but never mind, mom was stricter in my childhood the only victor. Can’t put him anywhere in the picture of a now damaged structure that once could’ve been salvaged if our relationship hadn’t been ravaged by neglect and mismanage. Now I question my mistrust in love or lust, can commit but disconnect because I know I’ll end up crushed. Can show affection if a special connection awakens my elation, but for my heart protection shut down at the sense of rejection. Deep in this black hole that is my mind and soul…
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And Just Like That, March
One morning, I blinked and reality wasn’t any longer. “Fourteen days,” I was told. An early Spring break…I couldn’t be mad about that. But just a little over the due Spring break and we’d all be back. Would it be like going back to normal? I was sure of that. Looking at a room full of confused little gazes and wobbly little hands waving on their way out, I wondered, too, “Is this how we say goodbye?” I missed them not. Sleeping in for days was the life. Mid-March led the way. Waking up alone every day soon made no sense. And so was a new calendar that had no…
