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Breathing is labor: one of those days
One of those days when the song on the radio brings back time and it stays and every shed tear, every far-off laughter returns like a ghost from a former chapter. One of those days when my mother’s voice in my memory sways; all her quiet wars, her calloused grace, still a warrior, her love I held dear yet too often misplaced. One of those days when no word you offer can alter my haze as I name myself a failure, a field gone dry, where seeds of dreams fell but forgot how to rise. One of those days when I’d welcome the arms that once dealt me pain for…
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In the soft light of November I remember
I don’t know what led to what first; the warmth in my embrace, the cold side of my bed, the soft Christmas songs whispering the arrival of a new season. How ironic that forgetting was how I remembered the memories that survived Memory is a cruel tide rushing in only when the shore has grown quiet again, when I finally stopped searching for your face in crowds, stopped replaying the end like a scratched vinyl that’s when your name came back to the tip of my tongue, weightless uninvited like a ghost tapping the glass just to prove it still knows the way home. And maybe that’s all love ever…
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Fantasy vs Reality: an Unsolved Mystery
Fantasy is often better than reality. In the real world, you have to face your truths, or the potential consequences if you don’t follow the “rules.” And there’s no way around it, to escape it, in the real world — other than [morbid drums] death. Nostalgia might be a “seductive liar,” but at least it makes sense why we keep going back that way, revisiting happy moments we once lived. It’s easier and better to live there. And a lot of times I find myself saying, yeah but you can’t stay in the past, with so much longing and reminiscing when there’s so much present living to do, which is…
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One More Night: Lies I Told Myself
I don’t know how or when it started the first time I told myself these lies, grown so tall it’s hard to find the truth hidden somewhere deep in the twisted roots. One more night, I kept saying. And then it was two…and three… and it seems now too infinite to count. How do I go back to the beginning? Possibly the only way to understand at which point in my history I was cornered and held captive. Maybe going back is the only way to get out of it while I can. But oh do I want to stay… Contradiction and masochism played a part; a code that’s been…
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Echoing Thoughts and Unknown Answers
I tried to write something uplifting, something cute, something not only inspirational to me but to others. I tried to do that this evening because I wanted to stay away from the usual melancholic tone of my posts. For once, I tried to paint this in a different color, but came back with the same shades of blue. Let’s just state, or reiterate, that forced “happy” thoughts make no echo, though. When I read others’ poems/stories/words, I want to find a connection. I want to know that it was worth every second. Somehow, I want to relate: awaken my mind, provoke me, trigger my deepest thoughts, arouse me, inspire me,…
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Life Has a Funny Way – Excerpt
How could I have ignored the time Rey commented on my neighbors’ little sister’s physical appearance? “Man, she’s going to be a heartbreaker,” he said in a way that no grown eighteen-year-old male should be using to refer to a ten-year-old. I found the comment inappropriate, but said nothing. And, how about the time a girl, who happened to go to my school, came up to me and told me that she was my boyfriend’s girlfriend? Or the time he implied that he’d lost count of how many girls he’d f-cked? Or the time when someone told me they saw him making out with some other girl at the beach?…
