Solitary, lie-back moments; of being in the coziest of places surrounded by the most mundane yet magical. Melancholy has a way of tinging itself with those little nuances of memory, and those little nuances of memory tinge themselves with shades of bittersweet and sad recollection over time. Silent reckonings, simplistically suppressing thoughts - all huge contradictions to the slow, natural motion of letting the waves wash over you.

Is this emotional maturity? Is this a step forward? Life is always full of too many intricacies to tell for sure.

The familiar scents of tearstains and revulsion being punctuated by the occasional flicker of light ahead; pain and perseverance, hope and the promise of heaven.

We are so full of contradictions - concrete, grounded beings yet with so many abstractions and complexities in our heads. A constant grapple, a relentless cycle. Coming back to places of washed up memories has this effect on you; but you pull through, you plough through quicksands, you pick up the small rationalities that have gone astray, and you move forward like you’ve always been doing before. It’s the only thing we know how to do.

Walk on our own, on our own two feet.

And pray that whatever knocks us down, will never be enough to sink us.

and there was a feeling -
a glowing in her chest,
a blooming nurtured by music,
an energy lulled by rest.

it moves through all things,
this pervading catharsis -
you may find it in the cracks,
or the things on your list.

as for her, she found it
on a road to nowhere -
one of a million infinites,
too heavy for her to bear.

she could no longer move the thing,
for hindered by her own weight was she.
she held in her chest a heavy heart,
dry heaving her way to her heaven to be.

and that was when she realized,
as the wind lifted her chin -
infinite is only as big as infinite is,
until infinite comes crashing in.

"what's left of me then?"
she sighed to herself.
and then the wind whispered, humble and true.
"what's left of you is still the very you."

"you may be the girl who has never won
after staring cruel despair in the face.
you may be on a million roads to nowhere,
but this is just the start of your race."

"the you who your mother cradled in her breast,
the you who looks at the world with wonder,
the you with color in her eyes and flowers in her smile,
who thinks light can be both a question mark and an answer."

a smile slowly began to set on her face,
subtly at first, then shining through her skin.
she no longer feared and fed on anxiety;
she felt stronger than she'd ever been.

soon she let go of what was no longer there,
and slowly she learnt to no longer despair.
with an open mind and a heart so true,
she began her journey into the blue.

“I miss you,” she said, her voice laden with longing.
sifting through syllables and filtering fiction, she sought her belonging.
flesh and bones and layers of love between her palms,
emptied chests of memories and hand-written celebratory psalms.

they flew to the fire under her hand, listen as they crackle and burn –
mercilessly licked by the tongues of time, as hourglasses overturned.
piles of sand scattered on the ground, indents of fingertips lay –
echoes of a touch once lingered, but then lost their way.

a kiss shared here trapped in this corner, a smoldering gaze there.
a heart shattered upon this stone, a one last wistful stare.
and now added to the list of lost things, upon the floor is she;
eyes open wide, hazel and bright, though nothing more she sees.

the doctors came in a hurry, like vultures to their prey –
a blistering of white coats, sterile scents and gray.
her report was released a few days later, spat out by some machine;
the details told everything, the crime scene bleached and clean.

“a useless heart,” the report said, “was the cause of her
falling down to the ground, lifeless; broken and dead.”

“one missing finger where a ring had snapped off under duress,
a haemorrhage in the brain from sheer insurmountable stress,
four broken blood vessels leading to the heart.
curious is that the heart never worked from the start.”

“deceased is she: a shell, long gone and cast away.
date of death undetermined, it was certainly not today.
rotted away was the heart, long before she bled.
it had long stopped beating; she was already dead.”

i want to live in a nunnery
and devote my life to something i will never understand.
at least i can just accept that i will never understand god
instead of trying to continually make sense of the world.
i envy those whose lives are one whole volume -
unabridged, and yet
still manage to fit from one cover to the other.
while the rest of us, full of breaks and pauses
and multiple volumes
that are either too tragic to print,
or too convoluted to put into words in the first place.
my life is a series of stops and gos,
of commas and semicolons.
infiltrated by question marks,
interspersed with the rare exclamation mark.
i'm just waiting for that full stop,
that 'the end' inked in your sweat that i
will never taste the salt of again.
i am tired of false starts,
of sputtering gas that fuel embers
and never really catch fire.
god only knows how many times i have burned
while trying to put out flames
that were never hot enough
to keep us going.

there are so many question marks and empty spaces in this world
that i wonder if they are ever meant to be filled.
the more i think about them, the more i am convinced
that they're not.
and i find that it doesn't matter,
because i'll never be whole myself.

here’s to lonely nights and resounding silence,
uplifting darkness and solitude abundant,
of wandering thoughts and imprisoned dreams;
when the night is a better companion than it normally seems.

here’s to the nights you spent crying in bed:
egged on by the monsters whispering in your head,
of nightmares dreamed once upon a time;
when nonsense was reason and chaos was rhyme.

here’s to the nights you felt so alone:
only company a mute, unringing phone
soaked with and made ruin with tears -
only voice on the other line was your head full of fears.

here’s to the night when the one stepped through the door:
unexpected surprise, footsteps patter on the floor,
two silhouettes like wayward trains meet.
bodies collapsing into one, admitting defeat.

"I could never win this war without you," admitted one.
“oh baby, don’t you worry, our journey’s just begun,”
she whispered as she clutched his glove between two hands,
and together they traveled beyond the land.

the night is never forever and more.
so don’t keep looking down, stop kissing the floor.
look up at the sky for a moment and you’ll see,
a billion stars shining for the person you’ll be.

your absence hits me like a hit and run,
a car that keeps barreling on until it falls off a cliff.
the last time the sun rose was the last time you kissed me,
yet I am still left breathless.
I think
it was you
who has taken my breath away.
I love you so recklessly,
so recklessly,
that the next air I taste will be the salty kind that hangs off a cliff.
how long have I been peeling my nails off with rocks, barely holding on
when I have already grown wings
from loving you?

falling is a funny thing.
one can never shake off the loneliness of having
whistling air as
the only voice
begging you to stop the fall.
I have grown so used to the feel of your hands
cushioning my back
that I have forgotten how the clouds feel
below my feet.
I have forgotten how it feels
to be the only one in this world.