"Restless. As if you haven't really met yourself yet. As if you'd passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt - 'Ah! There I Am! I've been missing that piece!' But it happens too fast, and then that part of you disappears into the fog again. And you spend the rest of your days looking for it." – Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

I.
We were never really afraid of emptiness
Only of void, the hollow
Which will never be filled anymore
As of an ember dying to ashes
As a photograph blurred by times
We fear only when we know
Tomorrow will never come
So when we can still see further
We abuse distance, we corrupt
Aloofness, we betray the intimacy
Of nature, we deny time of its place
It's occurrence, we unconsciously
Disrupt a timetable set to make ends
Bearable––

Not anymore

II.
Why do we even put only thirds
of coffee in our cup,
only to come back for more
In fear of content, overwhelming space?
Distance?
It is this fixation to this fear
that we fail to think of coffee running out

III.
We think in fragments
We fear the whole
Of the day being morning and afternoon
We hate the night for being night
The long stretches of hours
We could have slept,
because the darkness justifies rest
The day we could have played
because the sun justifies the break from monotony
Instead, we go in reverse

IV.
To counter fear is to think backwards
The other way––not really forward
We cheat.
We do not sleep simply because we might not awaken
We do not go out simply because we might only be ushered in
We do not try because we might fail
It is okay to sit right here
In the middle of space
Filled with comforting thoughts
That distance is a choice
from something
Not from nothing

But we will all wake up one day
From a restless night––
The sun is up, the light seeps through the window
Where the cup was lying empty on the table
This time, when we ask for the whole of it
The coffee have run out.

We feel the same way
I know why you choose to be alone
There are so many things in this world
That I too cannot comprehend
But, we already know so much
You and I
We're two brains
Thinking of the same puzzles
However, we were never supposed to meet

Perhaps, when you and I
Have surrendered the
sea
of
thoughts
The waves that continue to keep
                                   pushing
                                us
                        back
                 to
           the
shore
Back to where there's comfort
Or not

We feel the same way
If only we could not read so much into things
Not so much with the thoughts
The concepts
Theories
Ideas
If we try not so hard to understand
Every detail––
every/group/of/words/put/together
We would not end up
Finding ourselves unable to understand the WHOLE
The big reasons
As to WHY we question
Or we DO not question
And the most miserable of them all
Why are WE here?

We feel the same way
I know why you choose to be
Alone
The waves
         would
               continue
                     crashing
                           before
T h e     v a s t n e s s    o f     t h e     s e a
The gloom
In the moonless night
                                 be
                           sure
                       to
                come
            back
         to
The shore.

The smell of raindrops stench a sad aroma
It eats at the nerves of my nostrils as if the onset of influenza
Would come as a sniffle the next morning
The rain, as they drip-drip-drops, I could hear tears
Falling somewhere remote, unreachable
Untouchable, coming from such a hollow
That remains unrecognized, unacknowledged
It’s almost a call, a knock, the rain drip-drip-drops
On surfaces, spaces left unoccupied
Left unmanned, unloved—left—once shared
It drips quite lonely on sad surfaces, the raindrop
Falls, bounces, scatters to pieces to unknown circumference
I listen from deep within, the echoes of something
From somewhere, what a sad song it is
The melody of something dripping on a sad surface
Unoccupied, unmanned—one we once shared