And he closed his eyes.
Drawers are shut gently, curtains drawn back.
Silence stilled heartbeats & pulses.

She refused to close her eyes nonetheless.

Weak & numb
fingertips and wrists, I know how my back curls inwards when I cry.

Tense muscles knotted terribly, nearly as terrible as the words I wish to whisper into the cupid's bow of your mouth.

I am not breaking like glass or porcelain dinner plates, that I am well aware of.
We are all soft curves of muscle, skin, fat, blood, salt & rust. With fine wrinkles and lines mapping everywhere.

Home is full of secrets.
The first laugh and all the laughs in between the last of a baby muffled itself into the bedroom walls. His mother sometimes sit in front of it, hoping, hoping it could live in her ears again.

The nervous movement of lip to lip, neck to neck, heart to heart in the wardrobe, in between jeans and cotton button-downs.
Getting dressed is still achingly difficult. And it is getting truly ridiculous now.

Those holding-too-tight-yet, you-are- still- not- close- enough sort of hugs under tired doorways.
You were enough, you are always enough.

Within swelled up throats, the unsaid words hid themselves in odd drawers, cabinets and a handful of knooks & crannies.
I opened a drawer today and I very nearly cried.

For I heard your voice, your breaths, then brushed again with the warmth and coldness of your wrists. All of which were in different dimensions of time and memories.

And I try and am still trying to keep my pen on the page. For, its to keep you alive, again.
A few words has already slipped and tip-toed off the page.
I'll find it someday.
(Putting something far, far, far off the horizon eyes can possibly see is the sort of thing, humans are terribly good at.)

Time is a very, very scary concept.
We can only live for how long it wishes to breathe in our veins.

The sunshine dabbles on my skin.

Pale with wistfulness. It somehow reminds me of bitten back lips and swallowed words. The sharp edges of each letter paper cut there and here.

I stay a little longer, motionless, in this hazy light.

I'll come back alive.
I will be living once more.
Just give me a pinch of time.
That will do.

It seems like the cells in the spine of my body ache for another to fit against it.

Perhaps not a mirror image or unflawed symmetry,
but
rather just a presence.
Something beyond the lilt of a shadow and shallow breaths.

My fingertips unconsciously linger & idle on the place on my collarbone. Left side, a kiss's width from my chin.

Notice, the word, 'place?' I felt a tad bigger of a human, a bigger piece of this starry starry universe with you.

Eyelashes still flutter, giving way to soft gravity. Hoping your eyes would be reflected against mine again.

I am so very human
with & without
*you.

I'll be your 4am dream.
Could you be my 7pm kiss on lipstick-faded lips?
And fingertips meeting yet again at 11pm?

Why is the ocean blue?
The ocean is blue because water absorbs colors in the red part of the light spectrum. Like a filter, this leaves behind colors in the blue part of the light spectrum for us to see.

Why do people you love get angry, till their fragile veins bleed out?
They care, sometimes, too much.

Why do I feel like this?
Perhaps, your eyes said a shy hello to his.
And both of your lips refuse to say Goodbye.

Plastered wet t-shirts against bare skin, sun-shine evaporates H2O into transparent bubbles of ecstasy.

Bruised tailbones from

                                             f a
                                                   l
                                                      ling,
it­'s just your heart giving way to gravity.

Let it.

A deaf boy once wrote
"Mama, the silence is too loud."

"You're a very selfish human being."
The mirror
did
not
utter
a
word or breath back.

As her fingertips brushed through the fragile pages;
familiar notes of handwriting flit onto her lips, then her ears. She could almost hear his voice again.
The thin, ribboned memories sweetly tie themselves into the hollow spaces. The one on the left side of her wrist, the little corner behind the eye socket.

And especially, the ones where she holds her breath, hoping her very heartbeat would be enough.

Enough rhyme & reason to stay here.

Sadness-

Just let this little thought meld into your mind; this labyrinth and zig-zags,
"S" in this word only, it's a half-infinity. It won't last quite as forever as you think.

Some infinities are smaller than infinities.

I'll like to think that we are all glass figures, people, whatever.
We are fragile, delicate, malleable when heated, at times we can be coolly transparent.
But the undeniable truth that we always come back to is that we can all
break.
Under pressure- the sort that splinters pieces of wide-eyed innocence and hope, the kind of disappointment so pale, you can see it in their skin- it results into little fissures of weaknesses spidering out into ugly cross-roads. Which I think we will inevitably walk on.
And suddenly, with those gaping cracks,
we are no longer quite so impervious to
the bad or the good.
Frankly, as sickeningly cliche this may sound, it is universally accepted that it is the very inside that will start to bleed into those crossroads.
So, yeah, it is the inside that counts.
And I wish I could have learnt that without cutting my hands
red and raw
on these broken shards of glass.

There is an inexplicable magic
- sweet & short; the bitten back lips sort of pain-
something imbued with time.

For it survived through the silent deafening tick-rocks.
Little silvers and wisps of yellowed newspaper ink tailor itself in your cold coat pockets.

Oh yes,
dust-motes, blood & teardrops lay between its spaces.
But, it is still there.
Right between your seemingly fragile fingertips.

You're here now, make it count.

The way your voice sounded 357 pages ago,
a sweet cut across on wintry darkness; flitting out were all the stars.

The little husky notes living in the
b r e a t h i n g s p a c e s
of
your lungs and mouth to lips are like bookmarks.

I never quite lost the page I stopped at.
I dare not read on.

I like how her eyelids slowly close ever so gently, as if those words could be forever inked into the pockets of her mind.

Oh, the way he breathes in at times, it's like he tries to inhale the words through his slightly chapped lips into the airways and then

into the staircases to *nowhere.

Oh look, there goes a little bit of my mind,

where is it off to now?

I only ever wanted you to taste the sweetness of a white lie.
I guess,
my mind hopelessly wanted it to become the truth.

Footsteps chasing after overly-small ones.
Little gaps of space between their lips & hearts;
flitting in between are voices like little notations on crumpled maps.

Carelessly inked shortcuts to a
dainty dabble of
yellow on
ones soul.

"For sale, baby shoes never worn."
For sale, eyes that never quite met the irises of hers again.
Sold, my heart & soul.

I'll hold your hand through the wizened wrinkles; even if your beautiful mind will eventually crinkle.
Crinkled & crumpled into creases too deep for sunshine to peek through.
(My fingertips will still slowly but surely fix it.)

Even when the hair tickling my bare shoulders, collarbones & necks on lazy sunday morning is no longer quite the same.

I'll be right here.

Ink infuses into the depths of these blank, slightly creased pages.
Within it are little intangible but ever so omnipresent
pockets of bitter sweetness; just like fizzy,freshly squeezed lemonade
+
starry-eyed innocence x shy crimson cheeks

Dotted by moments of those cheeky upside down crescents; winks.
Strings of old time flit between dots and rusted locks.

Sunshine; this hazy thing that marks shadows of the hour hand, lingers on my cold, slightly lonely fingertips.

I made two cups of coffee, yet again
Only one met my lips.

The other one went
*cold & colder.

I stand here with winter-bitten
fingers & bare ankles..

I never needed much
when you were aways just a quickened heartbeat away from my own.

There's always an
inexplicable something
about all things old.

Maybe, these yellowing, crinkled, slightly forgotten
-slipped off the inky azure of the mind's corners-
have felt the way a pair of lips
moves & crinkles
as
they make
wide-eyed wishes and closed mouth good-byes.

Chance, a wise man's wizened lips would say it is the one terrible thing,
a slightly wide-eyed, a little dreamer of yet another wise man said

"This lovely celestial thing that lives in the pockets of those shy hopefuls.
Who are all pressed lips, closed hands.
It is all those cold e m p t y spaces
within
your warm soul
no-one has
quite
lived in."

You are the most wondrous dizzying
mess of cells,
deoxyribonucleic acid,
erythrocytes,
words,
sounds,
murmurs,
thoughts & b
                           r
                                                 e a t h s.

These bare walls whose peeling paint once felt the tremors, dips, quivers in your voice.

As my numb eyes and tired eyelids stare at them, they look
awfully lonely.

And this lull of loneliness seeps into these what I thought were  impervious pieces of myself.

Who knew lonely itself
could have such a
presence
in
the
e m p t y spaces of my chest & mind.

Could you perhaps kiss the snippets of pain

Here,                        
                          here,
There
Bye, please?

My soul cannot bear to let more pieces of itself to be lost.

So, let them get hopelessly tangled in the dips & cracks of your voice
saying
Go
                    od Bye.

Tear this little piece on the dotted line or carelessly,
a shard of you.
Any part.

It will still be a piece of stardust; a wisp of the infinite universe anyway.

Nothing quite the same, never quite this close in our ten fingertips.

Give it to him,
to her,
half-senselessly
&
half with all your heart.

Of course, with a pinch of apprehension, a tickle of doubt,
a sip of shyness.          

We will invariably be torn, broken, tugged at.
As, we are always guilty of doing more.

Never less.

There.
You're imperfectly human.

I keep spelling your name wrong.

Scribbles, cross-outs, dizzying cross-cross of ink adorn these pages.

The 'i,
the m's
i,
double ss

y, o & u.

My mind and soul clearly does not want to forget the
linger of your lips and fingertips
on their
broken & bruised
pieces.

Honey seeps off the tips of our sugar-dotted, pastry flaked fingers.

oh, your lips are
just
as
sweet
as
your soul.

The distilled silence are like dusty mirror reflections of
my breaths
&
slow heart beats
in this terribly empty room.

Spilt
little
pecks & kisses
on
bared collarbones whisper
"Good Morning"
on

those sundays.