I'm trying to swim
In the endless ocean
I'm trying to breathe
As the waves engulf me

Everytime I think I can catch my breath
When I reach out to break the surface
I'm pulled down deeper and deeper

Its like I've got shackles at my feet
Pulling, tugging, calling
I'm fighting I promise I'm trying

Every gulp of air
Met by the pressure of the sea
Every grasp for light
Only a little more out of reach

So many words yet to be said
Let me shout them, let me speak
Hear me, see me...

I think I'm in way too deep
Kicking, thrashing, flailing
Please I'm trying

I told you once, I had a dream
The breeze was light
And I was at peace

I hold my breath
Because it creeps in
The loss
The grief
The sorrow

I can barely breathe
I feel the weight on me
You
The lack of
You

The days blur
Time moves slowly at first
So slow it could've moved backwards
And I'm still out of breath

I fell to my knees
I heard the words and didn't understand them
I felt the words but couldn't believe them
You were gone too fast

It's like I'm wandering
Through the aftermath of a battlefield
I can hear the screams
They could be mine

I still long for you
Even though I've been without touch
I miss the sound of your voice
It reverberates in my mind
Didn't think it'd end in such...

I had to
I hope you understand
And my heart still reaches for you
After everything I've said

I didn't want to cause more pain
So I broke my own heart
Only wanted you to fight for me
But you chose to stay apart

I dont blame you
I threw the final word
But you have a place in my heart
No matter what you've heard

I still love you
But I had to let you go
Because the love you had for me
Still made me feel alone

So I let my heart reach for you
In the light of day and dead of night
Trying my best to move through
All the things you didn't fight

You didn't want to have to prove your worth
That would have been fair
If you hadn't left me in silence
When I was begging for you to be there

A drink by my side
A cigarette in my hand
A long dreary silence
A neglected heart

She sits by the water
She observes the sea
Can't take the silence
But she'll grin with a cup of tea

He leans on the railing
He gazes at the clouds
Yearning a little more
Needing a touch of femininity

I had never truly embraced love as i had with you by my side. It happened in a blink of an eye, like watching the sun set where you thought you had more time but nightfall came quicker than you realised.
I spent a long time hoping and dreaming and believing in our kind of love. Filled with a joyousness that left no crevice of my chest aching for fullness. There was a difference between the idea and the solidity of corporeality. It became a fission of emotional vulnerability and unadulterated passion within a second.
The love we shared engulfed my being like a tidal wave and left me breathless. It was as gratifying as it was painful in every sense. A connection of homogeneity of our wavelengths that left an ouroboros scarred into my heart every time you held my hand.
A natural phenomenon much like a typhoon sweeping in and destroying what we thought was permanent and leaving behind a quiet peaceful sleep before the aftermath hits. The bruises were in my soul and not on my skin. And an uncharacteristic gratefulness for having felt a love so deep, however temporary it may be.
This love. Our love. Blindsided me.
But there's no other way I'd rather it be.

It's currently 3:37am and all i hear is the sound of waves crashing against the shore.
Push and pull.

Breathing in and breathing out.


I said I love you. You whisper it back.
I ask myself if I can still feel you. If you're still here with me when you're asleep. If my eyes are drawn to the colours that surround you because they are beautiful or because I'm simply curious.

There's never just one dimension. Never just one angle. Light scatters and reflects and focuses. For every highlight, i also saw a lingering shadow.

I never realised how unforgiving fluidity has been until now.

There are those days when the moon shadows the sun
and we fall into an insecure darkness for a minute or two in the middle of the day

A cycle of grief
A bellboy greet
Tell me again when did I have my last drink

The nights where the silence is the loudest sound
and your feet are lead when moving seems like the worst thing to do

A weight on your shoulders
A reminder of sins
When was the last time I could breathe calmly

The days where the sunlight is muted
and every smile is a grimace paired with forcefully shoving down desolation

A lump in your throat
A blanket of solitude
God, I feel so alone

The year passes in a blur of heartbreak
and every intake of air is more difficult than the last

A tight chest
A sick feeling
I can't keep doing this

I feel like I'm dying, from the inside out and i am constantly aware that it's happening but i can't feel it because it hurts too much.

Embers burn and they burn out. That's what the pain will feel like. The embers burning at their peak. But eventually, they burn out like candles blow out. And that's what moving on from you feels like.
It feels wrong and unfinished. It feels unnatural. Like a growth, a mass, a tumour. Like a halfway-paved walk or an unfinished sentence.

But my memories of you will never be chipped from my mind like slamming a ceramic mug onto the tabletop. You've ingrained yourself in every ****** movement I make and I don't know how to make it stop. Because I don't want to forget. I can't forget. I need you because you make me feel real. You make me feel like I matter. And that's the worst thing you could've ever done to me.

Because when you walked away, I lost a huge part of me. I lost a chunk of who I was, who I could be.

"How do you feel?"
"Does it matter? It doesn't change anything."

Because that vacant look in your eye was the last memory of you that I have. The distance.

"Whether it matters or not is not the point."
"I love you."

Because the first time I said it, would be the last time you'd hear it. It's been 10 days since then. And 28 since you stopped caring. It's been 3 years and 4 months since we first met. But a day has not gone by when my heart doesn't hurt because you're no longer here.

You said that you'd never leave me.
And you lied.
You said you cared about me.
And you lied.

You said I could always count on you.
And you lied.
You said you'd never let me go.
And you lied.

You said you loved me.
And you lied.
You said I could trust you.
And you lied.

But I believed you.
I believed in you.
I believed because of you.
I don't know what to believe anymore.

A stumbling hurricane into a newly made up home.
I set roots and you tore me out of the ground.
I held your hand, and you let go.
I shouldn't have let you hold me on the way home.
I shouldn't have let you touch me when my heart hurt.

But I did.
I did and you held me.
I did and you broke me.

You broke me.

I.
It was just about to rain and the skies had darkened but let me tell you no matter how heavy the downpour is, I will love every inch of you - even the parts I shouldn't.

II.
Hearing you tell me you love me while I had just stepped out the door was like a wave crashing against rocky shores keeping it from kissing the shore.

III.
Holding your hand was the only comfort I knew and held on to even though it meant to last only a fraction of a second and you never meant for it to happen.

IV.
I filled my heart with a joy when I first met you and the consanguinity between us bloomed like a morning glory touched by the sun but you turned your back when the darkness came.

V.
Nights were used to think over every possible "What if..." and days were spent pondering on the concepts of "I should've..." but we both turned our backs when the storm brewed.

VI.
I could have loved and been loved in return. You could've loved and be loved in the end. Yet as the snow fell and the glass frosted, a coldness settled between our touch.

VII.
Your hands were warm when mine were chilled and I could hardly spend a night without wishing the bed wasn't as empty as it was and that you had come home once again.

VIII.
My stomach formed knots and bounded around my heart each time your silence creeped for hours, days, sometimes weeks. Had you already looked in the eyes of another?

IX.
They say that you should let go of the things you love so I let you go but you are convinced I had lost my love and I had you convinced I had given up on us.

X.
What happens when the truth is known? That a heart finds warmth in its coldness and the lack of you has been better for me than your omniscient presence?

**I love you.

Since we were kids, they kept a chart to measure our growth in terms of the length of our bones to the weight of our skin. And over time, we stop measuring ourselves and start measuring our self-worth. So instead of measuring the density of calcium in our skeletal structure and the height from the base of our feet to our crown, we measure ourselves in words, and voices, and the way our eyes look into the eyes of someone else. We measure ourselves in the curvature of our features and the smoothness of our palms. We measure ourselves in the value of our things and the whispers we hear in our heads. And they stop trying to define us by our nature and start placing us in carefully labelled petri dishes for the right moral and chemical composition that we radiate through the way we walk and the bends of our spine and the number of times we blink in a minute. We placed words in our palms picked from a bowl of chance and they do not speak to us to measure our worth. They measure us by our use of multi syllable words and our ability to manifest sides to a view even though it all seems the same. They measure us by our dexterity in creating complex ideas to explain intimate details between the grass and the moon. They measure us by our capacity to absorb and apply and absorb and apply like sponges and liquified knowledge that come from theories  we made up to feel connected. They measure us by our longevity which they deem to be privy to the lifestyle they have taught us to lead. We measure ourselves by the deepness of our love and how we sometimes would rather have knives in our back instead of place one in anyone else's. They forget that we are worth so much more than numbers and sheets of paper. They forget that we sometimes stand on two feet so that we don't fall and not because we are fighting for our survival. We forget that sometimes what's inside is dead set on the idea of a short wick and that open windows are not portals to new lives. We forget that even though sometimes more is less, less is not more and never will be no matter how many times we scream to ourselves silently about the heaviness of the eyes on us. So we start measuring ourselves as bodies of water and throes of passion. We measure ourselves in the leaping flames and how far we would go to achieve the serenity we think we need. We measure ourselves in the storms that destroy our homes and whether or not we will be able to tear the buildings down without hurting a soul. They measure us by the degree of saturation of our face value souls and the colour of the bits of our hearts that they collected eons ago. They now measure us by the frequency of sounds we listen to and the irradiation of the electromagnetic spectrum on our skin as light reflects a different side. And short of tape measures and rulers, they try to measure our worth without hearing the voices calling out to them about who we really are that are trapped in the back of our minds. So tell me, what are you worth?

It was just like this.
Being without you was just like this.
Uttering that I hate you under my breath
and letting it carry through the wind
while my mind screams that I love you
Because on a late September night,
you held me like I belonged somewhere
besides the cracked sidewalk under
the tears of the moonlight.
And in an intelligible dream, you held me
like there was no other place and time
and state of existence you wanted to be.
Being without you was being reminded
of the times I was with you
when you didn't want to let go.
Being without you was knowing how it felt
to be a portion of a soul that was not mine
and walking about the next morning
with an arrow stuck in between the arteries
of my bruised heart.
Being without you was feeling you tell me
you loved me while you hand rested on
my thigh and living every night wishing
we had stayed a little longer.
Being without you was not being able
to tell the difference between reality
and a daydream because it was all real.
It was all real.
Being without you was being torn apart trying
to explain to my heart that your hands
never held it and that you never really wanted
to stay for longer than needed.
Being without you was hearing your voice
telling me you wanted a few minutes more
before you had to leave
and waking up to a cold bed
far too big for one.
Being without you was like being haunted
by phantom limbs trying to inflict their torture
of making my hands feel yours intertwined
with my fingers and feeling what it felt like
when you lowered your walls and let me have you -
or at least, a part of you.
Being without you was having a constant nagging
in my head telling me I should've kissed you.
I should've kissed you when you were close enough,
when you reached out for me and knowing that it's too late.
And it was just like this.
Being without you was just like this.