After ten years, she knocks on my door again.

I try to speak.
I want to say something,
anything,
but I cannot seem to find the words.
I didn't think I would,
or that I could,
feel this much.
All I can do is stare at this apparition of my childhood companion,
who now holds her own child in her arms.


With eyes wide and mouth agape, I finally manage to splutter out
"Welcome back."

I ache so much right now. Curious longing to unload the weight from your heavy heart. Take my hand. Lead me through the workings of your naked core. Let guilty flowers blossom and grow between the cracks in our reality. I hunger of words missing, lost over timed silence. Cautiously I wish to know the carousel of thoughts that spin in your curious mind. Wanting so much right now to feel the distant beat of your heart. To briefly steal what is not mine.

I can't help but wonder
if you think I feel
like bird bones in your hands.

The first time we ever spoke,
I thought you were annoying.

I asked you what your favourite colour was.
You said
"White, because when thinking in terms of the light spectrum, it is the combination of all the colours. When you look at a white light, you are actually looking at colours that human eyes can't even process. You are looking right at them, and you can't see them, but they are still there."

I thought that was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

-
-
-

I was sent to a white palace when I found out what happened to you.
I searched for you in every windowless room.

-
-
-

Our romance was a
flash flood in the middle of a drought,
quenching my parched soil,
and then drowning all forms of life for miles around,
but it was over far too soon
and left me ravaged,
yet thirsty for more.

-
-
-

I took my new husband-to-be to the place where you and I met.
He didn't leave my side the entire time
and we listened to the music echoing around the mountains
while he said beautiful things that I would have died to hear you say
and he kissed me in front of everyone,
just like I used to dream that you would,
but you never did.



I realize now that you weren't my soul mate,
but believe me when I say that
I did love you.

-
-
-

I still don't know what to think when I look back on it.
My open and paranoid mind
can never draw definite conclusions
as to what truly happened.
Reality is subjective.

All I know is that this world is much more quiet than it used to be without your constant chatter that I thought was annoying when we first met,
and the only closure I will ever get
is accepting that part of who I once was died with you,
but an even larger part of who you were lives on within me.

-
-
-

My favourite colour is white now.

I have loved you.

White lines
of white silence,
end the violence,
take me to a winter wonderland.

They say that though the blizzard buries all the skeletons in your closet under a blanket of snow,
they'll still be there when it melts.

1
We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day.
Who in May admire trees flowering
Are better than those who perished.

We, who taste of exotic dishes,
And enjoy fully the delights of love,
Are better than those who were buried.

We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires
On which the winds of endless autumns howled,
We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared in
paroxysms of pain.
We, saved by our own cunning and knowledge.

By sending others to the more exposed positions
Urging them loudly to fight on
Ourselves withdrawing in certainty of the cause lost.

Having the choice of our own death and that of a friend
We chose his, coldly thinking: Let it be done quickly.

We sealed gas chamber doors, stole bread
Knowing the next day would be harder to bear than the day before.

As befits human beings, we explored good and evil.
Our malignant wisdom has no like on this planet.

Accept it as proven that we are better than they,
The gullible, hot-blooded weaklings, careless with their lives.

2
Treasure your legacy of skills, child of Europe.
Inheritor of Gothic cathedrals, of baroque churches.
Of synagogues filled with the wailing of a wronged people.
Successor of Descartes, Spinoza, inheritor of the word 'honor',
Posthumous child of Leonidas
Treasure the skills acquired in the hour of terror.

You have a clever mind which sees instantly
The good and bad of any situation.
You have an elegant, skeptical mind which enjoys pleasures
Quite unknown to primitive races.

Guided by this mind you cannot fail to see
The soundness of the advice we give you:
Let the sweetness of day fill your lungs
For this we have strict but wise rules.

3
There can be no question of force triumphant
We live in the age of victorious justice.

Do not mention force, or you will be accused
Of upholding fallen doctrines in secret.

He who has power, has it by historical logic.
Respectfully bow to that logic.

Let your lips, proposing a hypothesis
Not know about the hand faking the experiment.

Let your hand, faking the experiment
No know about the lips proposing a hypothesis.

Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision
Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction.

4
Grow your tree of falsehood from a single grain of truth.
Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.

Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself
So the weary travelers may find repose in the lie.

After the Day of the Lie gather in select circles
Shaking with laughter when our real deeds are mentioned.

Dispensing flattery called: perspicacious thinking.
Dispensing flattery called: a great talent.

We, the last who can still draw joy from cynicism.
We, whose cunning is not unlike despair.

A new, humorless generation is now arising
It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.

5
Let your words speak not through their meanings
But through them against whom they are used.

Fashion your weapon from ambiguous words.
Consign clear words to lexical limbo.

Judge no words before the clerks have checked
In their card index by whom they were spoken.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason.
The passionless cannot change history.

6
Love no country: countries soon disappear
Love no city: cities are soon rubble.

Throw away keepsakes, or from your desk
A choking, poisonous fume will exude.

Do not love people: people soon perish.
Or they are wronged and call for your help.

Do not gaze into the pools of the past.
Their corroded surface will mirror
A face different from the one you expected.

7
He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise to witness against him.

You can accuse them of any deeds you like.
Their reply will always be silence.

Their empty faces swim out of the deep dark.
You can fill them with any feature desired.

Proud of dominion over people long vanished,
Change the past into your own, better likeness.

8
The laughter born of the love of truth
Is now the laughter of the enemies of the people.

Gone is the age of satire. We no longer need mock.
The sensible monarch with false courtly phrases.

Stern as befits the servants of a cause,
We will permit ourselves sycophantic humor.

Tight-lipped, guided by reasons only
Cautiously let us step into the era of the unchained fire.

Cigarettes.
Pills.
Newspaper clippings.
Governmental conspiracy books.
No friends.
No family.
No food.
No water.
Just lying in the dark,
day after day,  
Until your heart gave out.

I have documented proof in the form of bills, bank statements, and autopsy reports that this was what the last years of your life were like.

I now lie awake in the same room where I figure you must have spent all of your time,
looking at the ceiling,
wondering if it was the last thing you saw.


I have felt myself become increasingly anti-social, bitter, violent, cold, paranoid, critical and reclusive over the years,
and I know that if I let myself continue to slip away,
I will end up just like you,
in this same room,
staring at the same ceiling,
with my face that looks just like yours,
with nothing to comfort me except for the fading memories of the love I like to think I once felt.


There were ten thousand books in this house the first time I came to see it,
piled high in every room,
ghosts in the ashes between every page...


I'm scared,
but you were the one who taught me to take pride in the land I live on,
so I will turn it into something beautiful,
and I won't let this place be haunted anymore.