I tried to hide you
Underneath the photos
Where the sun hides too

I tried to hide you
In between pages of books
that I have been meaning to read

I tried to hide you
In between the ticks and the tocks
In between the shadows and the light
In between what I wanted and what I never had

But here you are
You seem to seep through the leaks of my very soul
Suddenly you are in the calluses of my palms
In the sweat drops on my forehead
In the pieces of sand on my eyes
like you never even left

You have me, still.
Even when I cannot say the same for you.

you have been permanent in my life the second i told myself that ready or not, i will love you with all of myself and everything i have and didn't

and often

i wonder if your permanence have been finally stamped on by us leaving each other

like a box sealed tight with packing tape, ready to be delivered somewhere with destination

or a gift ribboned to be given to the one who actually should have it in the first place

on days i see you happy with the people you've been with after me and still with until now

i feel that deep love for you again

and no, it doesn't hurt as much as before

but it's still there, merging with a lot of feelings you didn't even know are possible to exist simultaneously

—of pain

the kind of pain you get when you badly miss something—someone—and you know that things have gone the way they should be and you learned a lot from it and you understand it now

but somehow, this

this is both a lesson and a heartbreak in one

there are still days that i let myself think that we could have done it, we could have gotten through it, and then 'only if' crawls its way behind that phantasm

i have accepted, really accepted, the fact that friendships come and go

that every fall out leads you to stumble into something that gives you more possibilities than before

that every pain is there to remind you that you got this and that you're going to get better, maybe not exactly on the time you want to be but soon, when every part of your being can breathe again without getting too much or too less oxygen but either way still leaves you gasping for breath

—of loneliness

the one that can only be felt when you laid everything to that person and felt like you've never been braver before and now, you don't know if you have enough left to be that fierce person again, to have that fire in you that both that person and you adore

loneliness always comes knocking at my door, most especially at times when the night is so silent and my head can't help but mirror my heart's content—filled with everything about that person

i understand that with surrendering my whole being comes with giving everything i have at my arsenal, that love will always come both ways: strength and weakness; happiness and sadness; determination and loss of will; courage and fear; love and pain

i get it

the twists and turns, the crooks and corners of everything where love and myself and that person is involved

but

i have been meaning to ask all those who have their heart broken the first time . . .

will i always carry this dull ache in my heart?

How will I end this severe pain,
If I want you to be mine again,
You made me forget my fears,
But you left me hanging in tears.

I know, I'm stupid for letting you feel unwanted,
But I promise boy, you're the only one I wanted.
I'm sorry for not telling you how much I love you,
But believe me, I do.

There's something about you,
that made me hold on so tight;
But I'm afraid because I can't make things right,
Maybe I'm not good enough, not good enough anymore;

I know you're not coming back,
And I should be okay with that,
Don't worry, I'll be okay.
Even though you're away...

It's still us
It's still you
It's still I love you
Won't ever change

It's still us
It's still me
It's still I miss you
Won't ever stop

How I wish you know
How I wish you  know....

It's me keeping myself staying away from you
It's me keeping myself not looking for you
It's me keeping myselft trying not to talk to you again

But in the end
After a while
I realize
This love is still yours....
Yours...
Yours to keep...

I still reread our messages
As if the spaces in between our sentences
Would suddenly produce new words
It was like waiting for flowers to bloom in an eternal winter
I checked every period making sure that you were done saying what you wanted to say
And maybe you'd want to turn your periods into semicolons – your sentences may have ended but your thoughts haven't
I was trying to find something, anything
In the string of words we told each other
Staring at each "I love you"
Trying to figure out if maybe I did something wrong
I had no one to blame for your decision but myself
I couldn't even blame you, I loved you too much
In the sea of I love yous and sweet nothings
I was hoping to find when it exactly stopped
When you stopped feeling the same
When our love became one-sided and you left me hanging
When you let go and I was still holding on
Why didn't I notice that you were gone

If we wrote to each other in Chinese characters I wouldn't be surprised that I misunderstood you somewhere in the stroke of a letter
But we spoke the same language and loved the same things
We went to the same places and made plans about similar things
You made me believe that the language of love isn't French but it was whatever we spoke, whatever we felt,
yet it felt like your words passed through google translate so much so that it turned into a language only you could comprehend

If humans only use 10% of their brain
Well believe me I'm racking my brain so hard trying to understand why I just wasn't good enough for you that I may be using 10.1% of my brain already
Maybe I just missed something
Maybe we lost something along the way and I was too naive to notice
Maybe it's the fact that I loved you after all your mistakes and I tried to understand you like you were my favorite song in a foreign language and I just had to sing along
Maybe I was too blinded
By my own love