It was raining over clouds
I found he is searching to get a shelter
He never lost  a hope
What triggered him to attempt his best

As he walked every mile
He heard a soul speaking to him
Just as he heard, it was me standing in pain

He felt we need to move on
Irrelevant  even if what it may
Just as he heard my cries
He took a lead to show me a shelter
and
He left himself alone in rain forever

this is how i'll let you go:

i'll open our photo albums for the last time, touch the yellow edges where your body ends, and not get drunk on what we could have been. i will wipe the coffee stains you left in perfect circles; sometimes, i pretend that they had the color of your eyes when the sunlight hits them. i will scrub your fingerprints off my spine; it's time for them to let me go too — slower, gentler than the way you did.

i will pass by your street, and not send you a bunch of paper rings engraved with all my overused metaphors. i will not hope you'll chase after me, wearing them over the promises we've broken, and over the promises we're yet to break. i will stay up late; midnights are somehow still for missing you, but i won't be writing anything. and we both know it kills me — not writing poems about you, when loving you and losing you are the closest things i ever got to call poetry.

instead, i'll hold on tight on every word that spills out of my mouth, seal them all in a trinket box buried in some place where we let romance die. i will fall asleep next to our cemeteries, wet from the rains we made; i might wake up at 3 am and not think of calling you. and i will wake up at 7 am, when it's still raining, and i will watch the early morning thunderstorms, and i won't wish you're back with it. i will sit there, free from the damp coffee stains and from the traces of your kiss. my tailbone will no longer recall the intricacy found in your fingerprints, and my eyes — they will have forgotten if yours were cobalt or turquoise or electric blue, 'cause darling, maybe it's too late to make you love me again, but it's not too late love myself.

sometimes, we all wish for the world to just stop spinning for a while; that we remain sixteen or nineteen forever — just dreaming of painting the marmoris of the sea and seeing it displayed in a museum. just dreaming of browsing bookstores — each book sinking into your effleurage, until you see that cream-colored cover with your name on the spine. just dreaming of hearing a song from a stranger's car, and call it your own. just dreaming of creating stories out of piano keys. just dreaming of discovering a star.

at least, if the world stopped spinning today, a dream can remain as a dream forever. it will never be another thing we messed up. it will never be another dream we lost.

nothing i do will you bring back;

not the shoebox of purple hyacinths
watered by the i love you's
i still wanted to say.

not the prose poetries i wrote you
whilst caught in a mania
in the restrooms of dying gas stations.

not the caving in of the see-through walls
mixed with static humming of the payphone calls.

not the pillow telegrams that smell like
bourbon and my mother's cigarettes;
darling, my bed has become a post office
of the letters i never had the chance to write
and of the things i never
had the chance to say.

and nothing i say will bring you back —
not even this poem, and i know that now;
i just don't know
how to live with that.

still, nothing will ever bring you back
and darling, watching you fall out of love
feels like the only thing i can do right now.

And maybe all I need is my 30-year old self to come here right now and tell me that everything will be okay, and that I made it.

— “I would’ve totally done that for my 13-year old self”

Tell a little girl that her coily hair is beautiful when all of her playmates think otherwise. Marvel at a little boy’s drawings when everyone else he shows them to is too busy to spare a glance. Compliment someone’s floral dress in the subway; compliment someone’s smile, someone’s art, someone’s cooking, someone’s gumamela flowers soup they made especially for you. Thank someone for the songs they introduced, for the songs that now have become your shower jams and lullabies. Tell someone that you think they’re amazing and smart, especially if they don’t think so of themselves.

In a world where everyone looks past a street singer and ignores the old man painting sunsets in a park, be that someone who isn’t afraid to tell people about the beautiful things in them. Be that someone who isn’t afraid to be soft to others. Be that someone who isn’t afraid to be kind.

you are so much more than the days you can't create or write anything.

those days where you lift your pen, press it against the emptiness of the sheet. those days where you are drenched in the skies' grayest clouds and the colors and lines won't sew you a silver lining. those days where the spines of your favorite books hold no magic. those days where inaction and emptiness will swallow you whole. those days where sunsets are just a discord of colors, and the night skies are just a discord of stars, and the poems are just a discord of words and you, just a discord of vacuums — you are so much more than all of these days. and today, it's okay to not be able to create anything.

today, it's your turn to be the art — it's your turn to be the poetry.