At the other end of this muffled line, I hear rehearsed tears of steel, plops of fresh rain from kisses of young May. "Come home," you tell me as the telephone embraced me more warmly than the wall that has risen high and hard between us. I'm sipping stale coffee as you talk me down to my lowest corners. "There is never going to be a love as mere as ours," I proved to the held voice that has missed your outspoken lies.  *

Stop calling me.
Stop calling me.
Stop calling me.

I never want this cold.
Not when it comes from you.

I never for once thought that I'd take writing seriously. It was just one of those passing things I did when I was in fourth grade (and it was journalism, even). Short stories became a breather in high school but somehow that stopped too with the revival only happening towards my end in college.

Ever since then my life has been in a kind of complicated knot. It's hard to get out of but a lot harder to understand. There are days when I like what I've written and sometimes I just want to burn my notebook with all the poetry I made. Every single time you get this brilliant, excitable idea come to you from nowhere, your blood springs up, you sweat the small stuff, your fingers itch—that kind of nonsense. But the writing part is a hell's worth of tricky. You see I'd start writing then stop midway because my brain shuts down in the best times. Kind of like a sprain during a running momentum. I feel terrible because I can't move on from that sort of limbo. And then I swear at myself for being too stupid and incompetent—it's insane. It can't be undone, it's somehow part of my process now. The worst thing is I get even more riled up if I don't get to write down that idea completely. The immense relief I feel when I finish a story or poem is unimaginable. It's comparable to having a cavity lifted out of your sore mouth. You can sleep better, do things better. Ball of stress but it comes from your thoughts.

Now that I am too invested in writing, there is only the fact that I must continue this no matter what kind of life I lead. I might become a diplomat or a crackhead (who knows life is fickle) but I think I need to write or I'll be doomed in my world of ideas. Writing is the closest I can get to a relationship lol and I humor myself in the silliness of it all. Honestly, I feel empty not doing it everyday but at the same time it gnaws on my biggest self-doubts. You know you're in too deep when it becomes a reason for being depressed as it is your hope in the ******* days. It has been with me in my extreme highs and lows and in times when I don't think anything is important.

All my entries here in HP are truly my babies. Which I also call out on my bad moods and frequently tell myself that they are utter crap. I'd work so hard to expunge them out of my system but if people tell me they're as hopeless as a Thomas Harris fiction then I don't mind, I plan on getting rejected anyway just so I can take writing even more seriously.

Though I realized from all of this that writing is not for the blind optimist or the stubborn pessimist. I'm more of a realist. Poetry, literature do not go with people who fool themselves with lies just to be happy. Luckily, I am not the sort of person who will compromise my thinking just so I could smile like a marionette. With writing, I realized that some of my beliefs were illusions that we tell ourselves. And I left them because I'd be lying to myself. This is probably why I've been writing darker material. Nobody wants to talk about them because they leave a bad taste in the mouth, so why not, right?

I've come to believe that our existence feeds on dark and light. (That yin and yang stuff is starting to make sense.) People thrive on two ends to grow and being happy all your life is completely overrated. Pain, sadness and death are some of the things I embraced thanks to writing. Hey, we can't have everything, it's better to just tolerate the different sides. If you deny pain, you will never understand the pain of others and how will you ever learn compassion? And so on. Writing has taught me that crap is crap until you change your perception and acceptance of things.

So all in all in this annoyingly long rant, I've exposed how I'm a self-absorbed little ****. Sorting things out has been my top priority since everything (except writing) became boring as **** to me. Not even food could cheer me up and that is a big sign that things have gone the wrong way. My mom complains that I've been sleeping too much, been extremely lazy but I saved her the bother of asking incessant questions because my depression is too hard to explain. Just the other day, I thought of doing extreme sports hoping the adrenaline rush could kick me out of the slump. But I also thought about getting bored with them so nahhh.

The thing I love most in life,
Started with a thought;
Where everything seems lost,
but eventually,
You'll smile
As you think,
It was surely worth my while.

We lost it,
But found another.
We had it,
But we gave up.
Was it really it then?
When we both threw it away,
Was it really it?
Or it had lost its meaning?
Is it really me? Or is it all you?
No more answers, just questions.
No more decisions, just routines.
No more us, just... Memories

Where would you be
In the next ten years?
In the arms of another?
Or the arms of your lover?

Are you well off the days
going through the maze
of the world painfully
to be reminded shamefully

Of your past mistakes
your shameful response
to that one person
there was no pardon

Lost as we seem
Can't we see ourselves?
In the arms of our enemy.
Shamefully, painfully
Reminded of the past wars
To see as clear as day
That there was nothing to say
But it didn't matter now anyway.

Locketh me up
Throw me in prison:
I'm in love dear sir
Oh didn't I mention?



©Brandon nagley
©Lonesome poets poetry
©Earl Jane nagley dedication