trying to die

Today I am trying to die.

Two strokes, are all I need, across my wrists, vermillion and silk, scrawled in haste, are proof I’ve paid my debts, ‘let me in, let me in’. Alas I lack artistic direction, and taste. This will not be a masterpiece.

Perhaps I should drown.

In the pool? Where children can gawk at my nakedness? Shield your eyes, avert them. Today you will start swimming lessons, so you will not sink on your own accord. What about the sea? Where I watched you wail at the waves until you were hoarse and bruised? Remember the gaslights that painted our shadows, stretching over tarmac like bandages? I recall the grains plastered on my back, falling off when I rolled over, ingesting your laughter whole, sweat and sand, teeth against skin, bare and blue. Fucking on the beach, that was your idea. You spat me out, eventually, grind and salt, brine and breeze. You’d always chose the sea. My head still churns and my nails are bent, toss a rock into the ocean, it sinks, lay your body to rest, it surfaces. Taunt me, sneer at me, scorn at my wits, but let me, let you, leave me. You asked me once how I’d like to die. I told you I was afraid of death, that I would live forever, by your side, of old age and liver spots. Now I shut my eyes while driving along the shore, too reckless, too rapid. I hold my breath underwater waiting for my lungs to swell, until my skin is raw. All I do is beg at the sea, ‘let me in, let me in.'

things i am sure of

i am positive that should he lay eyes on someone else, i will most surely disintegrate like dust. not even crack- my skin drawing hairline fractures, spreading like roots. no i would not even exceed 'crumble'. that would be too intense. i will curl up like the smoke from chimneys, dissipate and dispel. i always wondered if the circumference of a chimney affected the way it dispensed smoke. dispense is a strange word to use. 'shall we dispense with the forced civilness?' or  'she dispensed my medicine' yet i feel it is the only appropriate word to justify my depletion. 

so here i lay, this is nothing but smoke and mirrors i am confounded within my own means. it is quite the talent. now i am reminded of a murakami quote. 'I want to see him. I want to see him so badly I could die. That’s the only thing that seems certain.' this explains everything. with every passing day of our last encounter i am reaching my demise. i think i am in the process of dying. but i do not want to alarm anyone. my reflection retains the same half pained perpetually surprised expression. like when a non-particularly attractive stranger asks for your number. not like that unfortunate incident has ever befallen upon me, but this should help you visualize. it is a strange situation nonetheless. in all 18 years of my insignificant existence i have come to realise that love is flexible and non-defining. i have chosen to love only you. 

this could be easy, could be simple. after all it is. 

i think that if you were the sea, i'd tie rocks to my chest before going for a dip in the waters.

i think that if you were a burning house, i'd become part of your debris. 

i think that if you were science, i'd name love after you. 

i think i had enough with reducing myself to metaphors.

i think i love only you. 

There they are! The madmen, arriving in troops, their skin replaced with crust, bodies providing temporary respite for flies. They come in colours scrawling notes into the sky throwing their throats upwards, cackling 'There is no GOD! There is only Death! Death is the surest thing about life! Death is our God!'

i am trying to do a mirrored parallel to Nietzsche's 'Death of God' and i am prolly too ambitious but lol lemme try and if i fail it'll be quite funny no? 

i am not good at math

it is known that there are 6 people roaming the earth with the same face. i am assuming that there are 5 other identical pairs of your eyes choking with oceans, the same intensity no less- saturated with salt, whip lash and envy. 5 accidental dimples caved into the bump adjacent to your nose, like an afterthought, a careless nip and 5 other identical facial structures of yours, cheekbones completely sculpting the topography of your face(s) (so that they diverge paths, when your oceans overflow). and maybe there are 5 more voices that melt like butter, replicas of you that chuckle at the strangest, most mundane of matters, that elicit copious amounts of life in me and loathe chemistry as much as the quantum of atoms humming in sync between us. buzz buzz buzz. and if there are 5 other copies of you, what are the odds that i have 5 clones too? maybe amongst the 5 pairs of us the same gravitation exists and my brain is aching at the possibilities of them decussating, converging, trailing into place. and if they are in luck, perhaps timing and chemistry will overlap and somewhere somehow, the reality of us will prevail.

Limerence

In all my 16 insignificant/ unworthy years on Earth, never have I once encountered this unusual assembly of unassuming syllabi.

'Leem- mer- rence'

Feel it rolling off my tongue, each sound cradled cautiously then, thrown out like an unwanted lover.

What does it mean anyway?

I repeat the word and my mind flashes to the ever slight curvature of her cheekbones, the tiny crevices concealed (more of imprinted) (or perhaps lightly kissed) on the crescent of her face...

Oh, she was born amongst the stars. Christened by their effulgence, Rosemary was one of a kind. She belonged to the Milky Way, those distant celestial bodies, securing her to a completely 'out-of-this-world' peculiar framework of a girl.

'Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.'

Oh, how I wonder how you are? I am detrimental, and undeserving no doubt. I am a blade of grass, treacherous in strength of character, (not sly, but weak) easily swayed by the unforgiving winds of yearning. Yearning for who? But of course that diamond in the sky.

And yet.

Yet.

I am invincible in your presence. I am 'the King of the world' in that instant/moment when:

1. your tragic soulful eyes penetrate my heart. My impoverished deplorable heart. (What is a heart anyway?)
2. my neck tingles when I feel the magnificent scent of her wafting down like petals, slowly settling.
3. i linger upon the pauses in our inconsequential conversations. In the gaps between words, I sense the underlying ache, (I am not shallow) and in the deliberation of your breath, I understand all the brokenness that you are, in the halts of your voice, I relish/ revel in your silence, while my practicality curses my heart for this one-sided affection. 

Is this it? A fatal attraction, an overwhelming obsession with distasteful direction? She is a thing of beauty, stardust trails behind, tracing her peregrinate across my trampled defeated heart.

Recalcitrant, I refuse to back down.

Infatuation< Limerence< Love 

The equation of my life.

'Leem- mer- rence'

The word tastes bitter and bites my tongue, each lilt a reminder of Rosemary's pulchritude in all the facets of my obsequious passion. Between the dust of lust and love, I am no longer sane. 

How lamentable is the word Limerence.

'Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.'

the scientist

After months of trying to erode the memories so deeply imprinted and scarred on his heart, the scientist had finally found a solution to dissolve his pain. He had tried everything. To do whatever it took to erase the scintilating melody of her voice, they way her cinematic eyes found a void in his lonely soul, and of course, how she left an even deeper bottomless void in his heart when she left him. His feeble beating heart. Few have ever gone there (or even knew of its existence) and yet she, the most unexpected stranger, wounded up sneaking into his well guarded heart even making herself at home, in his very heart) without the usually observant and sensitive scientist, noticing at all.

How, could he ever, forgo her?

After a week of frantic manhunting, the scientist found himself sprawled over his sofa, beer bottle in hand, thoughts askew. His scientifically engineered mind had told him to list out all reasons for her departure, yet something else was working against him. It was a dull sickening blackhole somewhere in his chest. Tightening and throbbing, he swore he thought he was going to die. Hours later, in a secluded gay bar, he learnt from his new best friend, the bartender that 'its called heartache, honey'.

So, with heartache, the scientist resolved to find her. He did find her though, but when he did, he wished he never did. She was in the arms of another man, wearing another smile, living another life. In all his life of success, the scientist never felt more like a failure at that moment. What's left of him was nothing but a broken, wounded soldier. So he burned the traces of whatever she left behind. The flame licked each memory and slowly devoured it... the smoke curled and rose and morphed into odd forms. The scientist's sharp mind then recognized the queer forms..they spelled out the four familiar letters of her name. The scientist related the coincidence to his bartender who only shook his head and gave the scientist another of Bailey's to sober him up.

After 4 warning letters of possible sacking from his company and a rush of blood to the head kiss with his bartender, the scientist decided to emerge from the dust, grasping on to whatever he had left to find a solution to completely eradicating his memory of her. So he worked. He channeled all his desolation into sketching blueprints for his solution, determined to forget her face once and for all. He worked endlessly to end his misery.

The scientist hid his heart in the most secretive place he knew- the skeletons in his closet. This way, no one could ever find his heart, and no one could ever hurt him again.

On the 7th month of the scientist's prevalence, he found himself seated beside a ravishing brunette with curly locks at a conference staring intently at her dog eard and worn out notes. Out of pure curiousity, the scientist inquired the brunette. How her eyelashes curled when she peered into his lugubrious eyes, 'this, is my cure for heartbreak.' Later that night, the bartender would smirk while the scientist related his story, 'it was... Like she could read my mind..'  and underneath the dim light, the bartender saw something different about the scientist's sad hazel eyes.

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The tragedies of being forgotten in stone.

1987.
Unbeknownst to me, I make my final journey to the bakery, skid down the sidewalk to be in turn hidden by a sharp secluded bend in the street. Where I am heading to, pray no one will ever know. I toss a furtive glance behind, every nameless face I see sends me into a state of paranoia.

In my mind:
'Can you be in love with a stranger?'  'Yes.'
'To the extent of desiring so badly to embrace her in the crevices of your heart?
To carve your initials on her palms, and drown yourself in the scent of her blood?
To see tears eroding the sides of her cheeks begging you to stop?
Is this love? Say yes. This is love. Love means hurt. By hurting her I am loving her, I am in love.
This is love.
........................................

I am going to make her love me.' 

1987
8:31pm
Her name is Lavender. Actually I don't think I'll ever know her name. I call her Lavender because of the way her hair blooms meekly onto her shoulders just like the lavenders my Mother placed at my doorstep when she left. Deprived of love, life sucked out of its apologetic petals, its withered stem on the verge of death. I kept the lavenders under my dictionary, hoping to bury my Mother's apology under the weight of words, words that I would love to tell her, words that I would never tell her. And yet I couldn't dispose them. The overwhelming pungent of its decomposition haunts my dreams every night. Those lavenders and I, we are both decomposing. We are a tragedy, we are to vanish from the face of the world and have our names etched on stone and finally forgotten in stone too.

In my place:
Lavender is a magnificent creature. I am not saying this because I love her but because she really is one. I found Lavender under the Tree of Life 4 years ago. What beauty and allure she radiated, so sincere, so flawless, so pure...

1987
8:32pm
I am going to make her love me.

Again.

Again she painted her dreams now entangled and blurry. (Maybe even vague now) above the space pressing down hard on her chest. Lifting an almost unwilling finger she traced its outlines where lines intertwined to form an intangible mess. The beginnings melded into the ends.

Again she was tired of suppressing her undeniable fiery passion to leave everyone behind, to submerge herself into possibilities and greater unknowns. She was tired of being where she was at and not where her soul was at.

Again she wanted to be unsure. But then again she was never a certain person to begin with. But she was indeed clear of one thing. To be away from all the familiar faces and voices. To be thrown and tossed into a sea of unknown masks.

Again the normality and redundancy of life and its shortchanges (shortcomings/shortages) was taking a toll on her shoulders. She wanted something new. (not something new but something really really new. [dangerous]).

Come to think of it, she has experienced something new (not dangerous but close enough). In recent days she stumbled upon a meagre portion of strength carefully concealed in the pages of her freshly scrawled diary. This most certainly frightened her for she was never the brave one, the uncertain one-most certainly. The one who was always off course- of course.

So this was news to her, spectacular! , with that meagre portion of strength carefully conce.................. She managed to free her lonely mind from the treacherous reins of the past! WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT her heart blared, (now proud and angry-with joy?) it was confirmed. She was no longer held back from her past, the unsightly, silent, supreme shadow that clung so desperately to her mind/heart/soul.

Two.
'Shut your eyes. Now open, wait stop,
Okay open them now, what? Don't look at me like that!
Give me your hand, oh cmon!

Can you feel this?

That was awkward... Can't believe I actually did that, please don't be mad.. just don't forget
Me.'

Again she was amazed by her own amazing qualities.
Again she reaffirmed the amazing ability to manipulate the affairs of her heart.
Again she still yearned for being away from being away.

Four.
'You had already forgotten me. That is why I had to... forgo
You.'

Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Again she found her cloud of secret (not so secret now) dreams.
Again she made it out alive.
Again she is still breathing.
Again she is still yearning.
Again she is still learning.

Breathe in.
Breathe out.