blankets

I hope to see you soon. To tell myself that I am happier. To prove myself that I have covered a greater mile beyond the future that dimmed before us. I have no other way to compare the promises I made to myself with where I am now but to test myself through you. I hope to see you soon to tell myself that all the tears that quenched my throat was worth the travel down to my guts. It could never be anyone but through you for me to tell myself that I resurrected from the graveyard; that the hurt that came when I had to peel off my old skin, which knew too well the contours and gaps of your body, was for my sake even if it feels as if every strand of my faith is torn from me just for the sake of baptism. I hope to see you soon.

But not too soon. Or better yet, forget it. Because I am afraid that all the blankets that I wrapped myself beneath before going to bed will come hovering at me in broad daylight. The blanket of stars that remind me how I can never see another beauty. No one beauty can be repeated. It’s a thing that life taught us only through heartbreak. The blanket of darkness that I chose to drape myself with for being too blinded by the generic daylight most men have these days. And the blanket of thoughts that left me awake on the edge of sunrise and pulled me out of REM cycle.

Lies comfort the dreary ones and it is hope that makes one lie immeasurable against truth. I think I can never see you because I don’t know how much coffee I have to drink to keep my lies awake: that you are a linear past, never bound to repeat again; and that somehow, I wouldn’t want to let go of that throb in my chest because it perfectly spells out your name. And if we meet again, I can never be too sure if I can bring my entire self together again should you confess me your truth: that some parts of me still lives in you. I never want to meet you; because I’m afraid that beyond these promises that we made to ourselves after we almost damned each other in our memories, what we’re only needing is each other’s finger to plug the hole in our hearts when Cupid ask for his arrow back.

That flying imp never told us that his arrow could leave splinters in our hearts.

vertigo

I still remember you whenever I see planes dotting the sky. Maybe because the anchor of regret still wrings my neck hostage, a chain to a locket of impossibility, or a scarlet letter. Scarlet for dried bleeding, not Catholic shame. You see, I've always fallen clueless for men already tied to another. I guess it's my fourth to count that I started to examine my skin one afternoon before shower. Maybe an epithelial cell could answer the misfortune. You were the first domino to fall and create the wave. I should have loathed you but I guess there's so much peace in quiet resignation. Airplanes. You. Incredible, right? I do not know either.

I was in a daze the night when you said you were already at the airport. I wore two left shoes. One yearned the final bid. The other, a safe distance. None of them were right. But an injured person owes himself a sense of justice, and heaps of pride. Until some memento mori scattered in the metropolis reminds him that the world was built on skewed encounters, illumined by asymmetrical smiles.

Tickets to freedom may be constructive, I guess. Constructive, and an afterthought. We belong to lands whose shores did not even kiss during Pangaea.