Truth be told, you are not my first. You are not even my second in a lot of ways. You are not the first guy who I put lip balm on, and you are not the first guy I held the arm of, and you are not the first guy to look at me with glitter in his eyes. You are not the first guy to promise me a forever or to tell me that breaking up with me would be the biggest mistake if you ever make it or that your family knows about me. I have heard all of that before. I have been there before. And like Taylor says in Exile, I have seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending. But I am ready to give this a try, to give you a chance. I know there is a very high chance of me getting my heart broken again and you being yet another guy who would devastatingly leave me in the misery he picked me up from. There is no promise of you to stay. But I’ll take a chance because I see something in you, something I saw in someone else a while back, something that was maybe a mere portrayal or some sort of temporary bliss or an oasis that never was there, really. Please don’t be that someone again and don’t give me another illusion of a perfect life and take it away from me right when I get ready to take it to the next level. Promise me to not leave me standing with flowers in my hands and blood in my eyes and a pale blue sky above me that cried as I cried, yelling and sobbing and dying inside. Promise me you will not leave me over a stupid argument, or a big one, or something that we can totally talk about and sort out. I don’t want to be agreed with every time. Promise me that you will know when to let me speak and when to shut me up because I can be rather unhinged and sharp at times, saying things I rather should not have. But you need to tell me when to stop, tell me you don’t believe me when I say we can’t work out, and challenge me to actually work on it if I have the strength to. But one thing I don’t want you to promise me is a forever. Because that is a promise I am still not okay accepting, not okay believing. I used to be a big believer of destiny until destiny failed me with the only thing I thought it ever got me right. It took away from me my greatest possession and in turn left me with a void, some echoing hollow inside of me, aching to be filled, but I know better. It cannot be filled and I am not asking you for that. All I am asking of you is, please do not dig another hole in me that cannot be filled by anyone else. Please. And if you can promise me that, maybe, just maybe, we might have a chance at something good.
Monthly Archives: August 2022
Not Love
Love is not when you eat my leftovers or when you let me play my songs in your car, and not when you shape your day the way it suits me. Love is not when you calm me down when you see me grinding my teeth over that stupid friend of ours or when you tell me how people see me when I am unable to judge myself or when you motivate me to work on myself, sacrificing the time I took out for you. Love is not when you reach out for my hand every time I am sitting in that passenger seat or how you are always up on your feet helping me do things I can most certainly do myself or the way you are always there picking and dropping me, saving me a walk. Love is not how you laugh into my mouth when we are kissing in a funny way or when you miss classes for me or the way your eyes go teary when you see me in a long time even when it’s just 10 days. Love is how effortlessly you make all of that happen, how easily you let all of that slide and never ask credit for that. Love is how you are just happy to be there, near me, existing. Love is what you see me with and how your head unconsciously goes towards thoughts of me. Love is the way you greet me every morning with the same energy and smile like I am new and remade even though we fought recklessly the night before. Love is the way you try to understand me even when our thoughts don’t align and the way you are always up and forward to accept when you fuck things up. You redefine love altogether. You change its meaning. You’ve taught me that loving is letting go of all the things you can’t control. Love is you.
This Love
One of these days will be the last time I’ll feel this love for you. This love that I have been carrying ever since the day we decided to separate. You know, I don’t think about this as often as I used to. Apparently, I might not have moved on but it is working. This distance, this silence. It is working and a part of that love, a large part, unfortunately, is gone. I think of it as kind of relieving but also upsetting. I never wanted this to go. The thought that this day is not so far makes me crumble. I might have promised you that it would never fade away, this love, but what matters more is that I promised myself. The day I confessed to you, I still remember, I was staring at the phone screen with my eyes wide open at 11:37 on a cold winter night. My heart was in my hand, no wait, in your hand actually, and I was praying to the lord that he would make you keep it. I had wanted you for so long and you were finally one word away from being mine. A yes. That was all that was between me and you. Not this world, not my past, not one thing. It wasn’t easy you know. As much as I was hoping you would say yes, I could not help but create a scenario where you would say no. A world where I would have confessed my love for you and you would have turned it down, and we would have been required to survive each other’s presence in person for 3 more months to follow before we could finally move ahead to college and get rid of that bond. Thank God you said yes. Love is a complicated feeling. We see them displaying it, talking about it, writing about it, and fighting for it, and yet about 99% of the times we fail to understand what it is. I think, love is giving yourself to someone in such a senseless manner that includes you giving away your greatest treasure as a human, your emotions, for someone else to look after. And however scary that may sound, it’s one of the best feelings in the world. It’s breathtakingly soulful to see someone want you. And it’s equally soul-crushing to see them take all that love back. I remember you once told me that sometimes you would stand against the wall with your forehead touching it, imagining that it was me. I still believe it to be one of the most loving things ever said to me. But back to the point. This fading love. One of these days I was reading all the paragraphs you used to write me back then. I would read them and question myself the same thing over and over again, how can something THIS amazing, die? I am and will forever be unable to answer this question. But just because you don’t have an answer to something does not make it untrue. Like this situation, our situation. I asked the lord for you and he gave that to me and took it back. I mean, I didn’t know it worked like that up there. There were instances when you would sit across me, eating or talking or doing anything and I would just watch you and think to myself that how, how can someone be like this? You shone so brightly it hurt my eyes. I used to get intimidated by your smile thinking that it would make people want to steal you from me. I can’t say I was wrong because look at us now. I don’t know if it was the people but it was something. Something I will never understand but will have to because maybe it makes sense to you. Meanwhile, I’ll sit here and watch this love fade away, this love that took years to form and years to come to shape. This love that speaks volumes because I can bet they talk about us every time we are not at the table. This love that makes it so hard for us to tell each other that we miss each other because we are worried to mess with our heads. What great love must that be right? I wish I could carve it out of my heart and keep it in a glass bottle by my table, looking at it every morning and thinking to myself that the best days of my life are behind me but not being upset about it. Incredible love. We go together. We used to go together.
Poetry In My Veins 