Breathe.
Begin.
There are days when –
Delete. Pause.
Try again.
Personal
“All I hear is raindrops,”
Just when you think you’ve defeated them –
Hello, demons. Have you come to haunt and devour me again?
Ground Zero
I find Oliver staring at me. “Do you miss Jess?”
“Yes. She was my friend.”
“Then why don’t you show it?”
“Why should I?” I ask, sitting up. “If I know I feel it, that’s what counts. Don’t you ever look at someone who’s hysterical in public and wonder if it’s because they really feel miserable or because they want others to know they’re miserable? It kind of dilutes the emotion if you display it for the whole world to see. Makes it less pure.”
House Rules, Jodi Picoult
“Maybe I’m just dreaming out loud,”
*
Today marked four years since you left, and there is so much that I want to tell you about all that’s happened since and that I wish I could tell you, like the old days when I’d pop over for a visit just to sit down with you for an hour or two and tell you how my days were, knowing that you were the one person in the world whom I could trust to tell everything. Even when your state of mind had faltered and you were living mostly in the past; it didn’t matter that sometimes you didn’t understand what I’d be talking about – just being able to sit with you, having your hand in mine, my head on your lap and making me feel as if I was safe, right there and then, was all that mattered.
Je vais toujours tu te souviens
*
Listening to Adele’s ’19’ album instantaneously takes me back to the days in France. Or back to the memories, more like.
Memories that, when stirred up, leaves a burning sensation in the pit of my gut, mind & heart.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda… But didn’t.
The art of survival
There are places I can’t go to, films & shows I can’t re-watch, songs I can’t listen to, things I can’t do, old habits I can’t slip back into, strangers who look or sound like you whom I can’t talk to, food I can’t eat, emotions I can’t let myself feel, scents I turn away from, memories I suppress and thoughts I can’t think, because they remind me too much of the past –
And the pain that comes along with going through all that, just isn’t worth it.
“I was the one with the world at my feet”
I feel the dynamics in my relationships with people have shifted greatly without me noticing the gradual movement, until one day I find myself on a completely different island from them, with no connecting bridge whatsoever. Over the recent years I’ve come to terms with cutting people out of my life (and having me cut off from theirs) but I never expected to find myself in a situation where even the trusted handful would dwindle in numbers. I could take the sole blame for being completely out of sync with people these days – what with having a full-time job and progressing into a workaholic – but a small part of me can’t help thinking that maybe –
The fact that the frequency of all of our lives aren’t on the same wavelength anymore, it would have to take two hands to clap to make happen, no?
Or is this what you call a “natural progression”, when something has run its course…?
It’s 11 in the morning and I need a breather.
An afterthought, 