Love

“How do you spell 'love'?" - Piglet
"You don't spell it...you feel it." - Pooh”
A.A. Milne

~

"These are the words but the words aren't coming out."

But their echo does. And it's a ray of light shooting across the dying corners of my room. And maybe if you listen, if you listen well, you can hear a subtle melody. And maybe if you read this, if you read this well, its heartbeats will land on your lips. And maybe, just maybe, if you don't blink too hard, you'll let the beats watch those fireworks you cannot see. And then, perhaps, you'll hear a symphony, a glowing pulse in your eyes, shining back and forth, all the way through. But you won't know whether it's me or you, because your hand is already in mine, and you just noticed that we're dancing. And our shadows are too. Two souls made of fire, yellow, violet, blue, burn through the door of fate. Two birds emerge as one feather slowly falling into a quill. And this quill is frozen ice. Yet its broken tip melts, melts slowly, slowly at the darkness of these floating droplets of some meteor's ink that leaked through the ceiling of the night sky. We're still dancing. You forgot – again. You didn't even see how your fingers were rearranging my stars. But maybe, now, if you're seeing this, if you're seeing this well, you'll see them covered with that melting ink that seeped through my heart. You'll see them interlacing at the back of my neck composing a downward chill, set to an aftertaste of warmth; the kind of warmth we both close our eyes to – the kind of warmth that makes us smile while we're dancing. And, yes, naturally, I just hugged you. And this hug is a timeless vow – a promise. And this promise is a moment. And this moment is endless depth. And, okay, perhaps, my soul isn't infinite because infinity can't be broken down. But... I'm sorry I broke the rhythm but, maybe, in a while, the never-ending ending will start with better music. Okay, let's start again. Let's start with your smile. Smile, please. I'll follow your lead. And now you can laugh. You can laugh if you would like to radiate the kind of bliss that pushes the world's weight off my shoulders. It's not there now, though. Because we're still hugging. You forgot – again. Stop forgetting. Start knowing. I'm gonna stop whispering now. I'm gonna slightly raise my voice. Start knowing that your laughter is my cure. Start knowing that the words just aren't coming out. Pause. Please pause. I said please. You don't know what happens after this silence. You don't know what happens in the next frame. So let me tell you. After the silence, I get my legs back. I get my soul back. After the silence, I'll actually dance with you instead of writing about it. And we won't just fly in the realm of fiction against all that qualifies as wind. We'll also be travelling the world together, using airplanes in the realm of 'reality'. And to be 'realistic', well, as we're flying, we'll fall. We'll fall under white, translucid sheets and give our demons a taste of grace. So, yeah. Yeah, whether it's dancing or hugging or flying or running, we lay our hands upon the scars. And hope is that echo, that ray of light you've been listening to, that glow I once saw and could never un-see once your gaze was etched in me. But you need to close them now–your eyes, I mean–because I... I urgently need to kiss you.

I love you by the way. And, your eyes should be closed. Because we're still kissing. You forgot – again.

"I just wanted you to know."

~

“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”
Edgar Allan Poe

Empty

"Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward."
Søren Kierkegaard

~

Let there be light and many, many shadows.

I know you're tired. I'm tired too. And I don't think there's a word that stands between clarity and confusion. And I'm not even sure I know how to describe it. But my handwriting sure looks a lot like it. I need to finish that book. She's right – I never finish anything. I know. The depth of the word is the depth of the hurt. You keep saying that. But who cares? What will you gain from this? What will you learn? Nothing.

But maybe I just have a few things to say. When I was young, I always thought strangers had this mysteriously beautiful aura, this gleam that I needed to discover. It's not like that anymore. I wish it still were. I'm not sure that's what I wish. I'm not okay. I know you're not okay either.

Somewhere, right now, there's a snowstorm. And that snowstorm is set to music, a music no one can hear. Maybe the most well-kept secret is that matter is generated by consciousness. Then again, maybe not. And maybe I don't want to be understood because I know that once understood I'll be seen. I'll be seen for who I truly am – an ugly broken pen.

I don't know what's missing. I know that you don't know either.

The absent wind turns into these vapid words. And the old bland void strangles the breath. The answer plays in his imagination. But it's not really there. The only thing here is the night and it's racing the heart's attempt at throbbing to a slow death. The lights fade into his eyes and merrily turn to fire in hers. "Are you feeling what I'm feeling right now?" he asks. His skin is itching. His heart is aching. His art is lacking because he can't see her next to him, smiling. The pain pushes the pulsations back to a hellish pressure in the chest. Dawn won't be breaking soon. Your stars are the same as mine. Your soul is the same as mine. And... and I love you and that's all that matters. And maybe, even if you meet me, you would love me still. These roads don't need to be paved. They just need to carry your scent. And, yeah, I'll carry your heart and your smile and your laughter and your perfect face and anything you want – anything you want to picture in our future.

I know you think all we need is each other. I think so too.

Herein runs an emptiness that was once a red and flawed cardiac river.

And if it ever comes to back to life, you can have it.

~

"Hope is a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it."
Søren Kierkegaard

Fall

"So smoke 'em if you got 'em
Cause it’s going down
All I ever wanted was you
I’ll never get to heaven
Cause I don’t know how."
LP

~

So he wrote a letter to life. It started and ended with the same line:

What do you want from me?

I find myself asleep. I find myself pretending to dream. Again and again, I find myself not finding myself at all. Could it be? Could it be a thirst for the taste of purple melancholy that drives my blood to abandon its lively red? This inescapable need to be part fiction, part reality splits me in three:

You, drowning in uncertainty—You free-falling in reality—And I, the hopelessly hopeful ghost, playing hide and seek with the void.

And I told you not drown. And I told you not to fall. And I told the void that I’d stop hiding. So it found me.

Pause.

My fingers flirt with the play button but they do it at a distance. They’re too busy choosing between past and present tense. And as I walk to enter the realm of grand delusion, I read the sign at the door.

What are you doing?

I told the night to leave me be. And I told the stars I couldn’t see. I told the ocean I couldn’t breathe. And then I asked myself:

Why won’t you wake up?

Now inhale the confusion. And then you’ll understand—that I try my best to breathe out the truth—that I try my best for me and you.

I can’t go on. I can’t go on. I can’t go on.

Why are you doing this to me?

I don’t know what you’ve broken. I don’t know if we become what we lose. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I don’t know what to do.

I wish you could pick up my pieces and hug them back to animate glue. But you can’t. For they make up the map that leads me home, to you. And I need to find you. I need to find you. I need to find you.

So dear foreign heart, I implore you not to trigger thoughts and words about faith and trust. For tonight is not about hope and dreams. Tonight is not about identity and purpose. Tonight is not about unconditional love. Tonight is an overflow of information, a mindful con, a paradigm shift, a transformation. Tonight is an absence of internal music, a silent restless dance, a failing numbness, an underrated emotion. Tonight is not a flowing ocean. Tonight's a broken rhyme, a nonexistent sign, a colorless color of a flawlessly flawed design. Tonight is devoid of plot twists. Tonight is everything and nothing—switching sides. Tonight is a beautiful, muted, song. So stop singing, 'cause you're out of tune.

Never stop.

~

“If you are falling....dive.” 
Joseph Campbell

Dancing

"Hold
Hold on
Hold on to me

'cause I'm a little unsteady

A little unsteady."

X Ambassadors

~

He lay in bed, eyes fixed to the ceiling, picturing how their first dance would be. He knew she was somewhere being herself, and he hoped she was thinking about him in a positive light. And as they moved together in harmonious motion, his imagination was consumed by the tireless movement of his gaze—glued to the heavenly feeling painted on her face, rhythmically swinging from left to right, right to left and then, back again, over and over, wondering how her soul and its shadow could compose such spellbinding art, a love that could silence tragic pain, a promise to the light, a slow dance in the rain.

So run the pressure and the beat. Smother the darkness in this heat. Endure the unbearable delusion. And break. Break the intensity right before it knocks you out. And as your eyelids now both stumble to meet, examine the romance that's cracking the ceiling. Embrace the lovely and the intimate. And know that this bleak fall is reaching down to find the sweet flower at her feet.

Now focus. Focus on the fading difference between fate and freedom. Lose all sensation, all delight, all safety and might. Drop your arms. Drop your masks. Drop your pride. Drop your ego. Drop your delusions. And... and lay your love softly on the ground. Then look. Change your focus. Don't look at the words. Look at your reflection behind them. Look at your reflection behind them. Look at your reflection. Look at it. Look at you. I am nothing. I am no one. I'm not even a memory. I am not future hope. I am not tomorrow. I am now and this now does not exist. You can pierce the veil. So pierce the veil. You're not listening. Listen. You're not listening. You're not listening to your heart. You're not listening to your heart. These words do not exist. But you do. So start acting like it.

Even if you don't trust yourself, trust the moment.

Even if he can't see her, he can see her. He can feel her. He can feel her skin on his.  Even if she doesn't know it, they're together—always. They're together against all odds, until time forsakes all effort to break their unity.

Even if you give up on us, in my head we'll still be playing board games with our children in my side of the house, right next to your personal library. Even if your heart decides to beat for another, mine will always be on our small balcony at 3 A.M. secretly wondering when you'll wake up and give it a surprise hug. Even if you think that doubt and mistrust will always stand in our way, I'll keep daydreaming about how I'll propose. And even though you feel that you're very much alone right now, you might want to check your heart, because my hand is pressed upon it. And maybe, just maybe, if you close your eyes, you'll feel it.

And maybe, when you see the way I'm looking at you, you won't look away.

You'll smile instead.

~

"I'm in the corner, watching you kiss her
I'm right over here, why can't you see me
I'm giving it my all, but I'm not the guy you're taking home
I keep dancing on my own
I keep dancing on my own."
Callum Scott

Violet

"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society."
Aristotle

~

I wish I could say that but I can't.
I'll just tell you that life is about filling in the blanks before they fill you.

There was once this little girl who wanted to imagine a color that doesn't exist. Little did she know that she was trying to remember the color of her soul. Her grandfather had recently fallen in love with balloons. The little girl gave him her favorite balloon. It was white and she tied its grey ribbon to the left side of his wheelchair. And when she asked him what balloons reminded him of, he told her that, in a way, they represented the Holy Spirit, but her strawberry ice-cream and mysterious daydreams kept her from listening. He knew that his answer didn't register in her memory but smiled nonetheless at the sight of an idea - the idea that the Holy Spirit would later reveal herself to her through the eyes of another human soul rather than industrial helium. Little did he know that his love for balloons was merely a desperate way to hold on to that lively feeling of lightness he knew he was going to lose.

The harmony of the scene was suddenly broken when a little boy bumped into the old man's granddaughter. The small black Frisbee he had thrown to the sky and ran so hard to catch - as if it would return a divine gift - fell right next to his face as he tripped clumsily to the ground. High-quality strawberry ice-cream was slowly dripping down the girl's yellow sundress. She innocently smiled as she ran her finger through the pink coldness on her lips and softly painted a small warm home for it on the tip of the boy's nose. The little boy's face had turned whiter than the balloon. He blinked violently at the touch of her finger and then, after giving her a flying kiss and his Frisbee as an apology, he ran away so quickly just to blink again.

And as he blinks you see the boy a man, his wife beside him in her perfect yellow dress. She asks him about balloons, what color they would be in his perfect world and what he thinks they symbolize for him. He tells her they'd be white and purple and that they remind him of the kind of empty dreams people aren't supposed to hold onto. She innocently smiles and naturally proceeds to answer her own question. She says that her ideal world would have balloons in all colors, even those that don't exist. And then she stops and smiles again as she remembers that beautiful painting she loves and instantly decides that a balloon represents hope, hope against all odds. She tells him about the painting, while maintaining this heavenly drawing on her face, but not about hope because that's not how she wants them to find eachother. He blinks violently to savor her sudden, unsolicited laugh and then turns and runs as fast as he can to catch the red Frisbee that flew from her hand. And as he catches it while losing his balance, she blinks to keep him from falling - and then she blinks again.

And as she blinks, I see the girl and though she doesn't know it, she's here sleeping right next to me.
I hope you know that what's left of my heart is hope. And I hope you know this hope is you.

~

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
RWE

Faith

"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them."
Gebran Khalil Gebran

~

Heart of a child. Mind of a warrior. She's like a... a kind of fireworks that doesn't exist - a show like no other. You can't help but look up, into her eyes, and you only notice that the sky is clear after the raindrops start dripping down your chin. Then comes the prodigy, the boy who smells like childhood, the blindest and most brilliant composer of heartbeats I have ever met. He tries to cover his colorful soul with pale monochrome outfits. Little does he know that no one remembers what he wears, because the glow in his eyes blurs out everything else. So, in any case, she tells him all her weaknesses outright. And once he attempts to help her overcome them, she reveals that she was only testing him, that her only weakness is that she can never trust anyone.

Twelve years later, he writes her a letter. He tells her about his unrivaled capacity to find remarkable individuals, to observe them and marvel at every drop of awe leaping off their skin. He tells her about his friend, his best friend, how he saved his life, how he doesn't know that he saved his life because he never thanked him, that he one day will. He tells her that he loves her, that he always will. Later that year, she writes him a letter. She asks him why he hasn't written to her. She tells him that he's like a ghost, that he's always standing somewhere near, just staring at her, that she still checks that he isn't really there because her hands just need to make sure, even when she tells them not to. She also tells him that she met a guy who reminds her of him, a guy with a sunset on the back of his head.

[...]

People are only real if you want them to be. And those people never really leave. Everyone else does, like any chess piece in the game of conscious versus unconscious. But, they don't.

[...]

And love is that child knocking at your door, screaming poetry about fear and rain. And pain is this broken wrist that hid the doorknob in its veins. You find the key in the numbness. You find the key in this broken hourglass of incomplete tears, beats of a heart that's gone insane. And when you don't find the key, take your... take your cage back. I said - take your cage back. For these prison bars still spell your name. And your games no longer rhyme with rage. So blame the audience. Blame the stage. You still haven't opened the door. The echo of the child is gone. Run after him - run. He couldn't have gone too far. It's a different room. It's a different song. It's another field, another day, another heart where no rose can bloom. This smoke can travel beyond ideas of who you think you are. I don't know where you went wrong. I said - I don't know where I went wrong. I read words and eyes and I know when they're dead. So are you? Are you dead?

[...]

Arise, dear friend. Your pain is getting old. So stand up and fight. Fight for faith until it becomes you. The war has just begun. I said - the war has just begun.

~

“It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.”
Alfred Adler

Imagine

"Everything is grey, his hair, his smoke, his dreams. And now he's so devoid of color, he don't know what it means. And he's blue."

Halsey

~

All the pictures were black and white.
But she had grey eyes.

Picture your most valued object. It could be something you bought or found, or perhaps it was a gift from someone. Okay. Now think about the event that has hurt you the most. It could be something you did or, perhaps, something that was done to you, or maybe, to someone who is more you than you, more important to you than you. Now let's call the picture 'O' for the object that is now in your hand - in the realm of fiction - and we'll call the sound 'H' for the hell it made or still makes you feel - in the realm of 'reality'.

But now, we need to play a game. We shall call it Oh! The Dramatic Game. You need to say H out loud while imagining that you're throwing O in the ocean. Yes, you need to say it out loud - the thing that hurts you the most. If there are multiple objects and hells, you need to picture all the O's drowning and say all the H's out loud. Also, since you probably haven't done the H part yet, it has to be said in a musical way, as if Hell were a song.

So say it now, out loud, over and over, until your most prized possession sinks in the water.

If you haven't said it yet, please stop reading. Only carry on if you did.

Congratulations on reaching the next level. I hope you didn't cheat.

You must now think about your ultimate purpose, the reason you're here, the dream you were born to achieve. Read on only if you know what that is. And, now, picture the person you love the most. It doesn't matter whether their body is dead or alive. They just need to be smiling in your head. We shall call this game DL: The Spiritual Game. In case you're wondering, D is for Divine and L is for Love. And there is only one rule in DL, and it is that your heart makes all the rules. So imagine whatever comes to mind when you think about your truest dream. And then say whatever you want to say now, out loud, to the person you love the most.

In brief, at the end of the game, before you die, you need to find the relationship between O and D and it has to be right dosage for the sake of your potential equilibrium. Meanwhile, you should also tell L about H, if you haven't yet, even if you're not sure they're listening.

Beyond delusion, in the world of souls and mirrors, silently frozen in pictures, the eye can only see two colors: Right and Wrong.
So look closely. What color are your eyes?
No.
Look again.

What do you see?

~

"You're ripped at every edge but you're a masterpiece."
Halsey

Cocaine

“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”
Jean Cocteau

~

It's okay. Everything's gonna be okay in the end. That's not true. Stop lying. Everything's getting worse and you know it. Enough with this 'there is a light and it never goes out' crap. This world is rotten and you know it. You know it because you can see it. You can see the pain on their faces, there where each time, a part of you dies.

It's not okay. It's cold. How terribly lonely it must feel to see all through their eyes while no one can scratch your eyes' surface. I know you're just pretending not to be dead on the inside. I know that, in my head, that white line twists into the first letter of your name because I can smell your perfume right before the broken snow invades my bloodstream. And it's cold because I know I can't hug you anymore.

I know you erase yourself and that's why you can feel what they feel. I know you can't even dare to face yourself. I know you can't even bear the sight of your own reflection. You don't have the heart to stand the hurt that's carved itself on your soul, that black stuff you think you can hide in the shadows. But you know what? I'm gonna tell you the truth, the secret of life. So listen.

The truth is that there are three kinds of people on this planet. First are the heartbroken who want to break everything and everyone else because they worship their own brokenness. Second are the heartbroken who keep looking everywhere just to avoid looking at the bloodied shards at their feet. And third are the heartbroken who have realized that all the little bits have mixed, that a renewed heart is a mosaic of the heart-bits we fall in love with.

But enough with theories and myths. Tell me why you're burned out. Tell me how you've strayed so far from home. Tell me how heroes become villains. Tell me how heroes become villains. Tell me how heroes become villains. I'm sorry. I really am. I'm sorry that we're all addicts, that we depend upon chemical explosions in our kingdom to forget that everyone's either dead or gone. Maybe that's why we keep trying to control other people - because no matter what they do, in our heads, they remain motionless objects we need to move. Maybe we know deep down, that no matter what we do, we're motionless objects too. And we're never gonna change. Now would you fucking look around? Look around. Is anyone seeing what I'm seeing? It's that same lie everyday. It's the same delusion every fucking day and the drugs don't fucking work. We're just pretending that they do. So take that mask off your face, will you?

Right now, I don't think you can find it. So I won't ask. I know you're lonely. It's okay. I know you feel more like a stranger here with every passing day. I know that you feel dead inside. I know that you're me and that I am not you. This storm is death. And I'm sorry I'm not good enough.

But you know what? I'm gonna tell you the real truth, the secret to life, the only drug you truly need. So listen. Listen close.

Hope.

Everything's gonna be okay. I can't promise you that. I can only hope for it. And I hope that I'm not lying.

~

"Memories consume
Like opening the wounds

I'm picking me apart again."

Linkin Park