Split

“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. ” 
Ralph Waldo Emerson

~

Lonely wanderers unite in separation, falling in raindrops through your windshield. And as the beautifully broken breaths of rain find gentle rest on your tender skin, I pull you in closer, and I hug you tighter. And, for a split second, all the desperate seekers of the world find home in our embrace.

The road to love is paved with mystery. The colors on the street depend on the clarity of your heart. The surrounding buildings are adorned with perfect pain and breathtaking joy. And we could be walking there now, hand in hand, carrying each other's hearts wherever they want to go.

Some say that everything here has an expiry date. Others believe that some things last as long as eternity.

Stories have been told and re-told. Words have been designed and composed, recycled and sold. And, today, I find myself wanting to write out thoughts and feelings in secondhand wording though I have no story to tell. I thus find myself filling the void with empty metaphors and darkened smoke. But that's okay.

Time flows faster, racing the tides of motion, blazing through space to finish off this bond and the one after. We breathe it in thinking that we have it contained when, in reality, its bullets are already out through our holey skin, setting the scene for our unholy grave.

But there is music in this world, music worth fighting for. It is the kind of music that silently cuts you deep so its tear-perfumed light can pervade the abyss beneath your heart. The music reminds us that there are souls worth the trouble, and that their smiles are infinitely more valuable than our pain-born hatred.

Yet I am tired and out of soul. And every road undertaken holds beside it a thousand roads untraveled and a wealth of unopened neural pathways.  I am tired and out of soul. And there is no one here because the door is locked with a key I lost long, long ago.

Still, I remind myself that change is inevitable, that it is necessary. And like a flock of birds alters its formation, so too must the stars we have enclosed within.

By the fields, near the lake, I once whispered all of my secrets to everyone around me. But I was alone because no one was there. I remember that I told them about the dark side of red, that part they always left unread. And I told them about the violet shade of blue, and how pain always starts in you. I spat out the driest words of dread, with blood clots hanging by a thread. And now I give that thread to you today so that you pull out this wretched heart of clay.

Hidden demons unite in separation, falling in fire-drops onto our skin. And as the beautifully broken ocean lays us to rest, you pull me in closer, and you hug me tighter. And, for a split second, I almost believe that you're here.

~

“Here too it’s masquerade, I find: 
As everywhere, the dance of mind.
I grasped a lovely masked procession,
And caught things from a horror show…
I’d gladly settle for a false impression,
If it would last a little longer, though.” 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Star

"And I just wanted you to know."

My Chemical Romance

~

An eternal feeling unhesitatingly and continuously screams in the depth of your dark abyss. Echoes bounce off the walls, fueled by a resentment toward the conditions of time and space. It says that it is unconditionally timeless, boundless yet wonders, under its breath, for how long it's been stuck in this hole. 

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others are tender shattering dew. 

In the midst of noise, words crawl on a sidewalk. It must be really loud in your head, mockingly whispered the abyss. Even your words know there's no way out of here. Is our truth cold enough to puncture that heavy soul you so terribly wish to abandon? Paint the pain upon the brow, disillusioned by delusions, and punch the rain into your eyes, for this is but the world of lies. Like an inherently divided coin, sailing through the cobblestone, I wonder which side fortune will pretend-bury today, as its brother washes away under this dusty broken loan. Alas! Know that hell is not bounded by the red corners of your eyes. And so you must look further and beyond that gaze you distance yourself from - for the deeper you dwell, the closer your home to hell. 

We're in this together, said Heart to Horizon. 

Light music ensued. 

We're in this together, said Mind to Pattern. 

Mute lights fired through. 

Why is no one dancing? The soul wondered. 

I am, echoed Silence. 

But no one heard it. 

So listen. Listen to the shadow dancing in the rain, singing the praises of creation. Listen to your story and everyone else's, for a single thread can only resonate within its web. Listen to the lines hiding in their retinas, the ones their mirrors forget on the other side. Listen, second-most of all, to your silence. 

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others just never make it through.

When time loses meaning, and you feel that you don't belong in this body, or at least that this planet is not your home, it makes you wonder if it's simply all a dream. Yet you can't help but try to make sense of the contents of your existence. Thus as I attempt to hug you, our feet planted at the center of the bottomless rift of our fractured identity, I find that you are as opaque and immaterial as I am, that this open-ended monologue is a meaningless echo that bounced off all the voices in my head.

I believe the main difference between the suffering individual and the individual whose brilliance is widely recognized is identical to the difference between difference and similarity, because empty space is empty, and because Divine Perspective rules them all.

Some nights are broken, dead and true. And the stars align with your suffering because they want you to be you. 

What about me?

What happens to me when the music is gone? 

How bright will the hour of my star shine when I pass?

How short is the breath to failure? And how deep is the road to contentment?

What about you?

What do you see in the horizon?

And how does silence make you feel?

How do you fill the many blanks between these lines?

And which of the seven versions of you is blinking right now?

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others bless the divine in you.

~

"One who doesn't know how to dance, says the floor is crooked."

Nepali Proverb

Cut

“In the cloud, reflections mirror reflections, cutting out the object and leaving only infinite emptiness.” 
Joseph MacKinnon

~

My hand was in yours. Your hand was in mine. And there was a moment where I didn't know which was which. Then, the moment was gone, and another one came. It was the moment of separation, slowly tearing the pages of the book we wrote in our minds, pages about the dreams that we carried in our hands, interlocked. Yet, right before that second moment ended, time froze. Time froze with the tips of our fingers barely touching and I knew that a blink later I'd be falling off your side of the edge like drawings of sands made of demons while you'd be falling, over and over, in water-drops, off mine, like an imagined suicide scene on playback.

But time froze because it knew we were timeless. And it just sat there on a dusty chair that had 'Faith' carved on its back, watching the motionless picture of Fear's sword of Doubt pointed at Love's heart of Hope.

Cut.

~

You're not supposed to be in the audience. You're not supposed to be in the audience. You're not supposed to be in the audience, watching an ego disguised as reason taking up the role of the lead actor. You should know that this podium is not only set for a grand masquerade where the truth doesn't matter. It's set for anyone who has something genuine to say. And everything you see on stage is but a staged symbol, a moderately hidden clue for what's going on behind the scenes. So get up and come inside for it is in the dark curves of your mind that you find the scriptwriters. And when you do, it will neither feel nor smell good back there because all your lies, fears and insecurities dwell in the ego's lair, fueling your quest for a nonexistent power. Maybe, just maybe, one day you'll find it in you to write your own script, your own lines instead of lying yourself to sleep.

~

And so we spend the time that wastes us and write stories that erase us. Then time just vanishes because the shame leaves no place for any other concept but disgust. And they stare blankly at the conscience that died with its mouth open and its eyes gouged, screaming two simple words for the child that ran away into the horizon, Come Back.

~

Once, in a nonexistent time and twice, in a place of delusion, a child ran into his reflection in the mirror and broke it. Both were running to find themselves but what they found was something else. The boy in the mirror found a broken hourglass of sand and water, drowned in mud. And the boy with blood on his face found an open locket with an empty picture frame and a clock that's always stuck at dawn. Each paced around in his room in recurrent patterns of confusion between the definition of a curse and the 'nondefinition' of a curse. And as they walked through life, the pieces of glass wrote, with blood and footprints, tainted puzzled words and painted worded puzzles. They met again, and again, in different colors and shapes, on the surface of other people's eyes. And many mirrors were broken twice, and twice, again.

~

Whether you break mirrors because you can't see yourself in them or polish them because they withhold the truest lies you've ever written, know that you are neither of the elements of the inner fight, nor are you the sum of the broken mirrors.

You're that person still sitting in the audience, alone.

~

“Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.” 
Konstantin Stanislavski

Remedy

"And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death."
Pink Floyd

~

Time flows along these lines as they progressively grow sickened by my words. Time glides through the stream of your heartbeats, dodging its micro-seismic echoes and their heavenly cosmic beat. And time drowns beneath the line pulling down with it all the colors of the sunset. And as time fades into the calm and quiet watery waves of the mind, I lose sight of the infinite scene.

Time is buried along with all these colorful thoughts and yet there you are. There you are, the dream-girl who separates sky and sea, day and night, heart from body and mind from reality. And there they are, the edges outside which everything is blurred, the eyes that silence the world. And there it is, the smile that redefines both my heart and horizon, and every single word in between.

I, both fortunately and unfortunately, do not believe in time. But that doesn't matter because, either way, these misarranged words are mere ashes of an aching mind decorated with the metaphorical dust of a fraudulent self-destructive attempt at a heart. And it doesn't matter because this wind around me does not know the difference between the ash that once faked meaning in a blazing heart and the dust that disfigured pain, killed it, made a statue of it and then built a maze of walls around the statue only to realize that it was all in vain because metaphors bear no remedy for the heart.

So pretend. Pretend that you're walking in the slowest motion while all that's around you is restlessly running in the opposite direction. Pretend that your mind is hovering, exploring minds and structures, systems and thoughts, the origin beneath and beyond, and the almost indiscernible idea that seems to make all the difference. Pretend that your heartbeats are floating like bubbles, rushing toward that bed-ridden sunset that never really happened because it knows that the horizon is more empty than the phantom concept of society and even more so compared to this vacant chest of disappearing ink which believes in neither concepts nor horizons. Pretend all you want, really. Meanwhile, I'll pretend that you're only running for cover, that your mind is in fight mode because it's undecided on whether your heart is in that flight mode with underdeveloped legs, or in this one, with dormant wings.

Through and through, I've always walked alone. Surely, I've met individuals that were beyond grace and wonder, though they sadly couldn't see it. Yet though we walked side by side in the blessed moments at which our roads converged, I somehow always walked alone, and deep inside, they did too. But, there were other moments where I looked behind my shoulder with that slight turn of the head, and you were always there, the heavenly jewel that keeps the volcano from erupting. Through and through, I've always walked alone, but you were there too.

In any case, the music plays on. The melody fades inward into me, and outward into another tune as the rhythm within fluctuates in a manner mystically proportional to the two oscillating heartstrings I have left...

But regardless, whether your aspired home is on the mountains of power or in the stars of love, whether you seek strength and value to hide your insecurities or a make-believe romantic fairytale to feel worthy of love, whether you fall off the edge of your pride or burn out and think yourself into a state of stardust, whether all you do is reducible to the love of power or divisible into a series of hopeless shots in a dark sky that's always missing the power of love, whether you know that your heart and mind are withering and the people you love are dying in their own special ways or whether you drown those dreadful waves in numerous kinds of addictions, time is running out. Time is running out.

Time flows along my words as they progressively grow sickened by these lines. The main upside is that words and times are changing which probably means that my worn-out roadmap of being and becoming has redrawn its lines.

It's time to go.

Come what may.

~

"The time is gone, the song is over, thought I had something more to say."

Pink Floyd



Dream

"So go on, Love, find a new direction."

Mayday Parade

                             ~

I keep having this recurrent impression that all this is a collection of interwoven dreams. And it seems to me that every person I know really has no idea what's going on; they don't fully understand the story beneath the dream. Meanwhile, I sit here watching them, surrounded by mirror-like holograms, gateways through which I convince myself that I understand their dreams. Now, knowing that we're all the same in some sense, I wonder what kind of dream I'm living in, and what kind of life I dream of. I do, however, know that if I live enough to become really old, I'll have plenty of stories to tell about all these mirrors around me, and like most or perhaps all people, I will try to subtly mention how I played a nice small role in the lives of the people I loved; or maybe I'll keep that part to myself to be able to sleep at night.

Perhaps the motive behind these words is to tell myself that I'm a mirror too, that I'm not invisible and insignificant, that I'm neither broken glass nor darkened dust breathing through the projections.

Either way, for now, I sit and watch, stuck between the void and the light, hoping that the heroes around me will rise above their struggles, and that those I no longer have the chance to see find love and faith and, one day, themselves.

All these wishes upon a dream, they vanish in the blankness of my thoughts, slightly beyond the numbness of my nerves. They dissolve at the edge of the mirrors before they reach my personal space - the one I refer to as a castle when I want to compensate for my lack of confidence and as a fortress when I want to hide my trust issues.

All these wishes upon a dream and, still, last night, she asked me to make a wish. And she had no idea what I wished for but for some reason it made her smile that I breathed death into the candle, probably because she sees life in the little things.

All in all, it was a beautiful day with wonderful people. If there were a detached narrator, he would probably focus on the view from the rooftop. But for me, the real moment was in a subway that didn't know our names around strangers who probably thought expensive brands could make their names and bodies more valuable. The real moment was timeless, and independent of space, and it knocked at the door of my fortress.

In all honesty, it took me a while to understand that the world I live in is mostly about decisions, sometimes about actions and rarely about words, that when you read someone else's words, you only understand what you wish to understand, that all decisions are real actions yet some actions are a waste of time, that all actions are meaningful words but some words are a waste of breath. And regardless of what I say now, you probably have no idea what I really mean because whoever you are, you're just like me, stuck in a dream that you don't understand. Yours is perhaps in a painting that you can't draw yet while mine is in a book written in an ancient language that I don't understand.

In any case, whatever you choose to name your painting, be sure to figure out the name of the artist(s) first.

All those wishes upon a dream and I sit and watch them float around me. I slowly watch them die just as slowly as I realize that I don't deserve them.

Sometimes, the dream deserves a better dreamer. Sometimes, dreamers die because their dreams become nightmares. Sometimes, the dreamer and the dream don't know that they're the same person. Sometimes, they just want a good night's sleep and sometimes they just need to wake up. And sometimes, time kills them both with a single shot to the heart. But sometimes, in a flashing moment, you understand that your dream is a mirror, and you wish for it to be unbreakable. And that is how a dream triumphs over time and destroys it in a single, eternal moment of love, most real, most true.

Once upon a dream, I folded the night and my heart into the wings of a paperplane. 

Once upon a moment, the plane flew and disappeared in your eyes.

And one day, the morning sunlight will seep through the windows and fall upon the covers covered with our scent. And my eyes will be open and yours will be closed. And the paperplane will reappear - at least in my imagination - and the wings of night and heart will unfold. And that's when I'll tell you the story behind the wishes upon the dream.

I'd start at the beginning, where most things usually end:

"Once upon a time, I met this girl [...]"

And once I say that, you'll smile because you want me to know that you're only pretending to be asleep.

Then I'll wake up.

In the symphony of silence, we remember moments.

Yet, in the melodies of noise, time makes us forget.

                              ~

"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

Albus Dumbledore

Frisson

“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” 
Orson Scott Card

~

Silent threads of virtual ink stream in waves of darkened light toward bright eyes. And while the mind seeks to project a meaningful melody onto multifaceted words, I gaze into the friendly night in my room with my eyes open because I know that if I close them, I will see you.

I've long developed the mechanism of transforming intense feelings into concepts. And it usually resembles a giant water-wave fearlessly rushing toward me, only to find itself turned into dust, polishing the multiple sandcastles around my fortress. And yet, there you were, moving with profound grace, unknowingly leaving me out of breath every time you smiled or laughed. The supposedly invincible kingdom of thought has since become as lost and drowned as Atlantis and I honestly don't care because I just want to see you again.

In any case, it was dark and slightly chilly and I was settled on the grass trying to ignore the beautiful moon even though it was clearly playing hide-and-seek with me, trying to make me win, though it knows that I know that it knows how clouds become brighter when it hides behind them. Regardless, the scene was one of wonderful harmony as a mostly soft wind, soul-gazing stars, ancient trees and nostalgic music in my earphones all waited for you to providentially sit next to me and talk. Just talk. But you didn't.

So tell me, do you even know that you are Magic? Do you know that I can't think of metaphors when I picture you in my head because every element in my imagination momentarily disappears? Do you know that I just laughed at myself because I remembered how I childishly smiled when I saw you running in the rain? And now it's worse because I'm not sure whether the scene qualifies as 'heavenly' or 'divine' or simply both.

There are infinite questions and timeless answers, multiple worlds and recurrent dreams, half-written novels and wands at the ready. And then there are the stories that converge as our fingers interlace. And right then and there would come the ending and the ending would never end, because all infinity would be starstruck, and time would henceforth be suspended once the worlds and dreams dormant within my chest get to feel the rhythm of your heart.

And these words that run through me ceaselessly fail but that's okay because images of you are there too and they're interminably beautiful.

Now, moments of magic have always eluded me in a similar manner to how I transcended those that were tragic. And for most of my eventful life, I felt stuck, not knowing what to say or what to feel, how to go or how to heal. Yet, the irrational has happened and I somehow sensed a wind of unknown nature storming into my indifferent eyes.

A fire inside me has awakened.

A fire inside me has awakened and all I can think about is how it would feel to fall asleep around a campfire with you by my side.

~

“When people of similar frequencies come together, output is not a simple sum of individual work, but exponential. In science we term this phenomenon as resonance. Output at this stage is beyond any logical limit.” 
Ravindra Shukla