Forever January

“Take me home,” she whispered. “Please, please — take me home!” Her fingers dug into the bosom of the Earth as she pressed her face into the grass. “I’m not meant to be here, at this place. I’m too broken, too disarrayed. Please take me home, put me back where I came from, back in my sidereal world. This hurts.”

Crickets chirped into the night, stars glimmering in the black sky.

“I just want to go home. I’ve never been so broken and alone as I am right now …” Her voice trailed off into the wind. “Please, just take me back home …“

“There once were fireflies here,” she whispered quietly into the night, “in the summer. And the winter heavens were so filled with stars you felt surely the sky couldn’t hold another one, lest they all come tumbling down to the earth. And the springs were so full of butterflies, dancing from petal to petal.”

But now we’ve passed into the veil of darkness. We make Time twist our world into a macabre visage. Gone are the days of the firefly, of diamonds in the winter sky.

“And I do wonder,” she said, “if I will live to know of the last polar bear to sink into the sea, drowning in the Arctic waters, if I will gaze upon the sunset of this civilisation. I wonder, indeed …”

Lying in bed, I draw imaginary spiderwebs across the expanse of the ceiling and walls. Light glimmers through the windows as you move beside me in your sleep. I wonder quietly in the back of my mind how many more times in our life we’ll do this — spending our free moments together to keep the loneliness at bay — and how long will our strange, platonic relationship go on.

Sometimes I miss you, though I’ll never say it to your face. You say you’re leaving, moving away. I nod and turn my head.

I hope you find happiness out there — I wish you the best. I hope the unease in your heart settles, that your demons are burned away.

I keep my scepticisms to myself. They have no place here, right now, marring the end of our days together.

I force a smile as I sit up, greeting the morning with a private aubade in my mind.

An ending. I love and loathe endings, cherish and hate. I covet the dénouement, for in those last moments there exists an endless chain of unspoken possibilities — a renewal, a birth, a new glimmer of hope. And we as human beings cannot help but to race towards the light. It’s an ending in and of itself — but at the end, the light continues on forever. As human beings, we cannot help but to dream that we continue on with it.

Once upon a time, we were in the dark. So it began. And we found light, we raced with it, danced with it, lived in it. But as it began, so it ends.

In the dark.

The entries regarding my breast reduction have been moved to their own site.

You can locate them here.

but now we must pack up every piece
of the life we used to love
just to keep ourselves
at least enough to carry on …

- Neutral Milk Hotel, “Holland 1945″

I find there’s an excitement brewing deep down as I quietly peek through the cracks at it with a childish curiosity, quietly contemplating to myself what it could all mean. The days start sliding by so fast with the force of an avalanche, racing to that point in time where the line takes a sharp turn off into another horizon.

And I must not — I cannot — hold on to the past, even though those days are now wrapped in a hazy, warm blanket of nostalgia. They’ve created yearnings, pinings, wishful thinkings for what once was. Regret is in the desire for change, the need for solace, the memorisation of the thousand “what-ifs” that plague your dreams when you sleep. And remorse? Regret that bored a hole through the heart, manifested into the soul.

How can it be that these things live in me? The girl who lived with no regrets, now in the heaving waves of a remorseful sea.

And so it now goes that once again there is an ocean between us. You have your island and I have mine. We’re simply drifting into the sunset, not knowing where we go.

But I will remember this partially as the summer where I had one magnificent day with you, and even if it comes that this was our only day together for the rest of our lives, I’ll cherish it always.

And still I just can’t help but feel it wasn’t enough …

Nothing ever is.

Sometimes you say things that send my mind whirring down a path of endless possibilities, and it takes much willpower to say nothing of it. The small voice of reason in my head tells me to take this slowly, breathe, don’t get ahead of myself.

Because you know better than anyone, Rowan, just how easily things don’t work the way you plan.

And so I do. And yet … And yet …

I still can’t help but dream.