Miles Away.

I want you and you are not here. I pause
in this garden, breathing the colour thought is
before language into still air. Even your name
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again
and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight
I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer
than the words I have you say you said before.

Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me
with a look, standing here whilst cool late light
dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,
but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,
inventing love, until the calls of nightjars
interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,
into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.

 - Carol Ann Duffy

There are times when words just remain as they are.

love is a deep and a dark and a lonely

love is a deep and a dark and a lonely
and you take it deep take it dark
and take it with a lonely winding
and when the winding gets too lonely
then may come the windflowers
and the breath of wind over many flowers
winding its way out of many lonely flowers
waiting in rainleaf whispers
waiting in dry stalks of noon
wanting in a music of windbreaths
so you can take love as it comes keening
as it comes with a voice and a face
and you make a talk of it
talking to yourself a talk worth keeping
and you put it away for a keen keeping
and you find it to be a hoarding
and you give it away and yet it stays hoarded

like a book read over and over again
like one book being a long row of books
like leaves of windflowers bending low
and bending to be never broken

- Carl Sandburg

I’ve always been an emotion-driven person rather than a thought-driven one. Even as a kid, I had been acutely aware of the logic and consequences of my choices, but would still have trouble controlling my seemingly inherent impulsiveness. Rational thought may guide my insight and give me abit of courage, but ultimately, my emotions hold the reins. I like to imagine reason as the strict driving instructor shouting instructions in the passenger seat, and my emotions as the clueless, bespectacled driver listening to his Walkman on full blast swerving in and out of traffic. (It doesn't really matter I suppose, just that lately I feel as if the driving instructor has given up.)

Being in a relationship is also somewhat about coming to terms with my own romantic projections. I will admit, that there is still a teenage girl inside me somewhere who wants things to be as perfect as I had once imagined they would be. It’s not candlelight dinners, or declarations of everlasting love that I have trouble letting go off, but coming to terms with the mere notion that there will be times when we will fail each other’s expectations.

In Psych, we learnt about a social identity and an essential self. The essential self is your true self. It alone know what you truly desire and what you need to thrive, what you dream of when you write or paint, the struggles you take on when you grow. The social identity, on the other hand, is the mask you piece together through interactions with others. And usually we do it subconsciously, to be accepted and loved and be conventionally successful. The problem is, for me at least, I have trouble identifying where the mask ends and the real person begins. Part of my reality has been defined by the sound of silence echoing in the conversations I have with others. Talking has never been my forte, even with close friends and family. My head might be spinning with thoughts and ideas, but I’ve never been truly comfortable sharing them (partly because those thoughts seem quite silly and irrelevant anyway). I don't know why this matters either. Maybe because living in my own head has been getting too suffocating these days.

Writing in this lonely little blog has mostly been because I needed an outlet for my own emotional and mental reasons. I try to be sparing in the details, but most times, even through the fog I purposely create, I crave to be understood. I’ve always felt it’s something profoundly human to try so desperately to be understood and loved. And it’s not as if I don’t have a sweet boyfriend and a few close friends to share my life with. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.

Things will get better soon.