The Philosophy of Cliches

And you don’t even know about them.

Echoing conversations

replaying in my head.

One-sided stories… two-sided letters,

unsent.

It’s better this way.

It’s so much easier to blame you for hurting me,

Than to let you know you still can…

of letting feelings slip by,

never to mean anything.

But the more important it is

—the more I try to perfectly capture these emotions—

the more restricting this keyboard seems.

Why can I never capture anything that really matters?

Why does everything seem to lose its meaning anyway,

words attached to nothing?

They come and go like lost lines of sand washed away as the tide brushes through,

As though it will stay, each time, as it fades.

Time has never meant so little to me. Deadlines, work shifts, sunrise, alarms, the hour when construction starts outside my window. A new day, and no new feelings with it. Time used to meander with me… I convinced myself it didn’t.

So I can keep them, so I can store them in my chest away from the weathers and wind of all those feelings

like giving up,

Give me your dreams so I can give them back to you, any time you need them. Your whimsy has a safe home within me, it will never again be fleeting

If when you look in my eyes they don’t reflect the brightest parts of you then I don’t want them.

It is a sympathy I cant afford.

To comfort you through solace caused by the uncoiling of this cord.

How far can we stretch apart?

What happens when it cuts?

Is it only that which would set us free from each other’s clutch?

Don’t tell me that you’re lonely.

I can’t save you from what I caused.

I know I’m not the only person who’s ever felt like this, and yet somehow, I’m so convinced that I am. I can’t possibly imagine that everyone out there who’s ever found love has been filled with and shattered by these depths. If so, how have they kept it hidden? How is it not worn on every face? How is it not in the cracks of every smile? How does it not consume us? Because I can’t be convinced that anything out there matters more than this. Than the pulsing overflow from the centre of my chest and the electric vibration in the currents of my veins and the retracting ache in the tendons of my bones when he gets farther away… I can’t be convinced that we’ve all felt this. That invisibly love torments and flourishes and transmutes between us, and that we let it go. Because how come no one has warned me not to?

Without movement, without fuel, without fire...

This mess around me feels like mine, my heart is lost in it somewhere.

This hollowness is safe but it’s empty.

Do I fear heartache more than this?

Can I trade my wisdom for wishful thinking? Wispy nights and yearning whispers, liveliness fluttering like lost songs resurfacing from the depths of our minds, together.

Our hearts know the beat and our eyes know each other, but in this we are lost. Somewhere else forever,

I waste so many pounding heartbeats wondering how I can escape this, as though I’m not the one who keeps me here. As though I am not the one silencing myself. What’s the point of saying words that won’t be listened to? What’s the point of paving dead ends when they’ll never lead to you?...

But where else can I go?

How do I cut the ties and scrape you out of my insides until your words don’t make me feel warm anymore? Until your pointless rays of sunshine stop miraging a smile on my face? That smile is all you care about; some sign of hope, that maybe I’m not too far gone to be saved by empty promises again. That maybe you can come back, and all of me will still be in one piece, offering itself to you.