Gaga

Was it poison or a cure?

When my heart felt empty and hollow and these rhythms and beats echoed inside it

Was it a poison or a cure?

When I reflected only what echoed inside me

Ever since it first sunk into me at 11PM on a random Wednesday evening

Everything inside me disappeared and even after, it wasn’t momentary

Sinking into my depth like it belonged

I knew it was wrong when it emptied everything from inside of me

Like the wheel of time, I found myself incapable of pausing

Left to stare at the carnage spread around me in a slow spiral

The line between spirituality and desire completely blurred up until now

I stand completely alone in the bold line between with my face pressed against the ground

What have I done?

Have I sinned against myself?

Has my own hand betrayed me?

This space between gets lonelier and colder the longer I stay in it

I have no strength left in my hollow heart to lift myself up

A tired whisper leaves me, quietly asking for help

I know I don’t deserve it, but please save me

Save me from myself once again, I have wronged myself once again

And it’s in this space between where all my defences lay bare

It seems it’s the only place I can’t pretend

My heart deflated, my soul tired, all of me is vulnerable and raw

Yet there is no time to despair, and I have nothing to uphold my usual pretence

It’s in this space between I am truly me

The most earnest version of me

The most desperate and beautiful version

Was it love when you randomly stopped replying?

Was it love when you deleted your account without a word to me?

Was it love when you knew I didn’t want this type of relationship but you couldn’t not talk to me?

Was it love?

I keep asking myself if you meant anything you said

If there was truth in any one of your poems I read

Your life changed before I even finished blinking my eyes

A part of me can’t bare to blame you for the chaos I felt inside my mind

But there is a part of me that questions you

Curiosity that is never satisfied until it hears the truth

And maybe this curiosity will some day kill me

But it’s kept me alive and on my feet this long, so who am I to deny it?

Did you love me or did you love the idea you had of me?

Was the reason you changed because you were disappointed by my reality?

It wasn’t love when you left me without a word

But I guess the reasons you might have, no matter how valid, will never be heard

I sometimes think of the patience of nature

How barren land can see their fruits once more

Every few months when the earth has rotated on its axis just enough again

How it can rain today and it’d mean nothing but nourishment for the soil

And how it could rain for several days and months on end

And flowers that turn into fruit could once again bloom

How a carcass lie beneath the earth’s surface for decades if not millennia

Before morphing into the finest crude oil, greasing the gears of our modern world

How much time and pressure is required before a diamond is formed

Because nature is not kind but it is patient

Nature is patient in a way my father is not

I wonder if he thinks about his unfairness from time to time

The several decades worth of suffering we endured before he turned a new leaf

Is it then fair to expect those around you to change just because you have?

Is it fair to not even understand why they have certain reactions to you still?

Several decades worth of suffering will do that to a soul

It causes your blood to pause and your skin to flinch

It’s learned experience that gets soaked into your bones

This murky water will need more than one overwhelming rinse to convince the soul underneath of your change

Yet, unlike nature, you are not patient

You are kind in your own way, but you are not a patient man

I constantly feel rushed to feel a certain way, to think a certain way to appease you

But my heart fights me with each breathe I take because of how unnatural it feels

Intention does not negate impact

You’re stained in good intention

But I’m coloured in the impact of decades worth of learned experiences from you

How easily would you like me to forget?

How I had to tiptoe around you in hopes you wouldn’t find a reason to scream in my face?

How you threw me to the ground and put your dirty boot in my face before twisting it like you were putting out a cigarette?

How my mother warned me not to talk back because she was afraid you’d strike me in the face

Just like you did while I prayed and she had to tell me to stop and clean my bloodied nose because I couldn’t pray with blood on me…

This scratches only the surface of how desperately I learned to loath you

Decades of watching you abuse your rights as a father without being held to account

Not even five years of you changing for the better and you are preaching about how I should change

How I should be kinder to you the way I am with my best friend

My best friend had never made me bleed

He has never made me cry myself to sleep wondering, ‘maybe if I ended it all he would start caring about me’

That maybe if he beat me hard enough I’d become one with this earth and he’d finally have to face himself

My best friend never blackmailed or manipulated me

He loved me gently, kindly, and overwhelmingly

Father, you want to tastes the fruits of a tree you haven’t nurtured

You want the result while you haven’t laboured enough for it

You want the final product without spending on it

You want things from me that you haven’t yet lived to deserve

So sometimes I think of the patience of nature

Because even while it could be cruel, it was always painstakingly aware of the truth

I sometimes wish you possessed the patience of nature

I loved you with a love that made my heart coil tight

That made my ears fill and my vision slight

That made my palms clammy and grew stars behind my eyes

A love that could birth a thousand nations and then some

My love for you took root in the soil of my lungs

Where each breathe served only as nourishment

Where each exhale carried spores of your scent

So that every soul that encountered mine needed to encounter yours

Each season of you bore different flowers

But this magnificent evermore has become naked, the land barren

Nothing exists except this withering tree too fragile to desert

Glaciers have started to coil around the roots while the trunk has become dry

I can’t understand which season we have arrived in

All I know is this withered evermore I’ve learned to observe

The one glaring at me from afar

The naked, withered, and deserted evermore I used to sit under

Has now become just another page in my journal I look at from time to time

Captured thoughts and feelings dyed in dark ink

Scribbled down in haste, writing as fast as I could think

Afraid that time would pass and we’d soon forget who we used to be

So I hold this journal a little closer

The one I still look at from time to time

Without thought or constant desire

But with an old soul that has grown frail and tired

But I remember how colourful this evermore used to be

I remember its magnificence

One that encompassed all

One that overwhelmed everything until all I could see was that colourful evermore

All I could smell were the spores of our love

Mixing together until we became one

Your attention used to overwhelm me at one point. I felt so wanted. I felt like you couldn’t get enough of me. You texted me so much I became worried that you’d get in trouble at work. You’d always laugh it off and say you’d rather be talking to me. Or that you were supposed to be working but instead you kept writing me little notes.

Now… you don’t even have time to respond to a short message. You say you’ll listen to the song I sent you when you got home and then never actually do it. You’re not interested. Maybe that’s because you realised that you’re not all that attracted to the shape of my body.

Ever since you found my online accounts you have been acting a little distant. Otherwise, what is the reason for the change in your behaviour when it comes to me?

I can’t lose you a second time. We should have stayed dead the first time. I abhor the way I feel. I blame you for it.