live on

It’s taken me almost my entire lifetime to figure out that time doesn’t heal you. You heal yourself. Time is just a made-up concept. You work on yourself. Sometimes it takes you 10 years to heal but it feels like 60. Sometimes it takes you a week to heal but it feels like a year. Sometimes you take a deep breath as you realise that what you thought had healed is now an open wound again, but you’re ready to stitch it up. I think it’s rather dumb when people say “time heals everything”. I’m still going to be thinking about this loss 10 years down the line. Time does’t do shit. What matters is tomorrow I’m going to take a day off and watch old horror movies with my best friend and won’t let this loss hold me back. Tomorrow, I’ll heal myself.

Your first love was the beach because it was at the beach where you saw your parents fall in love all over again every second Saturday as they walked on the sand and held hands with their fingers intertwined and you watched them from a distance as the water hit the shore and your sand castle crumped but you couldn’t care less. You fell out of love with the beach the day your father forgot about your monthly trip to the sea because he had learned to love the blue waves that crashed in the eyes of another woman. Your second love was the rain because as the cold water hit your body in the open, you felt a little more connected to yourself and a little less connected to everything around you. You fell out of love with rain the day you were stuck in traffic at 7pm because the rain was pouring and your grandmother had to live her last breath without you. Your third love was a brown haired boy who pushed back your hair and kissed your hands and made you feel a little less miserable about yourself as he smiled in your direction and intertwined his fingers with yours much like your father with your mother. You fell out of love with him ( or so you told yourself ) the day he said his shoulders couldn’t bare the weight of your fragility anymore. Your fourth love was your sadness because you had assumed that since it had been with you through out, it would continue to stay. You fell out of love with your sadness the day your mother forced a smile and wiped off the tears stains on your cheeks and told you that things might take their own sweet time to get back into place, but they will. Your fifth love is the one thing you should have learned to love long ago. Your fifth love is yourself.

Your first love was the beach because it was at the beach where you saw your parents fall in love all over again every second Saturday as they walked on the sand and held hands with their fingers intertwined and you watched them from a distance as the water hit the shore and your sand castle crumped but you couldn’t care less. You fell out of love with the beach the day your father forgot about your monthly trip to the sea because he had learned to love the blue waves that crashed in the eyes of another woman. Your second love was the rain because as the cold water hit your body in the open, you felt a little more connected to yourself and a little less connected to everything around you. You fell out of love with rain the day you were stuck in traffic at 7pm because the rain was pouring and your grandmother had to live her last breath without you. Your third love was a brown haired boy who pushed back your hair and kissed your hands and made you feel a little less miserable about yourself as he smiled in your direction and intertwined his fingers with yours much like your father with your mother. You fell out of love with him ( or so you told yourself ) the day he said his shoulders couldn’t bare the weight of your fragility anymore. Your fourth love was your sadness because you had assumed that since it had been with you through out, it would continue to stay. You fell out of love with your sadness the day your mother forced a smile and wiped off the tears stains on your cheeks and told you that things might take their own sweet time to get back into place, but they will. Your fifth love is the one thing you should have learned to love long ago. Your fifth love is yourself.

Speak your mind. Speak all your thoughts and word all your emotions. Scream out your feelings like no one is listening. Cry out your every thought as though you won’t be judged upon them. Scream in colour. Scream in black and white. String together every existing word in your vocabulary. Use big words. Use small words. Your words are power. Your power is your speech. Tell stories, and don’t hide the embarassing details - those are the best parts. Talk to people. Talk to things. Talk to strangers. Talk to friends. Don’t hesitate, your words are your own, they are a part of you. Speak as you like. Scream if you want to, or talk in a timid tone. Shout random words. Burst it all out. Words are a powerful form of expression - use it. Make people listen if they aren’t, make them take you seriously if they aren’t. Express yourself, most humans understand words these days.

If you measure my worth by the length of my skirt or by how much skin I choose to show, or by the number of people to whom I gave the power to touch and feel my bare self. Or if you measure it by the number written on my pair of jeans or because I choose to have my own basic principles of life that don’t necessarily go hand in hand with yours then i’m sorry to say but you’re not worthy of measuring my worth.

1. Wake up at 5am or wake up at 9am or wake up at 1pm. You don’t need to wake up at the time someone else tells you to wake. Some people like seeing the sun rise when they get up, some people like seeing the sun shining bright in the middle of the sky when they get up. You decide.  2. Drink coffee. Drink tea. Sometimes drink both one-by-one. Some days drink it black some days add too much milk. Somedays you can add too much sugar and some days none at all. But drink tea, and drink coffee. 3. Write your heart out, or draw your heart out, or sing your heart out, or paint your heart out, or dance your heart out. Just do something - one thing - until you’ve poured your heart out into it.  4. Cuddle with your pillows, your stuffed toys, your bedsheets, your old sweaters, your mom’s sweaters, your dad’s sweaters, or sweaters in general. 5. Read a book. Don’t read just any book. Go to the bookstore and spend as much time as you want. You may take 1 hour or you might take 6, but take your time. Look for that one book you want to read; that one book you really want to read.  6. Decorate your room. Make silly cut outs out of old cardboard. Randomly splash paint on your walls. Take down old hangings and put up new ones. Add pictures. And plants, lots of plants. 7. Get rid of old clothes. You can give them up for charity or to your younger cousin or you can dump them in the dumpster. But first, take them out of your closet, where they have been for more than a year. In them lie the memories of when you were different, your memories from when you wore this shirt every third day, the memories from when you sat on the grass with that someone and the wet soil dirtied your shorts but you didn’t care. Take those clothes and neatly fold them, like how your mother taught you to fold clothes that day when you told her you’ll move out soon, and she smiled and told you how you can barely fold your clothes the right way and can’t even keep your room tidy. Take them and put them all in a box and label it ‘memories’. Then get rid of it.  8.  Hug a lot. Hug your mother, your brother, your father, your sister, you friends, your aunt, your uncle, your cousins, everyone you know and are comfortable with. Hug people.  9. Wear hoodies all day, or wear a cute dress all day, or wear PJs all day. You can wear your baggy pants and a t-shirt when you go shopping for groceries as well as when you go shopping at the mall. You can wear a dress for when you go shopping for groceries as well as when you go shopping at the mall. Buy the same t-shirt in 3 different colours just because you want to wear it everyday or buy a dress and wear it once because it only looked nice for that one time. Wear shorts or jeans or skirts or pants or whatever you want. You decide what goes on your body. Not anyone else. 10. Say sorry to yourself. For every time you’ve said no to a slice of cake, to pizza, to that pastry that looked so good. For every time you’ve looked at magazines and imagined your face on the figure of the model. For every time you’ve stood in front of the mirror and imagined how you would look if you lost a few pounds. For every time you’ve sucked in your tummy and held your chin a little higher. Say sorry to yourself.

But all I can really hope for is that three years from now when you’ll be standing in the balcony of your apartment and looking at the purple sky it reminds you of the lavenders you had promised me and cotton clouds remind you of my hugs. And that the coffee mug in your hand holds black coffee that you made for the second time because you decided that black coffee matched my dark eyes. I hope that when you were to go to a restaurant you order iced tea even though you hate it because that’s what you always ordered for me and when you leave the restaurant with that once chilled glass of iced tea still on the table - untouched, and little drops of water roll down it, it reminds you of the days I sat in front of you crying and you couldn’t do anything but stare at me until the tears dried off.

People mistake my sadness for poetry.

I don’t wait for you anymore but I’d probably not be sad if you’d come back. But I see you’ve found someone else to love and I can just hope to hold the tears. I miss you dearly all the time but I can hide how I feel pretty easily. I hope she loves you half as much as I love you, dear. But, i’m saying it now and i’ll say it again she could love you with all the power rested in her soul for the rest of her life and it will still be less than how much I love you each second. I chose you but you found someone else but that’s okay with me. I have cried enough and now all i’d like to say is that may you find the happiness in her that I found in you. The tragedy here is not how you left or about how you chose her or how about you look at her with your gleamy eyes. The tragedy is in fact how much I still love you even after realising that you never did.

And you will cry, and maybe sometimes you will feel the air being sucked out of your lungs. Sometimes you will feel as though you are drowning and you have forgotten how to swim and there will be times when you will feel your body being paralyzed and you will feel as though you have lost all vision and hope. But it’s okay because it doesn’t end there, you will recover and you will live on and you will be stronger than ever and honestly, darling, just take a breather and I promise you that there will come a time when you feel things changing for the better.

Sometimes you think certain thoughts, and they never seem to leave. They stay there, at the back of your mind and haunt you forever. And you try once, maybe twice, you try to erase the memory and to get rid of the pain. But the mind keeps revolving around it like the earth orbits the sun. And sometimes you will feel as though it is for the best to let it take over but it’s not. You have to push it away. All the thoughts that block your happiness need to go. You are entitled to happiness and you deserve to been seen as the ray of light that you are. It will be hard, yes. But it will not be impossible. You must get rid of the negativity. In order to attain the positivity.