from me, to the moon

I don't know when I begin to fade the lines between my passion and my reality. Maybe it was as soon as I dropped my blue ink on the floor and watched it spell out "reality," or was it the day when I stopped watering my secret garden and left it to burn under the sun?

Every night, I sit down on the table for two, pushing away my eagerness to write somehow I sit facing materiality now, it asks me to see what I wrote & then rips out every page & tosses my daily spread at me, telling me to stuff my face to stop me from spilling out my yearning. It keeps its eye on me till the time I'm laying in my bed, like my mother removing my glasses from my face when I fall asleep, it's snatches away my diary full of letters I held to sleep. With each night passing by, the pages becomes less and I fall onto knees more, with the whimpers of fear shaking my bones, thinking a day will come when it'll finally snatch away my desire to write and throw me into the real world for people to take their bites from me.

1. Read poetry; read poetry of people who have had tragic endings, so that you make sure to live yours before the same happens with you.

2. Love; love the people, flowers, trees, and bees. Love everything and anything that you believe needs it, including you, and when the same doesn’t happen to you, don’t close your heart and remember rejection is redirection and protection.

3. Write; write anything and everything, and do it every day because you never know when you figure yourself out, untangling yourself from the shackles of your mind and things unknown to you that you still lose your sleep over every night.

4. Spend some time; spend some time with yourself and with your people, no matter how different they are from you, as it might change you in ways you wanted to for a while.

5. Hurt; hurt just enough, let yourself sit in the color blue for you to release but not get consumed and maybe after it, try some other colors on.

Maybe seeing us live in agony forced my separation from reality.

For me to live, everything needed to be like a fantasy wrapped around my dreams of possibilities.

I lived for hope, and you lived for inevitability, and maybe that was the beginning of the phenomenon of our casualties.

I forced you to jump into my land of mirage without understanding that you built your house in the realm of actuality.

My nails have scraped on the surface of all the things I've touched, leaving dripping marks on all the things I had to let go of.

(The blood that dried up under my nails doesn't go away even with a million washes.)

In some dreams of my sleepless nights, my love appears as it is deserted by the seashores, waiting to get a grasp of the infinite sea called "you."

They try to tell me what my words are worth and how I can just write my pain away,

but what they don't know is that I have become the punching bag of things I am too cowardly to write about and the things I have done halfway,

how they are nightmares I face every night, and how they churn my insides with screams of horror and choke me rather than being my Salvatore.

Maybe I want you back sometimes so that I'll be the one to leave this time without thinking about the bitter aftertaste of blood that'll linger in our mouths every July.