#midreads

I'm enjoying it a lot!!

It's one of my first Miéville's and I absolutely GET why the guy is such a scifi superstar. I'm a known sucker for any science fiction that deals with social sciences and the humanities, so I'm having an absolute blast with both the Hosts and the concept of Language.

It is unfair that I needed an outlet just to contain myself whenever I think of you, that I needed to write you love poems while you were asleep.

But when loving you comes so naturally easy, nothing that has to do with you is truly ever a chore.

I wish you could understand just an ounce of how much you mean to me. Thinking of you keeps me awake, dreaming of you keeps me asleep. being with you keeps me alive.

Oh, do not get me started on how perfect you look. I will sit here and write tirelessly. I just knew I wanted to see that smile for the rest of my life the first time I saw it.

I would run through life again, and repeat every single mistake, so long as it takes me back to you. I will choose you, and find you; in a hundred different lifetimes and a hundred version of worlds.

I crave your love, I see your inner sincerity. Your body is mine, your suffering I feel in my marrow. any hurt of yours, minute or immense, I will see, and I will comfort you.

I am a creature of hope. I see what my mind screams with joyful mania, but with you? Everything is at peace. Some hearts understand each other even in silence. And you must remember this: for my love for you is higher than words.

I'll lay with you forever if I could. and I'll hold you dear and near until we fall asleep. Time spent with you feels so full, and good, and necessary. I want to love you loudly, and then quiet again just between us.

With you, I understood why love and anger are painted with the same color. So my love, forgive me for my impatience, for everything about you I feel so strongly about.

Yet despite it all, you still hold me, and kiss me. you make sure I am cared for, seen, and loved. Your love breaks me to tears, but heals my heart completely.

No matter how indecisive I may be with little things, honey, I want you to know,

that I am certain of you. and you can be certain of that.

This empty space in my heart, the one that fits you perfectly. That blissful place is yours to stay.

Until the sun sets in the east. Until the sky finally falls.

If you asked me how much I love you, how could I ever answer that? Just the thought of a life without you, makes my world pause in its orbit.

I promise, if anyone asks me about love, I'll tell them about you.

The curious thing about a person who prides herself on her frigidity is that there is always going to be someone who wants to break that pride.

The slightest change can disturb her routine, the comfort. Catalyst destruction makes a change so great.

You were nothing to me.

I was in a coma, in a lethargy against my will. Maybe I blink sometimes, but I do not see it as enough.

I just decided to stop.

I sought for you.

You are in everything after summer and my everything ever since.

I wondered if I had formidable lives in the past. I wondered if you were a part of them at all.

A fleeting hope ran at my first breath.

If past lives exist, I hope there is at least one where you return home to me and tell me about your day.

If past lives exist, I hope there is at least one where we shower with promises and the same eyes that fell in love with one another.

If past lives exist, I hope loving you comes as easy as instinct, and that replacing you would only be a nightmare in a thunderstorm.

But nevermind that.

I've been so deep in thought that I forgot fate writes itself.

In this lifetime, you are mine.

My heart—the most selfish and cruel being to ever exist.

It acts as if it has a life of its own. It beats to no rhythm, only to its will.

I lose grasp of it, my head loses control of it. It makes me feel things I do not want to, makes me act on it without consenting.

When it decides to burn, I raise hellfire with it. I make sure the devil shivers at the sight of it. Often, I hear the sound of my head begging me to stop it, for me to suppress it. But that voice is so little, so small, and so weak compared to echo of its behests.

When it loves someone I cannot have, it lingers. It compels me to hope, hope that the other will beat the same way mine does. It forsakes how much torment it will be for me to shoulder, how much time it will take for me to stand again.

It tells me that it does everything to protect me, but I do not believe it. Because not one soul have said things as ruthless and called me names as harsh than it does to me. It is my most valiant guard, but also my most dreadful nightmare.

I am its most loyal servant, however not by choice. Because it hurts me as well as the lot I wish not to hurt. It is one tyrannous master, but one so dominant and powerful that I can do no more than give it my unbreakable vow.

When it demands something of me, I do not question it—I just do. I am enslaved to it like a dog on a tight leash, that very leash burying its way into my skin. I am but a shepherd attempting to tame a wolf dressed in a sheep’s skin.

When I try to act on my own, it punishes me for it—in ways I cannot physically describe. Sometimes excruciating, sometimes quick. The scar nevertheless, is everlasting—a forever reminder of my pitiful attempt.

So do not blame me if perhaps one day, I wish for it to stop beating. 

Perhaps that one day, it will not punish me.

My father is a great man, an astonishing one that is. He was many things but a few, and only a few he cannot be. 

He was a fighter, a warrior—lifted lumber with his bare hands, sketched wood and sanded them. He was brute and rugged under the sun, no more than mere muscle on one’s bones. He’d push and dug and never stop, then be too weary that breathing was a chore. Every once in a while, he swears he’d seen stars so close and death so near.

When he does unwind, he found peace in the leaves that burn, in the fumes that buried him. He’d huff and puff and cough, but he promises they calmed the warfare within.

In between his high, he’d pick up his pen and a crispy page. He’d close his eyes and do nothing but feel. He’d ignite the fuel into a burning hearth, his hands would dance to the revving of said engine.

He was an artist, a poet—weaved words like they were straws, knitted rhymes like they were wool. His verses were nothing like an empty coffin that craved its fill, nothing like the world he knew—bleak, grey, and more distant than the heaven he prays to. 

I wish to be like my father, but not for his strength nor his bright mind.

I wish to be like my father, for I have seen the way he loves.

I see the way he looks at my mother, the way he manages to fall more in love with the woman he’d already married. It is the depth of which he speaks, the clarity of his gaze. His love is so whole that his missing pieces finally appear.

I see the way he looks at my sister, the way he looks at me. I know the fatigue that comes with, the soreness he had to bear. But his eyes served nothing of the sort, and he made the pain seem weightless.

My father is a great man, for his meek heart.  The very same that beat stronger than any storm, cared harder than any stone, it flew on indestructible wings—unshackled and free. 

He made sure I know that I am a sacred gift, made sure I know that I am enough, made sure I know that he is always my forever home.

He does not say, but I do.

I love you, Papa.

She is my foggy secret, my misty sin. 

She bears no particular beauty, none would bat a second eye. But a click of her tongue is enough to hypnotize me, enough to make me fall and kiss the earth that grazes her heel.

She is an angel from a place so clouded, yet she pierces through the haze like a silver blade, molten metal, liquid light—a glow so bright I’d let it render me blind.

She speaks a siren song, luring me as if I were nothing but a sailor destined to drown. I am bewitched, entranced, and helpless—I’d leap overboard towards the beached skulls only to hold her. 

But my touch wouldn’t reach her, my voice couldn’t reach her.

In those rare moments of clarity, a sudden and overwhelming urge to scream gets to me.

An icy bite of timeless suffering, a slow gasp for air in the raw snowstorm.

A red iron screaming on charcoal, a boiling sweat in the crease of my eyelids.

I wake myself to the wind blowing on my nape, I wake myself from my hazy slumber.

I open my mouth to call her name and somehow, I stop. Because I know that I remember nothing—and I know she is just a mere reverie. 

So, I keep her there and close my eyes so the sooty hue can enter my brain yet again.

When it does, I see her waiting.

Wake me when the sun rises in the west, wake me when the sea no longer comes ashore. This deep slumber I have cursed upon myself is nothing short of an escape, a flee from a written story of yet my long journey. 

My heart is not made of steel, my body not made of gold. I burn in every step I take, the next more excruciating as I go. 

In some moments, my vision fails me. It fails to paint color to the skies that soared high, to the waters that ran deep. 

In some moments, my hearing deafens me. It plays no more of the roaring thunderstorm, no more of the howling hurricane.

My skin grazes things, but I no longer feel them. I can tell that I bleed, but the sting is absent. My fingers are as frostbitten in the fire as they are in the snow. My hair is as wet in the sun as it is in the rain.

My tongue is numb of any flavor, numb of any stimulus. Water tastes the same as I remember, all else tastes like water. Salt no longer tastes as its name suggests, pepper no longer holds its spice.

Daffodils bear the same scent as roses, daisies bear the same scent as tulips. Lavenders bear the same scent as smoke, orchids bear the same scent as rust.

I am no hero. I am no villain.

I am but a mere lover, taking shelter on her warmth through each passing day.

I am but a mere body, she is my soul. Her words shoulder as much weight as they can carry, my words have none.

I possess not an ounce of freewill, for she spares not an ounce of strength left for me. 

I am alive as much as I am dead. I am present but I am not. I look not to the future, I look only to her.

When she leaves my side, I am no longer my own man―I am no longer my own person. Every breath is heavy, every blink is a chore.

Wake me when the sun sets in the east, wake me when the sky finally falls. Let me freeze in time and in space, let me be my own man for a second more.

Signed,

The loud cracking of the woods unknown frightens me no longer. Gone were the days when I waited in dread to the horror that I may face. Gone were the times when I was tortured for breathing their air. With your sacrifice, the roles have been reversed.  

I am not who I was when I met you. I no longer look wicked, malnourished. My hair grew as long as arms could reach and my skin is now lightly tinted with red. I look just like them. I look just like you. But more robust, powerful. Your blood endowed me with such strength that I am presently incapable of understanding. For that, I thank you for trusting me like a dog without its head.

How unfortunate it truly is to become a human. You get captivated by godsent beauty so much you turn a blind eye to everything but the beating of your heart. You get fascinated by a little shine of gold so much you turn a deaf ear to the wailings erupting from my dungeons. Your soul is so potent but your physical body is weak. But no bother, fret not. I shall live forever for our legacy. I am never one to share, but I always will when it is due. 

But do not be wronged. I do not share the same burn you have confessed to me too many times. You were simply a meal, a source of power I needed in order to build my heaven. After all, what made you think a creature like I and a human like you could possibly love one another?

Now my dear, I have to stop writing so soon. I shall make sure to give my regards to your birth givers, for providing me with such a fool for a son. I sincerely hope you are content inside me, for that will be the only place you will ever know of―for the remainder of forever.

Yours truly,