pulled out from the table

inside me.

It has been waiting for years.

Every morning

I straighten the house.

Every night

I leave the light on.

For whom,

I don’t know.

I only know

that some part of me

has never unpacked.

My body arrived.

My life arrived.

But something else

is still on its way.

So I wait.

In traffic.

In queues.

At red lights.

At 2 a.m.

At thirty.

At forty.

At whatever age comes next.

I wait

with the embarrassing faith

of someone who still believes

a knock at the door

can change everything.

The door stays closed.

The years keep entering.

And still,

before sleeping,

I clear a space

for a guest

who has never once

said they were coming.

hoping that you’ll notice

my eyes

following

the path of your heart

hoping we’ll meet

in time

and yet

with each blink of a lash

i lose you a little more

until one day

i wake up

and you’ve slipped

through my fingers 

and I sit by it for hours,

my cheeks red with blood gushing in

from the butterflies feeding on my stomach

My lips curve in a smirk from a heart beating faster

and of the wildflowers fluttering, blooming

in a thunderstorm.

I open it while the starlight goes off,

and the storm blows off my roof.

You sent me a little piece of your heart,

and asked for the whole of mine.

And I wondered about the doors it would knock,

if I returned it to nowhere.

i’m okay for now. sometimes i feel like what’s the point of anything and nothing matters. some days i feel fine. it comes and goes, but never go away for good so i try to keep my mind busy as much as possible to stay positive. 

Stepping into adult shoes, looking the world through something other than the rose-tinted eyeglasses of a toddler.

Welcome to the real world, it says. Here you have to work for everything you get. You do not get appreciated for every single effort that you put in and sometimes for anything at all. There are rewards for some but most good deeds do go unnoticed. There isn’t a tree at every road for shade. Some roads you just have to trudge along to find solace and somehow, neither of this kills you. You might want it all to end every single day but somehow when the day ends, you’ll manage to still keep standing. And your world will be ready to start spinning as soon as the next day knocks. But you’ll learn to not let it get to you because you’ll learn to start spitting out the blood that gushes to your mouth after every punch to your gut. You’ll learn to begin again without feeling like a complete failure or more accurately, you’ll learn to begin again even when failure is all you think defines you. Because somehow, you’ll learn that sometimes, a choice just isn’t presented to you and no matter how dejected you feel, the only course of action is to still keep crawling, to keep breathing no matter how hard your lungs ache. 

There’s going to be heartbreak and broken things are not always going to mend. Some roads are going to get blocked no matter how much you wish them to flourish. And somehow, you’re going to find a way to be okay with it without clinging to some childish hope. Because you’re going to accept that resurrection doesn’t actually work and the universe doesn’t conspire to keep you safe. You’re going to realize that the safety net you clung to was ultimately a mere illusion and things are going to hurt you when you least expected them to. But you’ll learn through it all. And I hope, somehow, through it all, you manage to cling onto that childish wonder you’ve got for this world.  

definitely sunny and ~78-80F aka 25-27C -- I’m sad we’re self quarantining and the weather has started to warm up here :-(