𝑷𝑶𝑶𝑳 𝑶𝑭 𝑪𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑻𝑰𝑶𝑵𝑺.

I promise I tried, but could it have been helped?

I’ve started thinking of what ifs again. It’s toxic, I know -- a habit I’ve desperately tried to drink out of my system, as though the vodka would have washed away all the hopes I had of you -- of us, of this ever happening.

I’ve started thinking of what ifs again, but mostly, because you exist. You breathe in constellations, and you laugh in stardust. You epitomize all that is good, and if Zeus could see exactly what you do to me, he would put all his lightning rods to rest. 

Nothing could ever awaken me like your touch.

It seeps deep into my bones like wildfire, and I am left in an utter state of dismay once the feel of your fingertips leaves the surface of my skin. I wonder, is this how it feels to be loved by you?

Perhaps this is a taste, like a split second of wine kissing my lips, the scarlet painting my insides and coloring what void had been left by past heartbreaks. Perhaps this is a tease, like a bone held in front of a curious puppy.

Is this how it feels to be loved by you?

I’ve promised time and again to rid myself of such questions, because life has never been kind to me, and love -- love was way, way worse. Worse than the grade school bully who spilled his milkshake on my school uniform, worse than the highschool bully who found it funny to push me against the metal lockers. Love was worse, always has been, because love found it funny to carve out name after name into my heart. It found the scars funny, the scabs a playground for lost souls and empty promises. It found the hopelessness comedic, the despair entertaining, the sadness amusing.

Love laughs at my demise, and yet, I freely stand upon the railing just to make you smile.

I wonder if fate finds this funny, too. Do you think, in another life, we could have been all we wanted? Do you think, in the grand scheme of things, there was even a miniscule space for you and me? Because in this lifetime, I know nothing awaits us. Nothing is promised to two hearts caged by destinies prewritten, not even willpower could bend its accord.

And so, I wonder if fate finds us funny. Perhaps not.

Perhaps not as funny as I am, still here.

Candy – tooth-rotting to its core, a sweetness so intense it becomes poison as the minutes tick by. Sometimes, I think of it as a necessity, overflowing amounts of glucose tickling my taste buds the way a lover’s fingers would. It kisses me in the earliest of mornings and in the heat of the afternoon, leaving my lips sticky, and me sated. On the other hand, it becomes too much – too sweet, too overbearing, too overwhelming it has resembled poison. It leaves a bitter aftertaste in the back of my tongue, and no matter how many gulps of water I take, no matter how hard the bristles of my brush grate against my tongue, I can never get rid of the discomfort – because it is there and it clings to me like grime.

And so, I have decided I do not like candy after all. 

I do not like candy, for it reminds of all the what ifs my mind conjures at 3 in the morning. What if my taste buds have grown accustomed to the sweetness? Would I be able to stomach the saccharine taste? What if my teeth were strong enough to stand the numerous bites and nibbles I subject every piece to? Would I be able to let it sit in my mouth for as long as I wanted, let it dilute in its own essence and intensify as time goes by? Or what if I was simply ready? What if I was ready to withstand all the pain, take the risk of cavity, dismiss the need to throw up because the sweetness ( too much sweetness ) leaves me in a state of nausea, but I have always been too much of a masochist to ever really stop.

 The red strips of strawberry solidified with sugar are as red as any red flag, and I cannot afford to keep looking at the world through rose-tinted hues. Instead, everything is white – a blank canvas, seen without bias and painted without remorse. Now, candies remind me of naphthalene balls, how they look pure and appetizing, yet they choke me in a death grip, breaking my trachea with the force of its insistence. It pushes and forces until I am turned inside out, my muscle now serving as an armor, and my epidermis kissed with the blood inside my veins. I am vulnerable, too vulnerable for my own good, and I do not wish for the world to see me in such a way – bare and stripped for onlookers to see me at my weakest.

 The world has seen me many times before, and it has laughed at the woman who has bared the scars of the aftermath of every destructive sugar rush she has faced, and I would prefer to revel in my own solitude, to witness the birth of all things bitter than to force myself to swallow cotton candy teardrops and candy floss sobs.

I do not believe I am beautiful. I do not believe I am smart, nor am I worth anyone's time. Everytime someone asks me if I have a boyfriend, I tend to laugh it off, to blush and shake my head and say, "No, I don't." Oftentimes, they ask me why, and I falter. I falter, because I have not moved on from my longest relationship. ( And no, it isn't with some guy I met in high school who fulfilled my Disney fantasies, nor was it the guy who taught me how fulfilling college was without a man breathing down your neck every now and then. )

My longest relationship, all this time, has been with my insecurities. To me, a relationship is when consistency thrives. It is stability mixed with a little bit of mystery and a lot of heartbeats spent on waiting for the unknown to unfold. It is when you feel their presence, even in the late hours of the night, staying with you even as peace prevails and slumber takes over, and I believe it is no coincidence that my insecurity flourishes as the hours tick by and the dawn welcomes me with the hollow promise of a new beginning. My insecurity is a protective lover. It shields me in its embrace, and no matter how others warn me of how poisonous its grasp seems to be, I tend to overlook their warnings, because my own insecurity warns me of other lovers. And I do not believe in the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, but if my insecurity were to be classified, it would have the letter I in all for slots, all for instinct. It feels what I fail to notice at first glance - the scoff that passes through their lips, the second where disinterest settles in place of commitment, and when a promise spoken by bitten lips seems a little too good to be true. It holds me back from giving my all, all because it sees what lies underneath fake love. "You are a temporary fix. A rebound. The interim. You are here for now, but you are replaceable. And so, when they find someone more beautiful, someone more intelligent, someone who can offer them the galaxy when you can only give them a single star ( and they will, of course they will ), they will leave. Because they always do. That is what they always do. They will tell you they love you now, promise you they are not like others, not like the lovers you've had before, not like the fleeting love affairs who have left you with a wounded heart and tequila on the tip of your tongue. You are nothing but a placeholder -- the one they meet before they meet the one." My lullabies consist of this mantra, a whispered prayer beneath the tinkling of piano keys in the dead of the night as I surrender control to slumber, and my insecurity almost takes up the entirety of my queen-sized bed, and so I shift until I am on the edge.

I realize this is the only time I feel excitement anymore, when my body hangs from the side of my mattress, and the monster under my bed eyes me like its next meal -- and I wish for it to take me so badly, because as much as I want to, I can never move on from my longest relationship. "Do not get me wrong," I tell them, "It is not you, it is me.” It is me, because I am insecure. I am a temporary fix, a rebound, the interim. I am here for now, but I am replaceable, and so, when you find someone more beautiful, someone more intelligent, someone who can offer you the world when I can only give you a single star -- and you will, of course you will, you will leave. They always do. You love me now, and you make all these promises as though they were simple syllables thrown into the air, but you have no idea how heavy your words weigh on my shoulders. You will find someone -- hell, you might even go back to her, and I will be here, nursing a broken heart.

I've read a myriad of works on first loves; poems, novels, short stories, hell - even magazine articles. First loves seem to become the center of a growing woman's life once, and then, it all fizzles out. The excitement, the adrenaline rush of finding someone so seemingly compatible coming to a sudden halt until all you're left with is the comfortable hum of a stable romance.

I was never one to settle. I did not grow up to learn the twists and turns of relationships. I was not made to compromise - I was a steady wall of stubbornness, an adamant woman who knew exactly what she wanted in life. And yet, whenever asked about love, I become blank.

And this is why I read about first loves. I never knew what to expect when it came to romance, because the stories I've heard about arguments leading to divorce, about obsession and apathy always tainted my view on a feeling that was supposed to be romantic. I learned about love the same way I learned about the cardiovascular system, through books and diagrams, mapping out the body's veins until they reach the ventricles. I traced my fingertips through the lines of capillaries underneath the skin, and in the same way, I had made a map of love with how it was supposed to be.

Robert Burns painted red when I asked him about love. He had brought me to a garden of roses and played me the tune of his romance, light and fleeting under the summer sun. His love was a promise, a promise to stay until the seas dry out, and even until then, he had promised his return.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning sat me down after she and I had made the world our playground. She held her fingers up, and amidst my heavy breathing, I counted with her. To her, love was a way of living, and she had listed how her heart used to beat in staccatos for her lover. In the soft lilt of her voice, she continued to count the ways her love had transcended the barriers of simply being an emotion. Her love was being, being deep, being free, being pure. Her love was being consistent, even after death has done both part.

I spend my days in the company of writers and my nights under the grasp of science. It tells me that love is a chemical reaction of neurotransmitters, a physiological reaction resulting from external interactions, and for the longest time, I became a slave to facts, ignoring the ignorant bliss in fiction. No love has ever lasted because science made me a cynic.

And yet, underneath that cynical woman was the dying poet who believed in Pablo Neruda. You see, Neruda had watched silently as I flitted from one author to another, patiently awaiting his turn to convince this wanna-be writer that love was not a mere sequence of words on paper. Neruda had shown me love, not as what it should be, but what it should not be. "I do not love you," he had repeated until the words became a mantra that haunted my dreams. To him, love was not extravagant. Love was not loud, and it was not a roaring wave from the sea of emotions the heart undergoes.

Love is this: comfort under warm blankets, thick duvets and wandering hands as lips rush to claim. Love is silence in the dark nights, yet a plethora of words louder than blaring car horns behind every longing gaze. Love knows no required word count, it knows no standard, needs no bejeweled presents, recognizes no standard nor pace of growth. Love is a bible verse awaiting to be read by the faithful, and a poetic line in a book in the hands of an atheist awaiting inspiration.

And words come alive when we put them into practice.

Love is this: the first meeting, when my eyes met yours from the other end of the room, and that single gaze has proven to be a denouement to all my problems. Love is the way you had laughed, and the world seemed to rock on its axis, the sound reverberating from your chest and right into my hypothalamus. It is the way your mere existence caused an over-production of oxytocin, and I am left confused, because they say too much is bad, but how could this much love be bad, when just a single smile from you brightens up my day? They say too much is bad, and yet, I cannot find it in me to see evil behind hazel irises. If God had taken mercy on me as I cried my eyes out last night, I would gladly recognize you as my guardian angel. Love is this, the way my heart pours in buckets of belief and blind faith, and usually my emotions do not cloud my rational thought, but when I think of you, I think of how every lobe in my brain is occupied by the simple "hello"s you say during our evening calls. I think about how you seem to pull your laughter from the bottom of your body for it to come out so loud (and I know how deep it must be, with six feet and three inches worth of laughter and poorly executed jokes). I think about how your name sounds more like a prayer when I say it, how every syllable seems to fit, and how you make my name sound like a worship song.

I think about how you had brought back every semblance of romance in my being, when my cynicism became a nagging voice in the back of my mind instead of a general commanding an army. I think about how loving you had made me love the things that set fire to my soul again; music, writing, playing -- living.

And when I think of you, I think of how Shakespeare had compared his love to a fever, and how Wilcox had compared lips to wine, how Chaucer had promised through life and death and everything in between, and how Whitman stayed contented with mere glimpses.

I think of the love they wrote of, how everything varied, and yet, the love -- this love remained. Because when I think of you, I feel the love they talk of, the kind of love that sits deep in your bones, that holds you in the coldest nights. I feel the kind of love that seems to set my heart alight with happiness, and if this is what it feels like to be in heaven, I promise never to sin again.

I think of the love they wrote of, and then...

I awaken to the sound of my own breathing -- shallow, labored, as though my nightmare had just managed to follow me into the welcoming arms of consciousness.

My bed cradles my figure, frail and fragile, skin pale under the harsh sunlight filtering through the spaces of my blinds. Remnants of dried-up tears line my cheeks, smudged lipstick one of the many indications of the sleepless night I had suffered.

In the early hours of the morning, I wage war.

It is in these hours when dawn kisses the earth with serenity that I curse it, because the world seems to have its favorites, and while many would think each and everyone of us eventually gets a taste of how vicious the world could be, I often beg to differ. Like many others, I am a victim, a doll put on a pedestal for others to marvel and gawk at. I am an experiment behind bars, an insurance plan, standards weighing me down and extinguishing the flames of confidence that threaten to set the world and its flammable structures apart -- bit by bit until nothing but debris is left.

It is in these hours that I wonder why the world has never been kind enough to ask if I needed time to rest from its cruelty, but the world has never been considerate enough to schedule my demise when my heart is the strongest. She does not care for the test, she wants to see me in ruins. And so, instead I am left to wonder whether I have ever been enough -- enough for those around me to cherish, to treasure, to care for, to truly love.

Instead, I am left to wonder whether I have ever been enough for romance to cradle in her gentle grasp, for comfort to accompany in the darkest nights. I am left to wonder whether happiness looks upon me with a satisfied smile, and if success and pride converse about my achievements as though they were my proud parents, sending their daughter up on every stage and beaming with admiration in their gazes.

And, for a moment, I wonder if I have ever been enough -- truly enough -- for people to care, because this is what I have always been. I am enough for them to look at, but never enough for them to linger. They come and go in wisps, the wind carrying each person to and fro. They come like visitors, because I am enough for them to meet, but never enough for them to stay, and the truth of it hurts more than it should.

When, just when, will the cycle end?

The thought continues to haunt me during my sleepless nights, when, instead of a fleeting dalliance, the sadness would hold me close in her embrace. She would whisper empty promises, and being the fool I am, I would believe every word she’d say. Because that is what I am. I am a believer in all things the world seems to throw my way. I believe in the pain that crafts itself into art, and I believe in the power of emotions coursing through my body -- adrenaline in place of caffeine, and serotonin for cocaine. There is no definite number of nights as to how many times I’ve slept with sadness, but like any other lover I’ve bared my soul to, she begins to pull away. 

Somewhere in the back of the closet that faces my bed, I can still feel her watching, as if waiting for the right time to strike. She is a lover that hangs around the memories I desperately wish to push back, to repress until extinction eventually does her job and these memories will have become nothing but words on paper -- nothing more, nothing less.

I have grown exhausted of being constantly sad.

Blaring car horns and distant yelling disrupt the chirping of robins outside my window, and I push myself off the bed, the weight of my own musings aching to drag my limbs back into the comfort of my covers, but I know I cannot afford another day succumbing to the thoughts of surrender.

Feet padding over to my dresser, I observe my reflection, the tiniest indications of sleep and struggle intermingling with the hints of a grapple between mind and body -- and today, my mind wins.

My sadness does not know me the same way my strength does.

Today, I am majestic.

Today, I am the only one with the power to hold the totality of the world in between my fingertips.

Today, I am aware of my strength -- more than sufficient to hold the totality of me. There is no one in this world strong enough to be me, and the thought evokes a smile from my lips.

And so, I undress, body stripped bare from the fabric that clings to my body like chains, and the hardwood is cold against my feet, but I have faced harsher winters alone, and this is nothing.

I am not unpretty. In truth, there is no one in this world who could ever be "not beautiful", because beauty is unfixed, impossible to grasp between standards and ceasing to exist within a universal category. Beauty holds no restriction, and I will never be the perfect woman, but I am a fighter. I am resilience and fearlessness in the same tequila shot, unapologetic remarks as chasers for the bitter burn that comes after, and within my soul rests a glow of independence consistent with my inner turmoils. My heart speaks the language of honesty, and I shall allow all my truths to be heard without delay.

I am not unpretty, and I am not unworthy.

I am wonder and capability in one being, strength keeping her walls intact as the world attempts to break my resolve bit by bit, and this is why I am deserving.

This is why I am good enough.

Because the world only sees me as this -- a mere, flickering flame resting on the wick of a candle, a woman of faux strength and voiced opinions, heat of the moment igniting a sequence of reactions. This is not what I am.

I am a raging forest fire, a barrage of anything and everything the world deems good enough to deter, yet its efforts remain futile, because I am not only beautiful. I am not only majestic.