Requina

he looks as if he knows the way, as if he's been there before through this even consolation aches, this same quiet distance, as if certainty still remembers his face unchanging. so calm in his confliction, though i know there's a storm there and the dawn looks so bright through his eyes, reflecting the kind that used to mean something almost like hope to me even now, without having to second guess which is where i hide all my fears, without a single sense of betrayal, somewhere in my clueless solitude seems unbreaking too soon.

with his steady arms embraced me all over my sorrows, i was paralyzed. i was numb when i was alone among the tide of faces. i felt the stillness crawled beneath my skin. he wasn't there the split second i closed my eyes. my heart scattered to my stomach.

i keep thinking that i've ever made sense of it all, for as long as i remember, only to find out these all were made of decomposing remnants filled with regret—the same regret i kept returning to, aching my heart far beyond any consolation. the music is too loud, love isn't in the air tonight. there is no such thing as a silver lining. and the worst thing is that i couldn't do anything to even help myself.

words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup and somehow neither of us even bothered anymore to wrap our heads around the way crispness drifted in the blurred open room, shifting little messes that borrowed the moment on the rustic table, those quiet misplacements that rearranged themselves with a kind of grace, some subtle trespasses to became something shared mattering with smiles, between sips and glances in the ease of forgetting why anything had to be sorted out after all, and my cold hands on the edges of our framed seats leading nowhere just to mark the space where something—some things wordless had settled, softened the edges like the way your sleeve brushing mine to the sorts that lives with a closeness to quiet to announce itself.

it doesn't shift, it doesn't correct, it doesn't hesitate between wanting to reach, to hold something that's already holding the moment for us for a second. it could be more or less than a second, maybe longer, sometimes too short and sometimes long enough to rehearse the blessing of the moment that rearranged themselves with a kind of grace—of sorts that neither of us had to ask if we could even tell the difference between the weight of a pause and the ease of it passing overnight, brewing in the open air to quietly announce itself without showing demand, even when we only sat still in the very unconsciousness that we found on our own, within each of ourselves.

i’ll spend forever denying that i knew there wouldn’t be a next time, even in that last moment just by the way you said my name. except it was such a strange name to my ears, one you've never casted on my face when you told me we’d always fight for each other, no matter what. how easily you said you wouldn’t mind living with me until we’re so old, like the thought had never even been a question. and how you said we were definitely soulmates in the same moment i finally started to believe it was real. but maybe you always knew something i didn’t, that things like this only last when one of us doesn’t have to grow up yet. turns out, both of us never had to.

(how i wish i could turn back time and fix what’s broken, if only it had ever been ours to fix)

and there we found ourselves were running rings around a fistful of sheen that he playfully lathered on the back of my palms, the first i ever saw him, as he moved with the kind of quiet attentiveness that never asks for acknowledgement—swept his hand over the surface before i could, his touch light over neither of us would mention aloud, but the kind of ease that seemed to be simply was a part of him, something that belonged to him.

thereon, he also told me how fond is he of the idea for a frontispiece wide open: with no strings, no seam to pull apart, no fringe separating back and front of the windowpane delighting in the shaft of moon ray, on quiet between one moment and the next.

yet, what was lingered in memory was never about the moonlight, and what stayed with me wasn't the light spilling through the glass. it seemed, and it felt as much as something weightless in the longest of time.

i watched his smile drift through the room like moonlight spilling through half-opened window, the last flicker of day refusing to end in the restless wind tonight, the space between heartbeats until it felt like not just the kind of feeling that knocked the air from your lungs—not the kind that steals the weight of breath from your body forgot to breathe it back in like a string pulled too tight, curling up in between sunken hollow, somewhere at the back of your throat too quiet to outcry at a push. it's clearly not the kind of pain to bear the weight of something deep down your chest, let alone a kind of pain at all.

but it felt like the kind that crept in slowly by the way he pulled me into his heartbeat threading in every quiet moment we share, and the space between his breath—our breaths, the surface of our skins touching, the air, the room, the quiet surrouding poured into me like the last light of dusk tonight, curled up along the seam of our breaths where words would only fray at the edges.

and the edges, they were folded into this paper, unfolding themselves with the thoughts of you in the most innocent way possible. because desire was never meant to be compared to the source from which all sweetness first learned its name, and i refused to define you as something to be tasted, let alone an aftertaste, a leftover of sweetness. the sweetness itself, it begs to be consumed—a hunger that seeks to devour, to be finished, in a fleeting moment that bring things to a close as quickly as it came.

so, it's not that i don't want you entirely, but what i want is, to want you in a way that doesn't steal from you. in the most innocent way possible.

i love you.

i woke up to a morning that reeked of rust and regret, the kind of dawn that scratches at the back of your throat before you can even recall what it's like chasing the sun that came up to soon. it burnt through me to see what was left inside—but i once said that i never cared about the sun, like i didn't want to care at all about the scene, the crook, the heatwave, the static, whichever came first. the sun is just a trick of the light and the world felt too loud again, already raising the roof of my senses at this point and it's screaming at me inside the walls of my head.

so i let the bitterness pool in the hollow spaces of my tongue, let it seep through my veins, pulse under my skin. my mouth is hoping the aftertaste would have at least a little mercy—might it settle into something quieter, something almost bearable again, though i know better than mistaking the aftertaste for an escape.

mercy is a hollow hum beneath my ribs, the kind of sound that stretches thin and trembles while you're half-asleep, restless and starving, or worse—the last breathe that trapped behind your teeth tasted like iron and grief, a feeling of regret decomposing from the inside out, a rusted ache.

i reckoned the twenty-second night since the air passed the wind overall felt less heavy, as the house of my lungs eventually was breathing—not with, and without—a puff of smoke and murmurs, once or more than even once, quite heavily breathing, smiling, and murmuring older than the walls themselves. once at a time somewhere past in an afternoon was a mattered house with sunset in the wind, close at a hand, or else a warmth looming in a mattered smoke heavy with absence on the doorway.

one can assume that it was just a phase whereas i would even be somewhere within sight of burning myself with matches and even strips that weren't mine at all except that once at a time, long way before no one had realized someone would be on the way to be getting their hands bloody as well on my bed which we left in a mess.

two days and two nights stretched thin restlessly, passed through me like a quiet tide before it dawned: it was never the house, the sunset, nor the wind that ever mattered at all.

this shall pass, this too shall pass.

honestly i just didn't remember which one of who had said it to my ears but maybe that's just how it should be.

that's how i could find myself again being in a room full of same familiar faces beneath a roof that remembered, except this time no bitterness had followed me to the doorstep, catching a glimpse of where the sunset flickered in the wind that day. that's how i could find myself getting off the ground surrounded by things entirely new all around, as a stranger, and now not-so as a stranger over again. sometimes it still makes me wonder too of why would he hold every door we come across within every corner of the room, of each places we encounter? why would he lean his body closer to me in the middle of our conversation on the rooftop that night? why would his body languages speaking to me that way as it seems? it's certainly not something new to me yet i still sweat it so much sometimes even when we're speaking.

even when we found ourselves being in the same room with all new faces to him, i still hardly understand why i felt like he looked at me like i was a familiar thing to him even now. it's so much deeper, quieter, than just the kind of familiarity that comes from recognition without needing the words or maybe i'm just being delusional. the fact that i'm trying so hard resisting myself not to fall too hard again this time. i told him all nothing about that feeling but what has been getting to me since two nights ago was the way he pulled me into his arms. i froze for a few moments in his arms, yet i also told him all nothing about that. i don't understand why i even sweat about it so much, still, even now. or maybe i'm just being delusional.

but why at the same time do i ache for him to tell me that i'm not just drowning in a dream i was never meant to wake from after all, that that we're not building a home out of passing glances and half-smiles again? why, of all people, do i want it to be him who pulls me from the wreckage—to swear that i wasn't just imagining the way his eyes holding me like something that was already familiar to him? why do i want it to be him who makes me believe this isn't all in my head?

i would like to know of why, yet i know that i would just keep telling him all nothing about it. not even a bit. not even at all. certainly, i'm the one who's being delusional, because did he just, without thinking, take my hand—his thumb tracing soft circles to the beat of the love song playing on the car radio—leaned in closer, his lips finding mine, then pulled me into his arms, holding me tightly like neither of us wanted to let go each time we parted? then i'd send a sweet little thank you his way, and his response would come back just as warmly.