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[caecattus]

Because I like Rivals to Lovers

A: “Why is it that they fall in-love with their rival? I don’t get it; it was such an intense rivalry."

B: “I think it is because even to consider someone your rival, you must first notice them - notice them in ways that not many people do. Noticing can be a gateway to many things, and love like rivalry is not exempt. Think about it, what is there to rival if you don’t follow them, learn them, or study them? Next thing you know, you are aware of their routine and how they are faring, and I mean this in the least possible stalkerish way possible. You become aware of their losses, their wins, their little quirks. You listen to them talk about their rituals that keep them on top of their game. Yes, it could lead to friendship, admiration, respect, but honestly it is also ground for love to bloom- don’t you think?”

[caecattus]

The Book That Calls 

I came across it a while ago, and more recently still 

The algorithm brings this book around from time to time

I would read quotes as emotionally charged music plays in the background.

Then one day, it dawned on me, this is one of those books that promises to break my heart.

And one day, I am going to let it go. 

I will watch as my tears pooled around every eye lash until all I see are blurred lines. 

My heart, then, will have no choice but to seek refuge in my lap as my chest grows to be too tight of a space. 

This book will have me cradle my heart in the palms of my hands. 

Only after immense tenderness, will it go back to where it belongs. 

Should someone anticipate being taken apart by a book this much? I don’t know.

It is one of those books that calls you, and the journey to it seems inevitable somehow. 

That book and I have a dance to dance, so I will make room on my dance card for it. 

It is now April 2, and the algorithm struck again!

I had this sudden and vivid picture of the book walking towards me in the middle of the night. 

A candle in her left hand and a shielded knife in the other, with a gentle smile and expectant eyes that ask “are you ready to be cut open? Are you ready to be mended?”

I like to imagine that I would hesitate, but I think it is premeditated yes.

@solace_imagine

[caecattus]

Little Prickly

Prickly, prickly, prickly

Breath little one breath, breath little one breath

Somebody needed to look, didn’t they?

Before you could no longer wash it off your hands

Before it stayed like a birthmark 

Brush it up with make-up but it won’t go away

Is this going to be a story about how you survived

 Or one about how you were made into a monster- covered in tar and coming back for seconds?

Yes prickly, will you also know softness?

[caecattus]

Ruins of the Soul

Inspired by this quote "Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.” Ocean Vuong

Sometimes I don’t think I mind being ruined because I have gotten quite comfortable feeling that way and being that way. Being and feeling ruined, that I am comfortable with, not desiring it but comfortable with it. 

It is knowing that someone sees the ruins, notices how fragmented I am- that’s the part that I am most uncomfortable with. 

The moments where I feel like I will truly break. For if someone was to look and truly notice and see, then there would be nowhere to hide. All the fissures, bits and pieces, all the what ifs would surge up to the surface because for so long they have asked to be noticed and finally they are. Tell me, how do you not fall apart when a grief of this magnitude lurks in every corner of your being, casting shadows far and wide, just waiting for the day to be acknowledged whether by you or somebody else?  

Waiting for the light, the day that you face yourself. How do you not come undone when the lid is taken off and it overflows? when the curtain is pulled? Tell me, I would like to know. What do you do with it, where do you put it?

@solace_imagine

P.S: I imagined this as a character's somewhat inner monologue. One who is going through a great ordeal of grief and struggling with accepting being known :)

[caecattus]

A Vivid Voice That Came as a Thought

Your arrival did not give us soul and personhood. We preceded you; our existence preceded your definition of humanity.

[caecattus]

To Stitch A Soul

To no longer exist in fragments

To feel all of me, right here

To know that each measured breath, no matter the land I stand on, breathes life into the multidimensional landscape of my being.

To not lose sight of the whole of me, regardless of the noise.

Having to show parts of me in places but never forgetting the totality of myself - the anchor that ties me home. That would make all of the dissections worth it. The turning over of my soul and the avalanche of tears - may it all land And like mulch, sun, and rain, let it nourish the whole of me.

@solace_imagine

[caecattus]

I will Dance Now

There was always something about music

Harmonies of a choir’s hymns, the high and low vibrato that always strikes a chord.

The way that the drums seem to awaken something deep within.

The way the beat works up an inner knowing

Shaking and urging me to remember with each note

With enticing rhythm, “move and remember who you are”.

Something encoded or maybe something visceral?

So I will dance now, even if my kitchen floor and my cooking pots are my only audience

My body, the only instrument that manifests.

I will dance now because I don’t know how long these legs will keep me upright.

I will dance now because I don’t want to look back and wish I danced then.

That shame, embarrassment, and fear kept me from taking a step.

See, when I dance, I get to step into and lose myself all at once

I color within and outside of the lines that contain.

Nothing is too nor less important.

Anxiety about everything else vanishes.

I will dance now because the beats ask for nothing less and nothing more than for who I am.

@solace_imagine

[caecattus]

Bone Shards

There is a scream trapped in my throat.

One that is sticky, raw, and painfully grating.

One whose density fissures my voice box and threatens to shatter it into pieces.

So sometimes I let the tears come, feel the sting under my eyelids, taste the salt, hoping they will glue the pieces together, calcifying and mending them one by one.

But on some other occasions, I let it shatter if only to hear how broken and unrestrained the sound - to let the heaviness down, and become whole after.

Either option is painful, but everything is better than swallowing it.

Although bones, they go down like shards of glass.

@solace_imagine

[caecattus]

@solace_imagine

[caecattus]

Half Remembered

Sometimes words demand to be let out, and you have no choice but to let them, lest you be tormented by the ghost of unwritten business. Those pesky ghosts will often show up time and time again, until the sentences are discombobulated words blown into the wind - echoes of what they could have been.

Over time, they will elicit only a memory of something that meant something - something important. You would shake it off as you could not figure out why it mattered so much. Always at the tip of your tongue but evading you faster than your mind and mouth could spell.

You will return to the daily until one day someone somewhere says something out loud, by way of a book, or on social media, and you could swear you heard this before. Your mind will turn over every corner of your brain as a pirate looking for misplaced treasure, or a farmer tilling soil.

But the pesky little ghosts would go on smiling as they turn into wisp of air because at last, you finally started to remember them. Half remembered and fully realized by another, their unfinished business comes to an end.

@solace_imagine