grasping

gasping & rasping abominable almost man (not yeti)

[fistfuls]

you noticed

‘it’s been years’

[fistfuls]

separate, disconsolate

I think three years is enough time to grow into, around, and with another person. All these tears I've been crying are for the huge chunks of who I am that are lodged in your being, for all the pieces of you in tiny, scattered colonies around my everthing I do, for the jagged, jigsaw way we used to fit.

[fistfuls]

make it

You will make it through tonight, maybe not without embarrassing yourself by putting up another futile fight in an unavailing war. You won't win and you will feel worse about yourself, but you will make it through tonight. Lick your wounds to sleep then wake up shattered, but stronger, the pieces of your heart looking more and more like they can be gathered and made whole again.

[fistfuls]

happy new year

despite all the ways in which my life transmuted into a wild, unfamiliar creature, i eventually learned to tame the beast, domesticate it, learn, love, and loathe it. this was the year of milestone, of momentous, of myriad. the carefully assembled surface of everything i am was rocked by tectonic shifts, friction creating rifts and splits, collisions forging new opportunities and relationships. this was the year of almost, of always, of already. moving on from some things meant it was necessary to hold onto others. in choosing, did i make a mistake? 2014, i'm thankful for the translucent membrane of the wing you took me under. i saw the thick, blue veins of everything essential, my life source; i saw the way skin and bone fused together, how they could bend and fold to withstand any pressure. i saw through sinew and blood and glimpsed light, even occasionally grasping it. thank you, 2014, and all the people you brought into my life and whisked away, with the mysterious possibility of someday reunions. i am glad to have lost no one absolutely, though i mourn those who i've lost intimately. maybe 2015 will be the year of moving on. the year of hard choices. the year of letting life go on as it should. the undercurrent of doubt and anxiety that bled through much of the past year must dry up soon, must bleed out until the well is pure, filled only with hope and a zest for life. i acknowledge the omnipresence of fear shadowing every corner, but true joy in life is found in overcoming it. i must welcome the fear, indulge in the unknown, and allow myself to shatter. it's only then that i can build myself anew and live life the way i want to.

[fistfuls]

or maybe i'm just hanging out with the wrong people

For more than two years, I've cloistered myself in the safety of another person's surefire devotion and smouldering passion. Intimacy calls for proximity and this natural, yet somehow restive, abrupt coming together of two whole people has not been without friction. Friction breeds fire, but it also chafes. Still, that unordained union has borne a love I know is my own and because it is my own, it is my right to decide that I do not want it anymore. In my mind, much of this relationship has survived and even thrived under the shadow of a guillotine, with myself as the executioner. Is it cruel that I never saw a future beyond a specified date or a calendared event that required a steadfast shoulder to lean on? I've pushed deadlines past their due dates and I wonder if this the force of this self-destructive cruelty is what pushes lacklustre lovers into unhappy forevers. I may be young and I may have disabused myself of the concept of eternity, but I am in love, and wretchedly, unfairly so. Because all around me are friends who love without specious pretensions. They love with open hearts and look with far-seeing eyes. I look at them and see something monstrous within myself. They've found love that they can be content with, love that they can proclaim to be true, without any scientific claim or logical proofs. Being in a relationship, I'm part of this subset of friends, though I feel disjointed, on the outside looking in. Most of these constructions are probably the off-shoot of an embittered, depressive imagination, but I feel like I'm surrounded by people in love, a force field of happiness I neither understand nor am able to obtain, because beyond that golden ring of long, languid kisses, held hands, and dime a dozen promises, there's you, always exactly out of my reach.

[fistfuls]

alcoholic nostalgia goggles

Back when I could hold my liquor considerably better, but drank in greater quantities and regular frequencies to compensate for a yet undiminished constitution, moments of blackout drunkenness were definitely more regular. This is all attributable to the fact that I hardly ever engage in the loud-mouthed, red-faced carousing that punctuated several weekends of my collegiate yesteryears; when I do have a drink now, the company is quieter, the drinks are either too weak to overcome me or are nursed to early retirement. I remember mornings where assembling the fractured pieces of the night before was a necessary start to my morning routine and how a trenchant sense of mortification was often the result of that haphazard reconstruction. I wouldn't say I miss those mornings, nor can I begrudge the past for its immutability, but I find myself romanticising the inebriated girl who made imprudent, embarrassing, yet honest declarations of love and longing for people who didn't deserve them, because that girl, though often hurt and scarred by that hurt, had her heart open and searching for the possibility of something extraordinary. Although I cannot pretend to be settled in life, I'm forced to admit that this relationship I have shrouded myself in for almost two years has changed me, maybe even fundamentally. Whatever openness there was in my heart was treated like a void and summarily filled by a love I deemed satisfactory. Whatever openness there is in my heart is either the cracks of that love falling through or the minuscule fragments of self that have not been altered. I haven't decided.

[fistfuls]

wait for forever

what is the point in rending myself apart for a person who doesn't even think of me? that is, i'm assuming he doesn't. we haven't spoken in almost a year. spoken in the true, meaningful sense of the word anyway. there is nothing worse than being in love with someone, while completely and devotedly loving someone else. i don't know how to turn that into something that sounds beautiful, but it feels so ugly inside me.

[fistfuls]

and yet

i never wanted to be the person whose sadness didn't have a good enough reason.

[fistfuls]

i lost a bet [and found you]

i saw you, but i could barely look you in the face, so i hid behind polarized lenses and veils of hair i grew out for you. i don't know why i write about you, when all you are is an idealized idyllic idol carved out of misshapen perceptions and unfiltered dreams. you belong to the ether in my life, permeating every possible substrate and inundating every swollen capillary. physics has written you off with absolute certainty, but i have been known to hold onto the alchemic magics of the past, false as they might have been.

[fistfuls]

i haven't been writing

but i have been dreaming you are faded childhood photographs i've never seen in a dream about another guy. you are tousled lion's mane, teeth spilling over a smile wider than the frame. you are fading from memory but growing sharper in regret. i haven't seen you in months (maybe), but i look for you everyday.

[fistfuls]

thanks for the memories

my favorite memory of us isn't a specific instant, unbound by a particular calendar date or a certain locale. my favorite memory of us is entirely spatial. there were times we were in the same room, when we were tectonic plates apart, the distance populated by the people we were pretending mattered more than each other. it took a seismic shift into a totally new paragidm — maybe a cramped car backseat or the drunken slouch-lean — to bring us to our natural state: our involuntary adjacency. your shoulder pressed solidly into mine; the lines of our arms parallel and warm against each other. you were so, so close and there was no distance left to bridge but the gaping chasm of fear that kept me from doing something that would violate any and all geometric axioms. because lines go on and on and do not stop at a junction of held hands. planes are infinite and kisses are brief and wonderful because they are brief and lead to an infinite series of brief and less brief and briefer still kisses. i couldn't bear to break those rules.

[fistfuls]

3am but i want breakfast mmm

you demand my love like a breakfast hot plate: with minimal delay, steamy enough to make the plate sweat, and bedecked with egg whites, because the yoke is for me to be buried under. i am not saying that this relationship is totalitarian regime. you are not a love fascist. but there are days i miss seeing a person's face without it being yours, looking into eyes that aren't filled with things other than love. you have held me so tight that my bones have bent and twisted to accommodate your embrace.

[fistfuls]

unfinished unpolished going nowhere etc.

the wind is clever because it is invisible. unseen, it can manoeuvre a lingering, lazy path through your hair, travel the columnar length of your spine so close that a shiver runs through you at its touch. the wind is clever because it knows where to find you. a gust of warm air greets you when you step out of your car a hundred miles away from where i am. the wind slaps at your face, because it does not know how to kiss it.

[fistfuls]

ripe and calling

i dreamt an entire dream about you: one in which we were reunited and in love. we were up in the mountains and your hair was cut short and you were kind like you never were before and sweet like you always inadvertently were. i was so happy. everything felt right, like everything in dreams. it wasn't the first time i woke up disappointed it had just been a dream, but it was the first time a want burrowed so deep under several layers of repression and denial ever manifested itself, with a structured plot even. it gnaws at me, thinking that you might (not) be thinking about me. i don't know which reality i'd find harder to accept. you are fading in memory, but growing in my subconscious. i don't think this is a good thing.

[fistfuls]

probably riddled with factual errorzorz

i want to figure out your body like a mathematical proof. parse down your intricately entwined identities until you are nothing but axioms and postulates, the barest, sparsest, universal truths. that is all i need to know that you are real and that all your points somehow make lines that transverse into planes stacking into polygons that finally comprise the infinite polyhedrons locking together to keep you solid and safe in my arms. if my love for you seems a fatuous conceit, conjecture flung so far off-base, then i will prove it to you as rigorously as i can, as vigorously as i can until doubt is the only incongruence you can find in this grand equation of you and i. until you accept this as your truth: that this one theorem cannot be disproved.

[fistfuls]

minas tirith

maybe you've built your ramparts high enough to eclipse the sun, dug your trenches deep enough to touch the moist, burrowed flesh of the earth. your rib cage is bedecked with every conceivable armour, your chest is padded with steel upon silk upon skin. a watch has been set up to sound the alarm at the first sight of the enemy, but your traitorous heart doesn't know when it's let one in to stay and bring this body to wrath and to ruin.

[fistfuls]

but you can't escape gravity

we dance light and spritely on silver feet, forgetting out steps, but matching the beats of our hearts to its rhythm, swaying on the slivers of waxing moonlight that bring us closer to the sky, and we dance and dance and dance and dance until it's close enough to flying