midnight bottle

[nineintheaftanoon]

I remind myself I have forgotten you, 

in the bustle of the day-to-day, the perpetual grinding of a nine-to-five, 

I do not think of you, I tell myself, you do not cross my mind. 

And yet,

I sit, in the hue of another silent night, another

midnight hour dripping with loneliness, wishing you still wanted to call me yours. 

You see when you told me you wanted to leave, it was like opening a vacuum in my rib cage, and untying all the rigging keeping the mast of what little self-worth I had upright.

Who will love me now? Who will fill the jig-saw void in me that has so glacially moulded itself to resemble only you? 

What will I turn to now when I wonder “what am I worth” - now that the currency of my lovability is null and spent. 

You were always in surplus to me; too good looking, too successful, too put together, too sorted, too god damn over-reached. 

Perhaps that was my down fall from the beginning. To put the heavy burden of appraising my human substance onto you. 

You see,

It felt good to be loved by you. It felt like anchor to ship, constellations to vagabond, the first seedling after an unyielding winter. If someone like you wanted me, then it must mean that I am someone worth wanting. 

But now you are gone, and I am left to rebuild the warehouse of my esteem. 

How are you so much part of my life, so viscerally imbedded into the spaces between my cells, and yet, suddenly become just a story, a story

that with each passing day slowly descends into memorabilia. How?

How can that be? 

How do I find my way back to myself?

Sept 8th 2019

[aqua-regia009]

Dawid Figielek

[yeahwrite]

No thinking–that comes later. You write your first draft with your heart. And you rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is…to write, not to think!

William Forrester (Finding Forrester)

[tylerknott]

Don’t mistake waiting for actually living; start and seek out joy.

Daily Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson (via tylerknott)

[withoutyourwalls]

Tracey Emin, Birds 2012 London Olympic Print, 2011

[dropovers]

[quotemadness]

I’m not used to being loved. I wouldn’t know what to do.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (via quotemadness)

[mostlyfiction]

Sometimes I mourn the past. Mourn the things that were both in and out of my control. I sometimes think of the past as a person that I never met but cannot seem to get out of my head. I mourn the past as if it was the life I was meant to live.

“Past-mourning,” - CB (via mostlyfiction)

[afadthatlastsforever]

A gentle reminder that your heart is a muscle and so should be exercised regularly. Love often and love deeply.

Beau Taplin • A  G e n t l e  R e m i n d e r (via afadthatlastsforever)

[timbllr]

[leebarguss]

[nineintheaftanoon]

Where are you tonight? What are you doing? This is my umpteenth time thinking of you, and it feels just like the first time. The first time we spoke under the summer sun, the first time we shared a meal over your lounge room couch, our first kiss, our first film, our last goodbye. 

You have a song, did you know that? Despite having ‘known’ each other for years now, and i use the word ‘know’ with subtext, I could count the number of times we’ve sat eye-to-eye on one hand. And yet, you have a song. It shuffles into my speakers as I’m driving every now and then, springs itself on me like an April fool’s can of beans. Shoots a dagger right in my heart, to remind me of how you use to feel, and the echoing reality that things are different now. It didn’t happen like the movies, with us, recluse in a hotel room tuning a three decade old radio until something came on that moved us so much that we patented it to be ours. No, it was something different altogether. Lany’s ILYSB (stripped version) is an interesting paradox of a song, in my opinion. On one hand, I find it so beautifully romantic, dripping with the optimism of a summer romance and the sincerity of a seasoned love. But at the same time, there is something haunting about it. Something melancholic, a longing for something, or someone just out of arms reach. Like streetlights changing on an empty street at three in the morning, that feeling. I guess that is how I think of you. 

We are a philosopher’s nightmare. An amalgamation of “what ifs”, and “what could have been”,“what would have been.” I often catch myself ruminating a different reality where we are together, what that would be like. Who would I be in that reality? Perhaps I would have found myself. Perhaps I would have lost myself. It is hard to say. All I know is that any quiet moment after sun down, when the noise has settled and the lights have dimmed low, you are there. And I wonder if I am there for you. If the night carries my whispers cross cities to your window sill. Or whether I’m just singing into the wind. You are the only one who could have become something. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that. I know in my mind I have a hundred times. Too bad you are not clairvoyant. I do not know if this is feeling is love. To be honest I don’t know that much about it. It has always been unfounded speculation, I don’t even know for sure if I will like the taste. All I know is I miss you. I scroll through frames of your life in passing, and I smile knowing you are out there living. You deserve to be. Maybe I could have been the one to give some of that to you. I think I would have liked that, but I was much too entangled in myself to have space for somebody else. But I am working on it. Untying knots are hard, especially when they are buried in the heart, six feet under. I was never good at textiles anyways.

Maybe one day we will sit eye-to-eye again, with dinner on your couch, and a movie we’re not watching playing in the background. Maybe it will simply be two strangers passing on the street. Either way, I hope when that day comes I get the chance to tell you thank you, and that I’m doing okay.  I hope you are as well. 

[confusedwithhell]

[nineintheaftanoon]

Now this scene strikes eerily too close to home, too familiar for comfort. The midnight hour on the cusp of the next day, vacation time, ears plugged shut with a vacuum of music stretching back to years already long forgotten. Knees tucked over limbs, my childhood bed. This, I’ve done before. 

God bless the seeming infinite propensity for the internet to store data, for the enduring option of Tumblr’s ‘archive’ button, and the capacity for words and images and songs and poems to capture the pieces of my soul I had almost forgotten walked before. Reading over some of my past work I am quite inspired, not just by the quality of writing and expressive prowess but how even after all this time, the piece of myself I imbued into those pieces still persists. Like a time capsule, waiting for me to return one day to reminisce on how much things have changed, and how much they’ve somehow managed to stay the same. 

My life was destined for two trajectories; one creative and expressive, the other scientific and compassionate. I think in the hue of adolescence and that odd stint of time we call “coming of age” I was in greatest harmony with these two sides. Still writing, expressing and creating on here while simultaneously pursuing academia. It was a proliferative period. But just like juvenile cells developing in an embryo eventually we all must pick our path, find our niche, our specialty, that channel in which we will come to siphon all our effort, focus and life into. For me that became medicine, and in some ways that became me. Likened to a black hole; immensely overbearing, ambiguously never-ending, insurmountable, and scary. It demands much from a person, and watching doctors around me, established or en route, it appears it is a path burdened with sacrifice. It becomes your life, it becomes your everything. Eclipsing all the other aspects of your sky until you become solely dedicated to the cause. Now, I understand this sounds alarmingly pessimistic and to that I completely agree. And on some level an over-simplification, as if one pursuit is mutually exclusive of all other pursuits. I understand that is not true. But I can’t deny that in the past several years all the things that use to occupy my space have humbly bowed off in way of this career. Inclusive to that is my writing. Reading through past entries tonight reminded me of not just what it use to mean to pen a piece from nothing but an idea, but how cathartic it was, and how, being unapologetically self-aggrandising, I was actually quite good at it. 

There is much to say about where I have been since those days, who I have become, how I have become. So much to write, so much I probably ought to have already written. I am unclear of whether this will be an isolated silo of a piece or the beginning of another chapter. After all, barring tonight’s trip down memory lane and an inkling of realisation about a love past, not much of the stakes have changed. But in saying that, against a backdrop of chronic affliction and a seat in the eye of the storm with my name on it, I have somehow found myself again. And perhaps that means things will be different this time. I really hope that they are. 

[emilyoberg]

[jamesreads]

like old friends meeting, or the dawn breaking into the night, a thousand years of darkness and then a flicker of light. 

art by james r eads, motion by the glitch

[quotemadness]

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

George Orwell (via quotemadness)