apart

“Love is an act of blood and I’m bleeding a pool in the shape of a heart”
-Dream Theater, Space-dye Vest

the pain is subdued – it would probably bubble to the surface and spring forth in tears if i let myself, but i won’t. i can’t afford to indulge grief, instead, i shall have to adapt. i was hollow that night after you left – i left a few tearstains on your pillow, perhaps, and tried to feel you with me as i huddled beneath the blanket and lay on the bed – your blanket and your bed, but you were not there. that was when my heart ached most, lying alone in the dark as i tried to conjure up a semblance of nearness and illusion of your being and the warmth that we shared once upon a time, an eternity ago that was mere hours past. i suppose it was because i was in denial and knew it, which really spoils the whole point of being in denial.

i left for home soon after waking late the next morning (sleep heals somewhat) – it seemed pointless to mope around in your house (which felt empty somehow) and dwell too much on the past, when, after all, the past is past and there were other things to get done. i drank the last can of nescafe latte that was in the fridge – our drink – and nibbled some chocolate while sitting on the floor of your bedroom and i was quiet and still with my heavy heart for a while, and then i went.

it was an unconventional parting, unconventional like every moment we spent together, and hectic from the start. i suppose it was somehow apt that a whirlwind romance should end (well the honeymoon period anyway) with a whirlwind of sorts.

the whole two days are somewhat blurry now. the images fuse and entangle into shapes and colors and sounds – grocery shopping, running around from shoe shop to shoe shop searching for the perfect pair of budget slippers, washing wet lettuce leaves, cracking eggs and pretending to be useful in the kitchen as you conjured up some sort of carbonara for dinner, the prayer meeting which i snuck out of halfway, sitting on my own on the swing, talking to god and watching stars and the night sky, the last mamak session and the roti bom we shared, meandering the streets past midnight onwards onwards onwards and sleepy-eyed, redesigning your pencil box with liquid paper and marker pens, watching the sunlight glimmer on the waves in pd as you gave me a piggy-back ride splashing through the shallows and feeling the white white sand soft and cool beneath my feet and gritty on my legs and how we waded hand in hand back to the shore trying to follow the sandbar from the little mangrove island in the fading light, two delirious lovers in their own little bittersweet paradise, ever attempting to push aside the knowledge that we were soon to part.

my heart blanked out on me as you ran around in a last-minute attempt to finish packing, because i didn’t want it to be real. the ride to klia was a dream, and the ticketing complications and last-minute scares were enough to push aside the reality of parting for the moment, because there were problems to be solved and things to think about other than love and leaving and leaving love. emotion finally surged back into my numbed heart as we prayed together and i babbled with wet eyes and clutched your hand tightly, not quite knowing what i was saying, only sure of what i was feeling.

and then it was time for you to go.

i didn’t want to let go, as we held each other tight one last time, but i did let go eventually and so did you, and i was crying inside and you knew it, as i gave you my wan half-hearted smiles and we looked into each other's eyes but we knew we had to take this path and so you disappeared down the escalator and across the vast empty cold hall and through the little gate, a small figure turning to wave and i waved back and it was vast empty and cold and i was an insignificant patch of empty coldness that filled the entirety of my world.

and then i turned around and walked away, away, away, as our entwined lives stretched in opposite directions, and distance faded into the burning ache in my heart.

i slept in the car on the way back, because i did not want to feel.

i wanted to write poetry, but i cannot. i have not the words. everything is yet too raw, and the reality of it all has not yet mellowed into eloquence of sorts and i cannot yet sufficiently express the beauty of this pain, the wounds that love inflicts, how we are embracing it all. i am sure that gems will be birthed out of this trial, but i cannot see beyond the silence of my heart, not yet.

i miss you.

distracted

Mm. Yes. I owe flowers and fury a long-overdue update, but unfortunately, I have a rather high distractibility rate. I was planning to get around to writing this afternoon, but I ended up working on a random piece in the making as well as an update for another blog of mine [as I have mentioned, updating multiple blogs is a semi-suicidal affair and definitely not for the faint-hearted!], and then I somehow ended up playing Minesweeper and eventually got very annoyed at my lack of success. That led to determinism to finish at least one! expert game, because no buggery little computer was going to defeat me. So. I ended up clicking little squares on a grid for a rather long time before I finished with the unsatisfying time of 126 seconds, and ended up not doing anything constructive i.e. writing.

And I am here now, hopefully free from distractions. Actually, this blog itself could be viewed as a distraction of sorts. Actually, Jien, you are a distraction. *grin* It’s so like dat lah, this life is – we are supposed to focus on something, then something else comes along [or floats along ;)] and we get distracted. Like now, I really should be writing my college application essays instead, or doing laundry, or even reading a book or *cough* practicing driving. But instead, being the love-struck googly-eyed ooh-ing and aah-ing teenaged girl that I am [indeed, indeed], I’m blogging about my romance. Oh dear.

Actually I don’t really know what I’m doing. Then again, that could be somewhat true of this entire affair. I guess it just shows. ;)

Where was I? Got distracted by bro who came into my room, and then I decided to transfer some of my old emails from the desktop to my notebook. Yet another distraction. We can do only so many things at the same time – some people multi-task better than others, but all the same we are limited and finite, although faced with infinite possibilities. So everything we do do comes at the cost of not doing something else. Doh, you say?

Dearest has been in Fraser’s Hill over the weekend for a spiritual retreat with his myf/church, and I am sort-of waiting for him to appear online at some point or another tonight. He flies off on Thursday night/Friday morning, and the honeymoon will be over and the baptism of fire begun. I wonder what distractions will come our way over the next five years of long-distance; what will tempt us apart, and what is the glue that will keep us together? Which pretty, flirty girls will catch his eye, when his beloved is half a world away? ;p Which long-haired, pierced guitarist dudes am I going to crush on? ;D Will we grow together, or will we grow apart?

Heh heh heh. Such suspense. Stay tuned for the next episode of....

Ish. I’m being lame.

But it is strange. Strange indeed how everything has happened over the past 2 and a half months; the intensity and the love and the pathos and the tears, and all the memories that we have made together – I’m sure it was a pretty unconventional whirlwind romance, as far as whirlwind romances go. Probably because we are such unconventional, unique people ;D And summer ends too soon. It always does.

Sometimes I sit and think wistfully about all the things we wanted to do together – the driving lesson we never had, evening strolls on the beach, visiting Penang/Kelantan/some obscure place, the terribly loooooong list of movies we said we’d watch together but never got around to doing, this and that, this and that. Things that are still on our list of “stuff to do”, the dreams we have together.

Then I sit and think wistfully about all the things we did do. Singapore [the zoo, always the zoo! ;p], Kluang and the overnighters in your Seremban residence and my PJ abode, ConFews and D’Fews and planning meetings, random trips to the mall, all the mamak sessions and teh aises that we shared, splashing around in Sunway Lagoon, reading poetry together in the hot sleepy afternoons, browsing photography books in the bookshop, and more. So much more.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m being too nostalgic, or being too much of a dreamer. :p But we figured we’re both too realistic for things like that. So I will live neither too far in the future nor stranded in the past, but live in the now and live it well.

Then. Aih. You factor into my past, with a multitude of marvelous memories [yay alliteration!] and into my future, with dozens of dazzling dreams [yay alliteration again!], but. But but but but. The time in between seems so indistinct and blur – at least the you part, I guess. Yish.

So we were called together, and now we are called to part. You shall depart for seminary soon to be my dear constipated scholar there – too soon, it seems, and I will depart for my Discipleship Training School a month later.

I will miss you. But out of necessity, these are the paths we take – and I would not change them, and though we part for the moment, may the roads we walk converge again in future.

fallen

I blogged this first on my personal blog a few days back, but it was so much about choosing the us over the me in my life, and how some things are so much more precious than pride. And it was also sort of the catalyst that got flowers and fury started - really started, instead of being some idea that we vaguely talked about. :) Which is why I am re-posting it here lah.

----

[10.10.2004]

Sometimes in life, you feel so very dead, yet very alive. And the evening sun shimmers warmly through the leaves as you lie back flat chilled by your heart in the sun on the bench in the park and feel the wind and wish you could just wing your way along with it and vanish like atoms into the breeze - scattered scattered scattered because that's how you feel, but that's how you can't be. Because you are here here in the now, and you are very very real even though you are very very lost. And you cry silent, and cry out and scream inside and plead with God to take this choice away from you even though you know you have already decided, and let invisible tears fall into the invisible nothingness that surrounds you and you are one and the same with the emptiness. No one hears, because you are alone. And you know you are alone, and realize that you do want to be alone - but not quite. Not really. Not at all. Because you have tasted something so much more. And so you cry because you are here by choice, in a choice you knew that would break you.

And you break - you can't help it, but you can but you don't - but breaking is a slow and painful process as you shatter and struggle and crumble and tear yourself in two and fall apart apart a p a r t and lie there lost and bleeding and yet whole in your pain and whole in your tears and you drag yourself along the path you knew you would take all along but knowing beforehand never makes the choice any easier.

Struggle struggle and stiffen and hold out against yourself. The greatest wars are waged within the heart. The deceitful, deceitful heart. Calloused and bruised, torn and scarred, blind blind blind and afraid and proud and insecure and so settled in pain, so discontentedly settled for a shadow of life, a life with no hurt no vulnerablility no angst no sorrow no pain - but not life, really, save in the name. And you know it.

Speak with the eyes, all the millions of things you want to cry out but cannot. And turn away. Still. Turn. You cannot yet lance the boil, the festering deluge of tears and brokenness and sorrow and love that hovers on the brink of explosion. You are still proudafraidinsecure. So you turn away.

And sometimes too, you try to overcome the agony of thought with concentration on the physical - on movement, on being, measuring your breath slowly in and out in and out keeping calm inhaling exhaling steady, on walking one foot another foot hastily placed left right left right in front of the next on and on just so you can reach that beautiful exhaustion and feel the tired tingling in your calves, the satisfaction of fatigue. And as you walk, you are so so very very conscious of everything around you - of the way the crows float coarsely gentle on the air, the steel shapes of the cars that whiz by and of the reflections in the puddles the mirrors of water that are so easily shattered by your footfalls and you realize it is just like reality reality reality that isn't quite so real after all. And it is all just a reflection but you want something real and tangible to hold but you are afraid of rippling the waters and destroying what you hold dear. Realize that a reflection is but a reflection and you are loving the wrong thing and should turn away from dull mirrors to face the reflected. Turn from a pale mean shadow of life to the full glory of love. You breathe in the air and fill your lungs and close your eyes and realize that you are trying to diminish yourself by drinking in the outside and trying to let it take over the inside so you won't have to face yourself anymore.

But you do. Because you know you treasure this open hurt so much more than your aching selfishness and steely pride, because they weren't the answers you wanted or needed or could truly live in. And this bleeding heart and swollen eyes are yours and ours and therefore beautiful. Somehow. Somehow.

To utter the two phrases that I feared for years. That shattered my pride and my emotional armor. That humbled me and made me so so so damn vulnerable. The [I'm sorry] and [I love you], so short, so potent, so..so. so..

Fallen. And I am glad.

burn and dance

So I started on this a few weeks back, conveniently let it slip out of my consciousness amidst a lot of hectic running around, found it on my pc yesterday and finished it up. Sorta. Well, Jien likes it, and that's good enough. *grin*

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whispersmurmersemotionalflickerings
toss and tumble, light up the night
midnight past and still they dance
through silence serene,
through love and laughter
to pierce my soul, to bind in truth
demanding utterance,
burn and dance.

burn and dance.
the tumbling of truth
in clumsy phrases
that demand their voice
for what would love be
made in quiet choice
if we were afraid and
silent shame reigned instead?

daylight spent waiting,
nights frittered in dreams
new longing in waking
new twinges, new achings
a meeting of souls,
to mingle and fuse
to stretch, to blossom
to grow in hope,
to grow in truth.

confusion that hovers
in peripherial whirlings,
whirling and wishing,
silent and waiting
tingle to see, in this
inbred uncertainty.

freed from me;
to live, to be
empty, yet filled;
incomplete,
yet whole in you.

12.8.2004