Wish you were here

I keep feeding the darkness my loneliness and soon, the night morphs into a monster, one with a hundred eyes.

Because silence can eat
only so much.

Nowhere to hide now. No use pretense. No escape. Nothing to do but lie back on the grass, hold on to my shadow, gnaw my knuckles and stare these fears down.

I'm so tired.

Because patience wrings
the heart dry.

Every minute is an exercise of tongue-biting will, every hour a recurring nightmare, every dreamless day a deliberate act of absurdity. Time agonizes, admonishes, apologizes, but it goes about its routine like only time can, quietly counting, one second at a time. Every night, I fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

Never knew this could be this hard.

One touch. One whisper ...

So bloody goddamn hard.

... of eternity together.

I hug myself, trying to feel you in the space between my arms, searching for the memory of holding you till dawn came looking for us. I try.

One hug. One wish ...

So hard, so hard, so so so so ... hard.

... for lingering bliss.

Why is it that two people travel best hand-in-hand? Maybe I'm a little ahead of you on this road. Maybe, I'm a little behind. How would I know? You seldom call out. And so, my confessions are all a little tempered; my need carefully calibrated. Lest I get ahead of myself. Lest I lose you in the distance.

When I was little, my father bought me a pair of binoculars, the green of a billiards table.

Because distance breeds
demons and doubts.

One summer afternoon, I discovered that if you looked in the far end, where the black eye-pieces were smaller, the clouds no longer became bigger; they just grew tinier.

Because truth is a trickle
too little, too
fickle.

And if you turned the knob, the birds flew farther and farther away till all you could see was just the blurred outline of the horizon.

Because evenings grow purple
with twilight dread.

Have you ever done that? There was always this brief moment, before I turned the binoculars around and looked in the right end, the right way, one infernal instant when I used to think "What if ...?"

Because tomorrow will come
crashing through the curtains.

Have you ever been caught in that moment when you didn't know if your world was coming back?

And I will wake up
wishing you were here.

Well, have you?

So the f***er finally did it. Well, like my brother used to keep prattling about, twenty years from now, nobody will remember Nadal's early exit and Fedex will have a career grand slam to show his fat kids.

It seems to me that both the artist and the philosopher are preoccupied with the same domain, that of the self.

One seeks to cling to the self, to explore and expand it, to eke out a place of one's own. For the other, all attempts at uniqueness seem folly.

One seeks expression; the other, release. One yearns to be visible; the other will settle for nothing but oblivion.

Trouble is, I don't know who's what.

***

The smallness of your heart comes in various shapes. But then that is bearable even though it's the one thing you have been trying to escape.

What is inescapable, and hence unbearable, is when you confront it in someone you don't want to confront it in.

***

Anger and desire seem to be conjoined. You distill anger from your spirit and later you realize that desire has slinked out the back door. And when anger makes a special appearance, desire starts licking the edges of your soul. While the artist needs both, the philosopher seems dead set against them.