A respite

Facts about you: 

1. You always wrote with such finality, it made me swell with romance but thick in doubt of what our end would be. 

2. This is not about you, it's about me, about how when I saw you,how  everytime I see you, I feel my eyes lit up in hope. 

3. I remember your face lying on your palm, you look away, pensive, I couldn't read your thoughts, you felt so far away from me. My eyes watered unknowingly, I think it's because I tried to swim towards you but you were too far away. I blinked and the blur was washed away. I blinked and you were no longer here. 

4. You love your highlighters. You highlight all your important points in blue, the things you want to take note of in yellow, the things you find hard to remember in orange. 

Is it strange how I think the first few months we met you always wore a blue shirt, the later part of our life together you always spelled my name yellow and the last time I saw you, you cocked your head to the side, as if I was orange, as if you no longer remembered me. 

Have strength

After so many things, after so many hazy miles,
not sure which kingdom it is, not knowing the terrain,


travelling with pitiful hopes,


and lying companions, and suspicious dreams,


I love the firmness that still survives in my eyes,


I hear my heart beating as if I were riding a horse,


I bite the sleeping fire and the ruined salt,
and at night, when darkness is thick, and mourning furtive,


I imagine I am the one keeping watch on the far shore


of the encampments, the traveller armed with his sterile defenses,


caught between growing shadows


and shivering wings, and my arm made of stone protects me.

—Pablo Neruda, from “Sonata and Destructions,”Twenty Poems (The Sixties Press, 1967)