Withdrawals.

I try not to dwell on it.
Choking back melancholy painfully on marble stairs, your echoing footsteps to sing of that ache, beating unexpectedly, knocking the wind from my chest. I wasn't supposed to be vulnerable. Neither were you. You weren't supposed to see.

"Come here..."

Gripping arms promise nothing, but hope — tentatively, of course — for more. Or so I'd like to think.

My subconscious runs its fingers through your hair guiltily late at night when I sleep.
It knows it shouldn't. I can do nothing about it.

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Was I like the young girl from Sadec, the bus that took me up the mountain like the boat that took her down the Mekong River for the last time,
her tears as startling to her as mine were to me?

The universality of human experience, of human emotion. For many things, there are no separations of time or space.


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Are we bound, then, to the roads we are able to tread?

Are we bound to find love where we walk? bound to extract life's darkest, most profound secrets from only the few people we are able to meet, the few places we are able to go? bound to find meaning amid the confines of circumstance?

Yes, of course.
What do you expect? A just God?
Fool.


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You wear on my mind, but I'm no longer sure it's you.
Sometimes, I think it's me.
Sometimes, I think you weren't even there at all.

In the Mood for Love.

I think this story was real. I think I was her that one night, sitting across from you. A table for two. Words to mask premonitions. Chatter for pain, talking heavily about the past. But it wasn't really all that heavy, at least, not from my lips.


We are twins, same race, same place. Parallel lives, just a few decades apart from each other.
It doesn't matter. Some things are timeless, anyhow...

Things like this. Emotion, confusion, isolation raw and on fire, searing the bones on my body, the bones in my head. Hoping that in another, we'd both find some footing. But just for the night.

Tomorrow, I will climb a mountain to the very top. Take my secrets and whisper them in a hole and cover it with dirt. No one but the wind will know of my struggle.

Regurgitation.

These days, I feel swallowed.
Masticated, ground up ruthlessly, spit back out, my standards held as steady as my grip on my mind.
I crawl out doorways in clothes I've worn for the past two days. I don't even notice, until
a sidelong glance and a casual comment, "You look like you just woke up."

Woke up from what?
I haven't slept in years. Not that I'd expect you to know anything about me. Or my habits. Or the plague of a whimpering mind, the slow grind of the blade on steel, not to sharpen, but to dull.
That slow grind, how it seeps into your skin.

Fires turn to flickers, passions turn wan.

I burn candles by the window to remind me.