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.