davecortel

[davecortel]

it’s not the people; it’s me—

or maybe it’s the weight of me,

the way i carry my own shadow

like a gun pressed to my temple.

don’t worry; i’m not pulling the trigger.

but some days, it feels like

even the sound of laughter

is too sharp, too loud—

like blood dripping onto something clean.

it’s just that the world inside me

has its own gravity,

its own weather—

and today, it’s raining.

not the kind of rain you dance in,

but the kind that floods the room,

fills your lungs,

makes you feel like breathing

is an act of war against yourself.

sometimes, i just can’t explain it.

how do you tell someone,

“it’s not you—it’s the way

my chest feels like it’s collapsing

under its own weight”?

how do you say,

“i’m sorry, but my body is a battlefield,

and i can’t invite you in without

showing you the blood on the walls”?

i cancel plans.

i turn off my phone

because it’s easier to disappear

than to admit that today,

i’m not whole enough

to hold a conversation.

[davecortel]

i tell myself that forgiveness is strength, that to let go is to rise above. but each time i forgive you, it feels more like surrender. i am tired of handing you the blade and pretending not to notice when you cut me again.

you say you’re sorry, and for a moment, i believe you. like the way a narra tree believes in the rain—welcoming it, craving it, until it comes too heavy, too much, flooding the roots and breaking the trust of the earth below.

i want to scream at you, shake the ground you walk on, show you the map of scars you’ve left on me. but instead, i smile. i forgive. i let you back in, only to watch you undo me again and again, as if my anger means nothing.

how many times can a heart fold itself into forgiveness before it tears? how much more can i give before there’s nothing left of me but the ache of what used to be whole? i wonder if you even see it—the toll, the weight, the way my hands tremble each time i pick up the pieces you’ve scattered.

loving you feels like a war i’m too tired to keep fighting. forgiving you feels like losing. and yet, here i am, opening the door once more.

[davecortel]

somewhere in me, the fire is just embers now.

life used to feel like a kapok tree in bloom—bursting, chaotic, alive. now it feels like the quiet shadow under a narra tree, heavy and unmoving. i’ve been through the ups, the downs, the bends in the road that everyone says make life worth living. but all i see now is the same cycle, spinning endlessly, like a river that only leads back to itself.

people aren’t who they say they are. even the ones i trusted most. their words, soft as molave leaves, cut sharper than i thought they could. and the more i look around, the more i realize how hollow connections can be, how promises dry up like fallen talisay leaves in the sun.

i turn to my vices—thinking maybe the smoke, the buzz, the blur of it all will soften the edges. but even they betray me now. no comfort, no escape. only the same stillness that follows a storm, when everything looks the same but feels different, wrong.

the world keeps spinning, and i stand still beneath it, like a dying acacia, its roots still deep but its branches tired. i want to feel alive again, but i’ve forgotten how. it’s not sadness—it’s quieter than that, like waiting for rain in the dry season. like hoping the cycle will break before i do.

[davecortel]

you disappoint me sometimes. not with big betrayals, but with small cracks that split the foundation we’ve built. you forget to see me when i’m standing right here, holding every part of me out to you, open-handed, unguarded. and yet, i love you still. even when it hurts. even when i know i shouldn’t.

to love you is to hold my breath, to live in the silence between heartbeats, to carry a joy that is always tinged with sorrow. but it’s mine. you’re mine, even if the world can never know. and that, somehow, is enough.

[davecortel]

—there’s a kind of love that doesn’t know how to end.

i care for you in ways i can’t undo, like rain caring for the earth even when the flood comes. i want to say i forgive you, and maybe i already have, because forgiveness feels lighter than the burden of holding onto what hurt me. but forgiveness doesn’t mend the place where trust once lived. that part of me feels hollow now, like a house stripped of its windows.

you see, trust isn’t a thing you rebuild—it’s a thing you grow. and the soil between us, once rich and fertile, has turned to salt. not because i wanted it to, but because some wounds never stop whispering their truths.

i wish it could be different. i wish i didn’t flinch at the memory of your voice, at the way promises sounded so certain before they shattered. but wishing doesn’t change the shape of what’s already broken.

letting go isn’t an act of cruelty. it’s an act of survival. it’s me loving you from a distance, the way the moon loves the tide—pulling and retreating, pulling and retreating, until we’re nothing more than the echoes of what we once were.

[davecortel]

it’s the expectation that cuts the deepest, isn’t it? to think you’d show up as something whole when you’ve only ever been fragments. i see that now. how unfair of me to want completion from someone still piecing themselves together.

still, my heart aches like an overwatered plant, heavy and spilling onto everything around it. you didn’t break me. but you didn’t hold me either. and that, i think, is the hardest truth to carry.

[davecortel]

once i beat the depression and the burnout and the anxiety and the loneliness and the exhaustion and the guilt and the awkwardness and the apathy and the low income and the chronic illness and the impatience and the vulnerability and the creative block and the capitalism and the cruelty THEN you'll see

[davecortel]

not to sound traumatized, but it feels unreal that someone can just miss you and want you around so often. I feel like every worry within me keeps repeating, “until when? until when?” and the people I love and that love me confirm, “as long as you’d like.”

[davecortel]

So I’m gay? Just because I like sucking other men’s dicks and falling in love with them ? Thats all it takes these days ?

[davecortel]

mastering being detached from everything yet being connected to everything at the same time. this is the secret to life i think

[davecortel]

its important to almost get hit by a car once a week to remind yourself that you arent scared of being hit by a car

[davecortel]

[davecortel]

Shoutout to the people who don’t think double texts seem clingy or uncool text me all day spam me I’m into that kinda shit.

[davecortel]

[davecortel]

Maria (2024)

[davecortel]

Maria (2024)

[davecortel]