tenth-of-july

[tenth-of-july]

a glutton for romance

I write, my fingers gripping tightly on the pen that was starting to look blurry through my glassy vision. It was incredibly frustrating to hear the constant scribbling and my head spilling out words that continue to clench around my chest. No matter how hard I put punctuation marks with every sentence or paragraph or phrase I put into the material, my fists do not stop contracting and the blood that runs through my body resumes to prickle my heart.

I write, still. Even as my chest started to rise and fall in an unusual pattern, hiccups that I force to swallow but end up choking on. I write despite not knowing if I had flooded the room or if I still had my grip on the words in the paper's lines.

It was not fair.

It was not fair that I kept waiting and waiting and waiting. They tell me the right person will come, but it has been years. When does the waiting stop? When will the yearning cease to exist? I am devastated and revolted by the thought that romance is the only quintessence that is keeping me alive. I wish I was a normal person.

I wish I only write so as not to compensate for what I don't possess.

[tenth-of-july]

a yearning

I am revolted by the thought of flesh meeting mine and the perceptions of my extricated mind. But all I really want is to breathe the same air as everyone else has inhaled for the past years I've stayed still.

I bet it smells like a memory I've once lost and redeemed or the history of who I was once in the eyes of the dead. And when I see it, I want to carve up the hope of it being sunbathed in a February afternoon or the tapping of globules during an evening drizzle.

I want that atmosphere, I fear my temperament, I yearn for change. To be covered in specks of vermilion and watch the world collapse under a glimpse of an eye refracted from the sun's radiance, to throwing coins in wells with wishes and hearing it collide on the surface of the water.

There are 365 days in a year and I watch the sun dip with every evening to come, the infatuation of my arms being held and the hours of my eyes closed to dream remain stagnant as I watch and listen to it condense into liquid, plummeting over the window where I'm leaning in.

[tenth-of-july]

I can hear my own heartbeat thirty minutes before midnight after turning off the music playing from my devices. I hear how it calls to me under the florescence of the laptop I use to write. It is alive and I am breathing, I am able to think and able to type this, I can hear it whispering in my ears and the subtle movement it makes beneath my chest. Years and years of midnights have passed, tonight I only douse myself with the pulsing of my cardiac. I am alive and my heart is the truth-teller.

[tenth-of-july]

is it over now?

How am I supposed to come up with new words out of over 600,000 entries in the Oxford dictionary just so I could avoid reusing all of what you left me? How do you explain the same type of pain that has lashed through your body over and over under a million times already? Would I be able to showcase the limit of my abilities through this piece? Can I recycle the words I used such as how devastating it was when your silhouette is still ingrained in the back of my mind to the point where I could spot you first in a room full of people under an already unusual day? Or how I remain breathless and unmoving in the coffin that you helped me build? All of these jumbled up letters that form into words meant to describe and relate to what I feel or have felt, will lie meaningless by the end of my point as its taste will subside but uncomfortably linger like the improperly flamed gin I mixed with grape juice to memorialize the morning I first saw you after a year of wanting to erase the traces of us from the capabilities of my episodic memory that right now, am unfortunate to have—from your face, to your voice, and down to the specific way your head would turn when you get to hear me call your name. What else is there to write other than the repetition of my woes and my alliterated miseries written between the lines of my poetry? 

How do I tell someone the fortuities hidden beneath this one encounter, perfectly timed at the 375th day (precisely a year and ten days; the tenth day, being the date of our parting) since that damned birthday party with the same drink I concocted and the similar restaurant where we had our first date? How do I tell someone that even after I chose to ignore your Christmas greeting last year, even after my third “last entry” about you in my journal, I still feel you cutting through me—and not in a way that someone would expect. Usually, it could mean that I yearn for you again, that I would like to talk it through and maybe change your mind if I were to gamble with my luck—But no one could ever be more wrong if they were to assume that to me. The closest word I can provide is torturous. My heartstrings, already tangled and unkempt outside the shells of every body system that any human being should encompass, beaten and tugged away yet again. When I walked through the door in that fast-food restaurant to escape from the pre-afternoon heat outside, I knew it was all over when the glint of your glasses led me to a spiral all those months ago. I looked away just when you noticed me walking in, your brows lifting in surprise and I think we had that same thought of, “Why now? On the last day of the semester? Just a year after?” I wanted to let you know that I knew we were in the same room that day, but then what? What would I do if I were to ever acknowledge you and the months that have passed without even a word from each other? That I forced myself to ignore your greetings in holidays because I was afraid of bursting? I sat behind your table, your back completely within my gaze, and I felt like I consumed a whole bottle of vodka at the sight of you trying to find my face through the front of your camera. I wanted to throw up and purge every drop of blood that was inside of me because you have already taken everything and what else was there left for me to keep but my organs and its vessels? This sudden pull occurred in the most agonizing way possible, happening in the blink of an eye—or more accurately (and quite literally)—in the blink of your eye. And now, I am forced to accommodate the fact that you remain constant on the soil where I stand as well. 

[tenth-of-july]

Corine,

You envelop me with the shade of night that reveled itself a year ago, the moment I knew I liked people in suits with their hair up and united worlds by spilling their words below the stage. We were in the height of something greater than continuous shots of dopamine, there was confetti in every corner of the gymnasium with people scattered on the dance floor, everyone's attention pinned to the blasting music and impressive dance moves. But my eyes never left your silence on the bleachers, my way across to you was the sea being parted, and that was when I knew you deafened the noise that surrounded me.

[tenth-of-july]

In betrayals, there is peace.

After three consecutive betrayals from friends who you thought had understood you from the very depths of your whole, and heartbreaks from people who were subtly interconnected with those prior betrayals, you think that peace is long gone from the hauntings of your past. How can you think of peace when all you can hear, see, feel, and dream about are those specific events placed at the tip of your adolescence? I found myself running towards pursuits to fill the time where they could eventually creep up on me. I found a job, joined a community, went back to reading, studied harder, all that effort just for the thoughts to consume me at night when I am most vulnerable and with nothing to think of. 

With the realization that they continue to wrap their arms around me even after my attempts of blocking them out, I stopped running and ended up searching for other people who could fill in the spaces they left with no one to occupy. And you think that this person who makes you laugh, treats you drinks, checks up on you, gives you presents, sings karaoke with you, records an instrumental to one of your favorite songs, makes a list of the things of what to do when you're upset, are these people who can make you whole again. So why was I still left empty handed despite them all?

Those people can say whatever they want to say—however they want to make it sound, but those people I have talked to will never make me forget how "they" would say or sound and that is not as remotely close as to theirs. I am all those people ever want, but "they" were all I ever wanted. I still end up with loose fragments of "them" mainlined in the stems of my brain to perceive those people as a substitute of "them". And I am mad that those people are not a carbon copy, that no one is a decent replacement; mad that there is only "them" that makes me write like this, how I write like it's my type of an enormous intake of dopamine. I say "them" as a bundle of people who have collectively trickled down the veins of my existence. The people of my betrayals. 

With never finding peace comes the intrinsic entwinement with grief, and in the past, I once read a conversation from the internet and it goes as, "How do you process grief?" and the reply was, "By running from it until it finds me in the middle of a sunny street on a beautiful day". The conversation perfectly encapsulates what I feel most of the time. Sometimes I find myself walking down the street on my way to a destination and enjoying my day when I am suddenly reminded of my past with who I used to be with the people who have betrayed me, and I get stuck in an endless loop thinking of what we were, what happened in between, and what we could have been.

Now with finding peace, they say it comes with acceptance and forgiveness. I imagine getting up during a beautiful morning and coming to a realization that what happened happened—that I don't feel anything bad about it anymore, and that I forgive everyone who has ever made me feel less from the trials and tribulations given to me. I imagine that to realize you are at peace with the past, is to receive it in a peaceful position. Peace, presumably, should be received in its own form—peaceful.

But to me, peace did not serve itself in a silver platter. It did not wake me up in a beautiful morning where birds chirped their songs and the noise from outside miraculously formed into melodies. But rather, peace punched me in the gut during Christmas Eve at twelve-thirty, one of the most depressing and frustrating nights I have ever lived to experience, with two separate messages and forty-six characters: "Merry Christmas! Hope you're doing well now!!!" 

It was a message from someone who, in context, was not part of the betrayals, but a part of the heartbreaks. Though, he serves as a main component of what stirred inside me that stitched together both betrayals and heartbreaks when his audacious remains that were left in the bottom layers of my mind has resuscitated itself with those messages. It opened up the type of wound that I have been meticulously tending to, and his words sprinkled salt and poured vinegar all over it.

Other than feeling the burning sensation of this metaphorical wound, I also felt like I got shot, and that bullet perfectly pierced through the layers of my skin right in the heart. A flawless and consummate trigger, forcefully spilling out the carefully hidden and well-kept thoughts that I no longer wanted to confront. Something exploded inside my body and it ripped itself open—an inspiration born from his audacity and my reoccurring hurt. And so I write my frustrations away, the highlight of my piece being my third sentence, "Christ's Mass and the nailing of Jesus was not told for people like you to come back to one's life after four months of desperate prayers to make the sick feeling and churning of my stomach with just the thought of you to go away". It was relieving having the words come out of me, but almost unbelievable that I was able to write something so intricate and beautiful in a sentence—but also so devastating, like a black veil worn by widows in the funerals of their husbands. After finishing my two-paragraphed piece that I like to call a "prose poetry", characterized by its absence of stanzas but bounteous of figurative language, the rest of what's left in my system continued to spill out. It was the continuous flow of my blood, my words, coming out from the hole left by the pistol, free and unforgiving. I write again and again, my thoughts seemingly never ending. I write about him for another four or five times. I write about them as well. Their betrayals, their sins, their virtues, how I used to imagine them, and how they are and will continue to be eternally etched in my marrows. It continued to spiral, my love for writing and the want to contribute to my kind of genre. I write about my love for my sister, my mother, my disgust for certain metaphors, my view and desperation for romance, my loneliness, me.

As I continue writing these complicated pieces of literature dedicated to people who have hurt and loved me in the past, I learned two things: One, I do not need to forgive and forget to find peace. I learned to live with remembering. They are found in the corners of my room where the miscellaneous lie, the sebum of unwashed dishes, the freshly pressed clothes, or the excessive ink on my pen. It may not be as constant anymore, but I allowed it to stay, acknowledging it, but never accepting as I did not deserve any of what was given to me. I can never accept. Two, to succumb to writing literature and showing it to people is my way of finding peace. Writing this is my peace. The relief of putting it into words is like being able to knit tangled yarns in different colors. And people being able to read my pieces and encode them on their own gives me a sense of being partially heard—my pain and bearings seen as a mosaic of some sort. It is a form of art—it is my art. And I wouldn't want it any other way. 

Peace is subjective, and my idea of it is unfortunately not a one-size-fits-all. It can be deemed as misguiding or vindictive, that I cannot let go of the past despite the years that have passed. But to me, soaking in the hurt is my form of healing. I let myself be exposed to the situation over and over until I am eventually unfazed. I write it down no matter the state of my mind or the colors of the clouds, doing nothing but materializing the happenings as letters that form into words, into sentences, and until it ultimately becomes a coherent pattern of my thoughts. So after three consecutive betrayals and heartbreaks from friends and others who you thought had understood you from the very depths of your whole, you think that peace is long gone from the hauntings of your past. It isn't. When peace punched me in the gut that Christmas Eve, there was a pang in my chest and a long to express—I felt alive again. I wanted to write. Peace is where I am and what I am doing right now. It is the flow of my thoughts and the tapping of my fingers. It is the beating of my heart and my ability of feeling. Peace is always with me for as long as I am able to turn everything into words.

[tenth-of-july]

i will forcefully leave traces of my teeth in the flesh of people I have given a chunk of my heart to and let them run off with it to individuals whose hearts are already full as I sew what is left of me alone, knowing full well that I will only be whole once they have no one else to run off to again.

[tenth-of-july]

The umbrella has a skeleton of six ribs to hold out the comfort of a person, but to me, it takes twenty-four—and it takes yours.

[tenth-of-july]

We never met up in mornings, only in afternoons or evenings. Why do we need to when mornings are for beginnings and we had nothing to begin with?

[tenth-of-july]

a requiem

as happy as I am for the others, I do not wish to sit in the back tables of banquets, celebrating over someone's shared love. I swallow dandelion greens and turmeric to ease the bitter pain, but I still somehow end up in a coffin, in a mass I never want.

everyone could be standing at my wake and they would see my face, pink and pale from the lipstick and uneven contours. They don't notice that a finger is missing on my left hand where a ring is supposed to be linked to the veins near my heart. They only see the face of a woman who has smiled, laughed, cried, and yelled in front of them; but they never see the finger that has waited for a ring or any symbolic object to reassure her that romance is not as dead and cold as her.

they pray for my departure but I refuse to go; for what is the purpose of a requiem, what is the purpose of my dead body, my hands, my fingers, if there is nothing to hold?

[tenth-of-july]

my integumentary system is familiar of even the thought of you that bounce around the voices of people I barely know; they tickle through the cracks of my goosebumps as the words continue to sort themselves into sentences until it eventually forms a coherent conception of who we were, what happened in between, and what we could have been. they continue to feel familiar deep through the layers of my skin, below my subcutaneous, inside my marrows, and around my tendons.

[tenth-of-july]

trucks

I dream of a truck.

I dream of its two bright lights, like lingering eyes hungry for something to seep.

I dream of its massive entirety, ready to collide with a body as small as mine.

I dream of many trucks all at once, my key from deprivation.

When I dream of trucks, I dream of a sense of belonging to nothing. I dream of no inhibition, of no commitment.

I dream of my particles scattering across the air; my blood, sweat, tears, and dreams; all out in the open for everyone to see.

I would love for everyone to see, a smooth finale of my dream.

To dream of trucks and being in the air, is a dream I wish myself to sleep.

[tenth-of-july]

Solace

solace is a person who I have not felt for two hundred and forty-six days. Solace taps my knee to hand me my drink, sprays me vanilla perfume, gives me the last of his spiked ice tea, pats my forehead with a handkerchief, hugs me in the middle of a concert, lets me sleep on his shoulder, travel miles to pick me up inebriated, explains the scientific difference of drinking with and without the fan facing you, discusses the color psychology of restaurants, and leaves first. Solace revolves for a month and ten days and I would call it a decade.

[tenth-of-july]

day 246

you can say whatever you want to say — however you want it to sound, but you will never make me forget how he would say or sound something like that. How do you even explain to someone when you are tearing up because someone jokingly called you the endearment of "baby"? He has never called me that, but receiving it sounds scandalous, as if I've betrayed him by wanting to forget him so I talk to other people but they only look distorted and wrong after they praise or worship me.

I am all you ever want, he was all I ever wanted. I end up with loose fragments of him mainlined in the stems of my brain to perceive you as a substitute of him. And I'm mad that you're not a carbon copy, that no one is a decent replacement; mad that there is only him that makes me write like this, the enormous intake of dopamine.

[tenth-of-july]

day 221

"There was a girl who was good with words," maybe there is a timeline that you would end up aching as you read this; if you ever saw the mountains of excerpts from holes I dug beneath the earth's soil with my bare hands, fingers bleeding for the familiar warmth I've lost for what seemed like decades, because of you. In my point of view, it has been seventy years.

Every once in a while, the sentimentality comes back and I embrace it with open arms because who was I if not known for self-destructive behaviors and the continuous longing for miseries? Maybe there was a truth to your opening line, I am good with words; but when I was with you, no words would come out and only did it spill when you so terribly forced it out of me by leaving. I have embraced the unknown just like you said and was only caught off-guard on the ninth day, failing the system that circulates throughout my body. And yes, there were so many stories, but ours tore me apart the most.

I'm still good with words, am I not? (My writing has gotten better, I have not)

—————————————————————

This needs a bit of context to be understood fully so here it is. These are the lines from the poem he made for me that I decided to use as a parallel to this work:

"There was a girl who was good with words"

"Embrace the unknown, but guard your heart"

"Cause plenty of these stories will tear you apart"

[tenth-of-july]

sometimes I feel like romance is an obscure piece of a three-dimensional shape that I find difficulty fitting into any part of my hollow framework. Everything I do in relation to it is always somewhat insufficient or too much. It's deemed as odd or desperate if I unlock my phone to actively seek for someone to fill my void, that it's a waste of time if I continue to wait for someone to naturally sweep me off my feet on roads I barely cross or in libraries I pass to bookmark lines of poetry I find endearing; how there's no point in pursuing your interest in a person if they don't check each box, or when you're left with a lie that they will come back from someone you actually want to risk your ego and pride.

romance should not be difficult, I perceived that one myself. I see it in every corner and crevice in places I've been and have never been to. In parties, in streets, in institutions, in histories, in books that are labelled as "non-fiction", in the arms of my friends, and in every piece of media that my eyes have laid upon. Their romances were perfectly shaped for them, and I have tried to carve mine with my own two hands in every way I could ever imagine so why has it not plunged deep inside me yet?

maybe romance is as simple as they say. That it is merely existing in the shape of a sculptured heart. And what's left is my body; maybe chiseled wrongly, proportioned with the wrong measurements, and cut too deep for a shallow and uncomplicated chunk of affection. So maybe it is not romance that is shaped indistinctly, but it is I who am hollowed out unearthly.

[tenth-of-july]

decay

ants crawl over my skin in bed, bruised and purple. They hold a portion of my flesh and inject their poison. But that is not the cause of my decay, not the soil shoved in my mouth nor the maggots planted in my ear. It is the removal of my organs and the beating of my heart. My hands were caught red-handed, the ones at the scene of the crime. My fingers sunk their nails deep to my core, grasped its structure, and ripped it all out disfigured and bloody. Now I am left with concaves and mushrooms sprouting from the empty spaces where my eyeballs used to roll.

I was dead sixty minutes ago, a living and breathing carcass. Bit by bit, my body pulled me onto the mattress and now I lay there unmoving and rotten, wondering if I had made the right choice to willingly give it all up and succumb myself to the tragedy of life and the birth of a biosphere.