But, I love you.
There, my finished prose!
---
But, I love you.
But, I love you.
It’s always the “but” that’s the problem. But, I love you, in spite of all the burn marks you made, welt by ugly welt, lighted cigarette stub carving out invisible words on my skin. I hide the marks from you under slightly damp jacket sleeve and sunglasses which over half my face with lens where I can look out through tinted shades, and no one will see the stains and the swollen raw pink of my eyes, not especially you. No, I face the world with diamond studded walls, blinding everyone with its brilliance just so they won’t bother to look into the dingy, shameful interior, shrouded in half darkness and dimly lit by gaudy fluorescent lights flickering on and off. What is inside is where I seek shelter in from each puncture of your raining arrows, peel off my jacket to reveal the ghastly imprints of love and writhe under the garish lights shaking with muted sobs.
But, I love you.
You have no idea how much it pains me to peek at you from behind closed curtains, dodging every time the wind blows and lifts the curtains up to reveal what’s behind and reappearing every time they fall back into position. I glimpse you standing with slightly hunched back, hands dipped in pockets, tall stature casting a long shadow that forever eclipses me. And my heart gets chipped off little by little as I see you constantly looking towards her direction, the chisel stained with dirty red, diluted red, tastes of metallic and salty intertwined together. When, once, you gazed at me with those eyes of yours (eyelashes so prettily long with the song of the dawn and the rhythm of the rain), mouth curved up to reveal protruding front teeth, now you save these for her, coin by coin accumulating in that glass pig, and you break it to give them all to her, leaving none for me but broken shards radiating silence and reeking of the cold.
You hurl me around like a boomerang, letting me fly up high until reality catches up and crashes me headfirst onto the littered ground. And so I lie there, a lone object accumulating scattered soil and grey raindrops weighing me down with longing and hopes and leaving me streaked with dust when they evaporate under the harsh, harsh sunlight, and I wait until the next time you decide to come back and hurl me off again. I live for those moments of flying; I dream of those instants when you pick me up in your warm grip and I lie in the curve of your hand, snuggled in the contours of your palm for just a brief second of pure happiness. It’s never enough, always too brief, speeding past me before I even have time to squint and for the rest of the days I lie alone, hurting, resentful, with only the chill of the night wind to accompany me in those hoarse thoughts crying out for you.
But, I love you.
And I disgust myself with the way I always follow the candy you dangle in front of my eyes, trotting after it and starving for it, a hungry child whining to her parents. Even knowing that inside those mlulticolour swirls full of what-ifs and what-could-bes was the bitter painful venom of what-was and what-would-happen-again, I still trail after it, fish on bait. I bite the wriggling worm every single time I see it only to feel the hook piercing through my mouth and dragging my entire weight along, and I’m just a helpless naked baby wailing fresh out of the safety of my mother’s womb as I struggle against the pull of the hook and cry out against the excruciating agony, begging for anything to stop this pain, I’ll be good and I won’t fall for the same trick again, but each and every time always ends up with the same result. My heart listens to nothing but itself, the contumacious ball of flesh that suffers from amnesia all the time, the rebellious teenager with spiked pink and green hair blowing bugglegum beside the highway and breaking wooden canes in front of her parents with a smirk. And you know just which call to cry so it follows you like a dog and sells itself to you like a whore, so seducing and enticing is your cry. You know you have the keys to unlock the walls defending my heart, and you do so every time - leaving me vulnerable and defenseless to you, a single leaf ruthlessly carried around by the tide.
But, I love you.
There’s something about you that makes me sigh, and long, and ache for. In the emptiness of the night, I hear the whispers of the night wind and the undertones of your voice, beautiful chords accompanying the melody of my thoughts. And it drifts over me and washes me with memories of you, gentle warm bath foam caressing my skin and soaking the mundane everyday worries, shutting my eyes to you, and only you. I wear your image like a jacket, breathing in your name and sinking myself in the warmed cotton of your presence, knowing that you are somewhere out there and combing my mind for your schedule so I know what you are doing, and somehow running my fingers over your creased timetable makes me feel comforted. You complete me like a puzzle piece fit perfectly into place, like a single rose placed gently into a crystal vase.
I always try to convince myself that I can be content without you, but it only takes one singular message from you to buoy me and lift me up to the blue, blue sky, a helium balloon released from the hand of a child, and only then do I realize that contentment - is not enough. When your words are enough to make boiling bubbles of happiness overflow and gurgle out of me and give an extra dose of rich, rich colour to every object in my vision, my world without you just seems so - dull, like leeched out blood of an ashen corpse, so pale, so wan, so eerily white, lifelessly ambling through each day and willing for it to be over. You make my days beautiful like the sprinkling of stars in the dark night sky.
This is why I love you.
And I yearn to clasp your hand, yearn to lie in your arms, yearn to run my fingers in your hair, yearn to gather all of you inside my embrace, yearn to touch my lips to your eyes, your nose, your lips - yearn to love you freely, yearn for you to love me like how I do you. But (there is always a but) your love is so fickle, and so inconsistent. Loving you is like trying to grip the string of a kite; always flying away from me into the vast skies for freedom, always flying towards someone else. And I’ll shield my eyes and look up into the piercing sunlight at your vibrant body flapping away in the full blast wind, triangular tail trailing behind you and forming a path in the sky - always out of my reach. I’ve tried to roll the string in just so I can be closer to you, but each time the insistent wind tugs harder at that delicate line and I falter, afraid it would break - and I’ll lose you forever after, the recurring nightmare which stalks me for countless nights that I hope will never greet me in reality.
There was once you came so near to me (I could feel your breath on my skin, and your voice just inches away from my ear) I twisted the roll harder just to feel you more, and then the thread almost snapped and you disappeared for so long I thought I would never spy your shadow again, but you came back one euphoric day, a spot of colour in the limitless grey, came back to hover above me again. In those days when you were gone, I would search for you in every tree, hoarse voice shouting my throat desiccated for your name, coarse hands pricked by uncaring thorns and crisscrossed by mocking branches frantically lifting every leaf for your presence (perhaps you were trapped, somewhere, line tangled by a branch?). But you hid from me, shut yourself from me with fogged fortress and refused to hear my desperate cries. Lost in a vacuous world suddenly by myself (and the bus seat beside me cooled and vacant), I almost resigned myself to your absence, a shriveled seed inside a still succulent fruit as I went through each day with a deliberate extra bounce in my footsteps just so no one would suspect anything was wrong - but everything was, everything was - something had ran throughout me and made sure everything was stamped dead and lifeless, and the sandstorms had whipped through mercilessly so everything was just a blur of sand and tears. But you came back, and suddenly I could see the sky again, the sun no longer shunned me, and the extra bounce wasn’t deliberate anymore. And so I content myself with just watching you hovering above me, all the time hungering for more - a hunger which will never be satisfied.
But, I love you -
I wish you could love me back, too.
---
But, I love you.
But, I love you.
It’s always the “but” that’s the problem. But, I love you, in spite of all the burn marks you made, welt by ugly welt, lighted cigarette stub carving out invisible words on my skin. I hide the marks from you under slightly damp jacket sleeve and sunglasses which over half my face with lens where I can look out through tinted shades, and no one will see the stains and the swollen raw pink of my eyes, not especially you. No, I face the world with diamond studded walls, blinding everyone with its brilliance just so they won’t bother to look into the dingy, shameful interior, shrouded in half darkness and dimly lit by gaudy fluorescent lights flickering on and off. What is inside is where I seek shelter in from each puncture of your raining arrows, peel off my jacket to reveal the ghastly imprints of love and writhe under the garish lights shaking with muted sobs.
But, I love you.
You have no idea how much it pains me to peek at you from behind closed curtains, dodging every time the wind blows and lifts the curtains up to reveal what’s behind and reappearing every time they fall back into position. I glimpse you standing with slightly hunched back, hands dipped in pockets, tall stature casting a long shadow that forever eclipses me. And my heart gets chipped off little by little as I see you constantly looking towards her direction, the chisel stained with dirty red, diluted red, tastes of metallic and salty intertwined together. When, once, you gazed at me with those eyes of yours (eyelashes so prettily long with the song of the dawn and the rhythm of the rain), mouth curved up to reveal protruding front teeth, now you save these for her, coin by coin accumulating in that glass pig, and you break it to give them all to her, leaving none for me but broken shards radiating silence and reeking of the cold.
You hurl me around like a boomerang, letting me fly up high until reality catches up and crashes me headfirst onto the littered ground. And so I lie there, a lone object accumulating scattered soil and grey raindrops weighing me down with longing and hopes and leaving me streaked with dust when they evaporate under the harsh, harsh sunlight, and I wait until the next time you decide to come back and hurl me off again. I live for those moments of flying; I dream of those instants when you pick me up in your warm grip and I lie in the curve of your hand, snuggled in the contours of your palm for just a brief second of pure happiness. It’s never enough, always too brief, speeding past me before I even have time to squint and for the rest of the days I lie alone, hurting, resentful, with only the chill of the night wind to accompany me in those hoarse thoughts crying out for you.
But, I love you.
And I disgust myself with the way I always follow the candy you dangle in front of my eyes, trotting after it and starving for it, a hungry child whining to her parents. Even knowing that inside those mlulticolour swirls full of what-ifs and what-could-bes was the bitter painful venom of what-was and what-would-happen-again, I still trail after it, fish on bait. I bite the wriggling worm every single time I see it only to feel the hook piercing through my mouth and dragging my entire weight along, and I’m just a helpless naked baby wailing fresh out of the safety of my mother’s womb as I struggle against the pull of the hook and cry out against the excruciating agony, begging for anything to stop this pain, I’ll be good and I won’t fall for the same trick again, but each and every time always ends up with the same result. My heart listens to nothing but itself, the contumacious ball of flesh that suffers from amnesia all the time, the rebellious teenager with spiked pink and green hair blowing bugglegum beside the highway and breaking wooden canes in front of her parents with a smirk. And you know just which call to cry so it follows you like a dog and sells itself to you like a whore, so seducing and enticing is your cry. You know you have the keys to unlock the walls defending my heart, and you do so every time - leaving me vulnerable and defenseless to you, a single leaf ruthlessly carried around by the tide.
But, I love you.
There’s something about you that makes me sigh, and long, and ache for. In the emptiness of the night, I hear the whispers of the night wind and the undertones of your voice, beautiful chords accompanying the melody of my thoughts. And it drifts over me and washes me with memories of you, gentle warm bath foam caressing my skin and soaking the mundane everyday worries, shutting my eyes to you, and only you. I wear your image like a jacket, breathing in your name and sinking myself in the warmed cotton of your presence, knowing that you are somewhere out there and combing my mind for your schedule so I know what you are doing, and somehow running my fingers over your creased timetable makes me feel comforted. You complete me like a puzzle piece fit perfectly into place, like a single rose placed gently into a crystal vase.
I always try to convince myself that I can be content without you, but it only takes one singular message from you to buoy me and lift me up to the blue, blue sky, a helium balloon released from the hand of a child, and only then do I realize that contentment - is not enough. When your words are enough to make boiling bubbles of happiness overflow and gurgle out of me and give an extra dose of rich, rich colour to every object in my vision, my world without you just seems so - dull, like leeched out blood of an ashen corpse, so pale, so wan, so eerily white, lifelessly ambling through each day and willing for it to be over. You make my days beautiful like the sprinkling of stars in the dark night sky.
This is why I love you.
And I yearn to clasp your hand, yearn to lie in your arms, yearn to run my fingers in your hair, yearn to gather all of you inside my embrace, yearn to touch my lips to your eyes, your nose, your lips - yearn to love you freely, yearn for you to love me like how I do you. But (there is always a but) your love is so fickle, and so inconsistent. Loving you is like trying to grip the string of a kite; always flying away from me into the vast skies for freedom, always flying towards someone else. And I’ll shield my eyes and look up into the piercing sunlight at your vibrant body flapping away in the full blast wind, triangular tail trailing behind you and forming a path in the sky - always out of my reach. I’ve tried to roll the string in just so I can be closer to you, but each time the insistent wind tugs harder at that delicate line and I falter, afraid it would break - and I’ll lose you forever after, the recurring nightmare which stalks me for countless nights that I hope will never greet me in reality.
There was once you came so near to me (I could feel your breath on my skin, and your voice just inches away from my ear) I twisted the roll harder just to feel you more, and then the thread almost snapped and you disappeared for so long I thought I would never spy your shadow again, but you came back one euphoric day, a spot of colour in the limitless grey, came back to hover above me again. In those days when you were gone, I would search for you in every tree, hoarse voice shouting my throat desiccated for your name, coarse hands pricked by uncaring thorns and crisscrossed by mocking branches frantically lifting every leaf for your presence (perhaps you were trapped, somewhere, line tangled by a branch?). But you hid from me, shut yourself from me with fogged fortress and refused to hear my desperate cries. Lost in a vacuous world suddenly by myself (and the bus seat beside me cooled and vacant), I almost resigned myself to your absence, a shriveled seed inside a still succulent fruit as I went through each day with a deliberate extra bounce in my footsteps just so no one would suspect anything was wrong - but everything was, everything was - something had ran throughout me and made sure everything was stamped dead and lifeless, and the sandstorms had whipped through mercilessly so everything was just a blur of sand and tears. But you came back, and suddenly I could see the sky again, the sun no longer shunned me, and the extra bounce wasn’t deliberate anymore. And so I content myself with just watching you hovering above me, all the time hungering for more - a hunger which will never be satisfied.
But, I love you -
I wish you could love me back, too.