loneliness

An Open Letter to a Lost Friend

poetry 

I am writing this 
in response to the 
overwhelming hole I caused 
within my own heart.

A heart that was 
blackened by darkness,
 shrunken and shrivelled 
by the overhwhelming urge 
to cast love away.

You see, 
the first thing that books 
never tell you about 
depression
is not the loneliness 
you feel inside,
(lord knows I know enough of that)
but the loneliness 
it creates around you.

(The very same loneliness that made
me push you away,
afraid of exposing the darkness within.)

You may ask why I kept silent,
but what you 
may never understand
is that opening up about the darkness
is far more treacherous
than keeping it hidden.

(You can wrap a cold
heart in silence
until the broken beats
disappear from fuzzy ears.)

And it is for this reason
I never told you, friend,
and for that reason
I guess our friendship
has come to an end.

I am no better now
than I was then -
my heart is barely healed,
wrapped in patchwork fabrics of
silence, loneliness, lethargy.

There are days when I wake up
without feeling awake at all.
I am constantly 
drifting in a sleepy conscious,
tip toeing a line between 
the light and this darkness,
wondering if anyone 
would try to stop me
from plunging into the deep.

The place where
my blackened heart lay, friend,
is the place where our
friendship is buried today -
wrapped in patchwork fabrics of
my silence, regret, and anger.

I am sorry friend
for the unanswered 
calls and texts,
the cancelled plans,
 and the friendship 
I traded for rest. 

There's a lump in my throat 
when I talk to you -
a painful lump that is there
because I don’t know how
to speak to you 
without wanting to burst out 
in apologies
and explanations.

But what you may never know
is how you still kept 
the darkness at bay
even though I never 
gave you a chance
to know that it existed.

So thank you
for healing my heart
without knowing its 
terminal illness.

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Thimble

poetry 
She holds regret between her teeth 
like a red thread of punishment
she can’t fit through a needle -
every time she tries to get rid of it,
his face pricks the corner of her thoughts
and she starts all over again.
 
She sits there, 
a reproachful patchwork of emotions
picking at the loose threads that lay 
between him and her,
like a vulture who picks 
at bones already clean of meat.
She was threadbare, 
hanging like broken seams
cut from blue muslin squares 
and bleached in the sun.
 
Smells of mothballs 
and old fabric clippings
rushed the insides of her nostrils, 
while she unspun a new spool of black thread, 
replacing the red one -
frayed and covered in her saliva.
The remnants of desperate attempts 
to force a broken thing into working.
 
When she pulls the black thread through -
when she no longer feels 
a familiar tug on the sinews 
connecting her heart to her ribcage -
she allows herself to take in the colours
of the world she knew before:
ochres, indigos, mauves, even pewters -
thimbles to the needle 
memories that pricked her mind. 
 
Weaving the needle in and out -
through loops woven from moments
stitched into her skin and mind,
she embroiders
the story of letting go.

Prompt: “1. … find a passage [of your writing] dominated by your attention to imagery and the way your language sounds… Transfer it onto a page and begin making a poem from this skeleton.” from Nancy Pagh’s Write Moves, pg 44.

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