sad

When Two Gazes Meet

poetry 

A fire burns strongly
in the night,
feeding off  the
oxygen that leaves
my body every time
his gaze meets mine.

I see his eyes’ warmth flicker
on and off
like the filament
of a lightbulb,
turning a shade darker 
when scanning the mass
then
burning brightly when
the orbs align with mine.

Nerve fibres 
catch on fire, kindling 
to my sweaty palms and
the shaky breath
that rattles in my chest.

A fire has started that
we cannot control,
a conflagration
that burns the room 
around us,
scorching the bodies of 
the occupants within.

These people are oblivious
To the blaze that 
creeps up the walls, 
fed by the tug of heartstrings
pulled taught with separation.

They are oblivious
to the heat
to the burn
to the pain
of two people locking eyes
across a crowded room.

Nocturne

poetry 

Over time,
her mouth became 
a string instrument 
tightened with the tension 
of constraining her words.

Measures between her laughs
and ivory smiles grew longer,
each beat of silence 
lingering for just 
a note too long.

More often than not,
tired sandpaper lids scrape
against the white expanse
of her eyes, exposing the 
red vein strings
hiding beneath;
they turn the half note circles
below into shades 
of a minor key.

At night,
her heart thrums to the rhythm
of a staccato symphony:
rising, rising, rising,
as if her conductor brain
commands it -
faster, faster, faster.

Frantic thoughts 
create a polyphonic sound
of worry and dejection -
melodic harmonies to the
hasty trills within her 
xylophone ribcage

These sounds echo 
in the acoustics of her skull 
like the clicks 
of an 
off
beat 
metronome.

Prompt: “Write about a change you have noticed in your lifetime, but write only about the things that embody or illustrate this change. It might be a change you have noticed in a friendship, in the body of a loved one, in your hometown…” (Pagh 79)

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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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