The Art of Departure

Let’s do this in reverse

We’ll unroot each other from one another’s heart completely but before that, I would like to ask you something, why does it feel like you’re whispering to my heart every time we speak? 

It doesn’t matter, I think there’s been a mistake here and I’m not supposed to tell you this but from now on I want you to lose every signal my eye sends your way. 

Believe me when I say that I’m winning this battle with myself.

I am.

Only I don’t know it yet.

In order to do this correctly, I believe we should do a last dance, it’s necessary to feel everything before we say goodbye to it, don’t you think?

It’ll be okay love, we’ll do this slowly and at once, they say it pains us less this way. What have we got to lose? 

Please ignore anything I will try to tell you after this conversation ends, I want you to deny my every request so I don’t come back knocking your door asking for a second chance.

I want you to remember this as the last time you left someone this easily, I need you to keep remembering to forget we ever happened.

In fact, let’s burn my shark tooth necklace, I think cleansing requires a sacrifice and I’m ready to wear my shame on my sleeve.

One last thing, I need you to put me out the way you stab a dying cigarette.

Suddenly then discarded.

Peekaboo

I have visited you for months on a loop. You were waiting for me inside a secret trap door inside my mind. Nobody knew how to forge a hidden pathway to your compartment, except for me, and that was devine because we are safe together. Always were.

We never used words, it was not necessary with us, you spoke my silence language and I understood the meaning of your sighs. You were my home and I was your security blanket inside that tiny space of invisibility. 

However, there was a code that we’d agreed to follow every time we met to ensure the safety of our union. But one day the others found out about us and the code was broken.

With that, you migrated from my mind to another and we no longer saw each other. 

Sometimes I tell myself that there is a thin line connecting my heart to yours and I’ll always find you, like that red string theory. (Do you know it?)

A year ago, I tried to locate your whereabouts, I did not succeed, but I left you a message in our hideaway, because we're good at this game.

I get lost and you find me.

The Other Side

They told me that I used to exist happily on my body until a tumor on my left shoulder with the size of a walnut kept growing day by day resembling  a second head carried through a protruding extension of my skin holding identical set of eyes, nostrils, cheeks and mouth.

I didn’t know what to expect at the time, so I kept my tumor/head secret from everyone else and hid it beneath a large cloth next to my left ear thinking that it would eventually go away and shrink to its normal size.

One day as I stared at my unwanted companion, I noticed that it murmurs nonsense in unknown language to me. I couldn’t distinguish the words but later I realized that it wants to replace me entirely and take over my body.

I agreed to surrender right away and start over on a new body to recreate our memories.

Ever since then I’ve become a thousand times lighter but I’m not sure that I want to bring back any of our memories, I’m completely free..

Punchline

You’re bitter in my mouth, love. 

I can almost taste apathy on the back of my tongue long after watching your first words forming in the space between.

I pondered/struggled/writhed with anguish to gather my scattered selves and reach my unsung melodies of terror and solitude to tell you that it’s sunny, love. 

And that although it’s the middle of January and we’re said to hit the climate climax of the season but I don’t feel anything. In fact, I did not hear a single cold wind hitting my back.

Denial is a river in my brain cells, refusing to utter the syllables out loud in your presence.

What’s Latin for “Imissedyou”?

How do you spell “whole” again?

Where’s your moon today?

When I found my voice, I awoke.

Camelot

We’d both known what’s to come next, we prepared for the inevitable incident.

Yet, when the storm hit us, we lost track of all our plans and alas! Our time on earth was nearing its end. 

We tried quickly to run against all the odds of this world and escape our bad wind but it felt like an eternity while we stayed together, waiting to be rescued.

So we ran faster until we found solace in a tiny space away from the storm.

I saw you flinching.

You swore I was dreaming it up.

I drew closer to you. 

That’s when I knew how much you hated to be seen vulnerable in front of me. 

You wanted to appear stronger so I would keep going but the memory of you shaking would haunt me for the rest of my life. 

After that, I realized that it won’t be long until we part ways.

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Longest Day of The Year

Someone shot your partner and you were next in line. 

All you could do to end this was jump from the highest window of your building straight into the unknown. 

You hoped for instant death but you survived the fall somehow as you hit the sea surface.

Although you managed swimming to reach the shore safely, you hear someone shouting: “look closely at your hem!” 

That’s when you saw the tiny creatures creeping up on you. 

The maggots are starting to multiply on your wrist, arm and now they’re on your shoulder. 

You’ve been dying many times but at this instant you didn’t choose how your life ends, so you quickly run back to the water and drown yourself.

Dream Sweeper

He was the dream sweeper,
that was his job all day all night and for the rest of his life.

He would collect people's dreams when they slept and upon their wakings, he swept them away from their human minds into a secret place, hoping one day to find his own dreams in the process.

The dream sweeper had succeeded in forming a sea of nightmares and a river of slumber tales where he kept all the world's secrets hidden and every wishful thinking intact.
However, he never found any appropriate dreams to call his own.

After years of formulating oceans of memories and registering the world's largest dream collection, he finally understood why he was unable to conceive dreams of his own much like everyone else in the planet.

He was the man with no identity.

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confinement

'Falling down the rabbit hole' is known best as a figure of speech but Alice wasn't just a fictional character. Alice is real and she tried to seek solace in her darkest hour by chasing the moment as it slips away.

Like Alice, my mind ticks to chase the next layer of darkness that lies within your soul. Let's make a deal, you can bring your poisoned cakes and purple creatures and I'll invite myself to hit this rock bottom gladly.

I don't know how many shadows I've wrestled with in my way from there to you but it should last me for three lives and half a decade.

Being protected from the dark won't necessarily guarantee safety, it could mean a stale confinement with no exit doors and endless hallway.

but goddamn it, you're worth the fall.

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Dust

Hunger is purple, like the coldest spark that precedes the flaming ache.
It's a carnivorous animal that feeds on a dead bird inside my no-where land.

(I call my body 'no-where', because it has a gaping hole in the middle of it, enclosed by a regurgitated barbed wire that got stuck in my chest from swallowing too many warnings signs.)

Hunger is craving to gulp the sharp edge of a knife to feel something.
It's chocking on a muffled scream at 6 am. to show them you know how to breathe.

Hunger is dreaming of a downward ladder into the deepest edge of dust to master the art of denial.

Hunger is 2 steps of disintegration, starting with eating your own bones, followed by gnawing at the leftovers of your soul only to watch them eat your cake while you have its poison too.

Blur

November 6th, 2008

You're wearing khaki brass-buttoned Tshirt, the one you bought the day you dropped out of med school and decided you're gonna settle for community college because you can't stand the idea of another cadaver being cut open by amateur limbs. Your shirt's fabric is washed out, yet you could care less since it works nicely against your honey-hued hair and flawless skin.

Despite the loud beach's noise behind us, I somehow hear the sound of your laughter and keep wondering if the sea waves were fighting one another attempting to recruit you as the next mermaid addition to their underworld.

I can't take my eyes off of the hazy shade of blue sky above your head, pastel colors always remind me of beautiful Monet paintings and my mother's kitchen.

I feel the timid breeze brushing your hair and I see you trying your best to hide your tremors by maintaining fake calmness to avoid being told you picked the wrong sweater and I wait for you to ask for my jacket but you hate asking for favors.

Novembet 6th, 2014

I wake up panicked and I start to recount one by one the hairs of your eye-lash in my head but I get stuck between 156 and 165, also I can't recall which lipstick color you wore, was it coral or naked Peach?

I'm terrified of losing more details of you. What if I woke up next year and forgot the hazel eyes that sent shivers down my spine? What if I stopped associating bad decisions with you? I must write it down to keep you alive.

Theft

Like the thief you are; stealing cigarettes from my mouth when I'm not looking was your specialty and I was your shop-lifting spree from that moment until I wasn't holding back on being your most prized possession. But when you were away, I stole rough mattresses in rooms that stank of piss and smoke, buried words you left ashen on my stomach, stashed each sunlight that slipped through window-cracks on days that reflected your smile in my eyes.
I learned from the very best for I snuck up, every night behind your head to whisper sweet dreams of redemption with a combination of shadow language and your favorite instruments.

You don't wake up until I say so.

Pieces

It was the year of tarmac, the year everyone got their knees bruised on the newly paved lanes and had their knuckles injured from punching hollowed out walls, sprayed with graffiti of religious slurs and sexual taboo. It was your idea to burn it down to recreate the Berlin Wall effect and we smelled like gasoline for the entire night..

These days, I'm numb from tripping on your memory, so I bandaged myself with the prospect of a better tomorrow where I get to see my favorite smile, I've been replaying it in my head ever since I saw it on you.

I remember incidentally meeting a tattoo artist and asking her for the shape of your birthmark to be inked on my thighs and a hint of your skin was stitched into me.

Flashbacks of your Parliament-soaked shirt burns my nose whenever I pass by smokers huddled up outside my building and a dose of your scent lingers.

The asphalt road has gone stale.
The shameless wall burned to the ground.

I yearn for gasoline.

Wishful Thinking

Were you sorry because she died?

Where were you when she was lying on the ground dragging each last breath from her own frail lungs desperate for someone to hold her hands? 

Where were you when she wanted someone to tell her it's gonna be alright? that she doesn't have to depart this world alone?

Are you apologizing to her everyday until the memory of her face stops to interrupt your slumber and the sound of her laughter ceases to visit your brain?

Are you forever distraught at the possibility of having been there to brush her hair off of her cheeks? or because you wanted to make the last moment she spent on earth belong to the two of you and only you two?

follow her.

Placement

Put me down
I've been fighting for too long
the walls are whiter
the cracks are deeper
the edges are sharper
the ants have come out of their hiding place
they're crawling on my skin
I've become their prey.

Drive

I was born with clenched fists in a cold month known for its vicious wind and I haven't stopped shaking for the last 25 years.

I ran against your better judgment before I learned how to crawl out of my fucking self. The day you kissed my eyes and hoped for a getaway out of this hellbent town was the day I believed the heaven in my textbook to be my ultimate salvation.

When I found out about your secret plan to flee, you knew I was your new disappointment.
Within your silence, I sit and have more nightmares awake than I do sleeping.
The villain of my hallucinations spits fire at the bottomless pit of my mind every day I forget to check for the exit door.

You taught me so well mother, now I count each step forward to retrieve my rehearsed steps back from memory.

I need you to regret me so much I become unborn. 

This is a memory too

“If you could keep only one memory what would it be?”

I want each moment, in which you unraveled yourself completely to me,
I want each new color I unearthed from the grayness you hid underneath.

Get me the memory of your smile on a shared inside joke,
Get me the day my stomach turned into knots when you uttered your first I-love-you.

Rescue the first time you started anything with me,
Like the first time you laughed and I curled up on my belly so deep my butterflies started to tickle my throat.
The first time you cried and I thought my god her vulnerability is beautiful I wanna spend the rest of my life being her constant.

Please keep the minute I wanted to be yours to hold.
Keep the second I saw your lips and my tongue itched ever since.


I want all our dreams choked back by my fears, by your tears and every whisper in my ears.
They're especially lodged under black box labeled "classified" behind my blind spot.

Lose everything else you might encounter in the process and remember no matter what happens do not listen to my head!

Inertia

It was one early morning, around 7 o'clock, the moment before the bell starts to whistle, summoning students for morning queue.

I could feel the concrete floor stillness, it was the very first day of our senior year and I remember strangely not being nervous for the first time in my life.

Your hand in mine felt like the best moments in my life summed up collectively in one gesture, your hold kept me grounded, confident that whatever might come, is somehow all right because you're here now.

Your friends and acquaintances were the first to arrive in the scene, they seemed popular among the crowd. I saw few people I knew from previous year, I nodded hello -not wanting to leave your hand-

 without moving into their direction, you led the way to the front line while in my head I was going through all the past three months we explored each other longingly in a failed attempt to meet our limitations. It seems odd to me how distant those moments are this morning.

In the middle of my wanderings, you looked at me and I was paralyzed by that gorgeous smile, I don't think I've ever seen better looking face illuminated by sun light before. It hit you in the right places illustrating your features splendidly, your hair pulled back in a way that reminded me of the sea waves and my knees sank deep..

-"Where should we stand?" you asked
-"At the end of the queue, that way we can watch everyone else but no one has to watch us" I explained.

Right then you grabbed me closer and I thought my heart was going to erupt into million little pieces to mimic the concrete's crushed rocks under your feet.

"I love you" you whispered

we stepped into oblivion..

Pillow medicine

This only works clockwise starting from your last mistake:

Puke decades of dead weight,
choke on all the maladies that got you here,
press the wound,
press so hard pain washes over every nerve in your system.

Stay up all night,
exchange madness with every demon in your head,
collect all the fallen wisdom tooth,
wear them around your neck next time you sleep.

a Eulogy

I can feel you behind my eyelids, in the whites of my eyes when I squeeze them shut.
somewhere deep in me your tears are embedded within.

Collections

I remember how your head felt on my chest, I don't know what words you mumbled in your sleep but you sounded adorable, your breath so sweet, your baby-like cheeks warm and flushed. It's amazing how every time I recall your skin the olive shade strikes me by the head and I fall in love so much.

I know you used to tell me about your nine lives and I'd laugh along thinking if your soul had to be recreated it wont be you again. That the recipe of you, somehow, will lose its secret and someone else will come back, but damn! you outlived all your nine souls, soaring with that smile and those cheeks and I fell in love so much.

I'm so overwhelmed by how the curtains of my room still remind me of that day we spent daydreaming lost lives, by how certain shades of beige are instantly labeled as your skin in my head.

Close your eyes..