I want someone to make love to me, with the turbulence of the sea and an enveloping comfort that falls like the darkness of the night. I want to drown in your emotion, tangled in your legs and thoughts and the irises of your dark eyes. I want to jump into your happy warmth and swim around in your heart, humming a tender tune to caress your lonely soul. I want you to love me as much as your body can give, overflowing at the seams and eager.

Meanwhile, I’ll wait in the shallow wading waters for you to come pull me in.

c. February, 2013

I am alone, sitting here in the quiet glow of my laptop screen, enveloped in a safety net of darkness, nestled under warm covers and comfortably rested against worn pillows. I am surrounded by a myriad of sounds - the running water through the pipes above, the gentle spinning of the hamster wheel, the faint but consistent bass of the music somewhere below me, a hollow creaking of the bones of this apartment building. And seemingly, all at a moment, they stop. Nighttime silence pushes its way past my door and settles in like an old cat.

I am alone. There is no party tonight. There is no loud, drunken crowd to turn my mind away and no suspiciously delicious drinks to blur the edges of my acuity. There is no lover tonight, either. The presence of his warming body and soft lips are missing. The space in which he normally occupies on the bed is empty; when I turn and stretch, I run not into human flesh and prickly beard-hairs, but folds of soft blanket. I suddenly have the freedom to move about, to do as I like, to twist my hair into odd shapes and to let out tiny bubbly farts on whim. There is only me to please tonight. 

I am alone, existing in a cave of palpable solitude. 

I am alone, but my mind is at ease and my heart is comfortable, for it is cupped by the knowledge that I, on the whole, am utterly content to be with myself.

When we fit together like peas and carrots

With my face in his neck and his arms wrapped around me like pigs in a blanket

When he says, “You are gorgeous” and looks at me

with his honey brown eyes so sweet that it could sweeten the bitterest pot of coffee

When he glides his hands down the curvature of my body like velvet chocolate

With a quiet confidence that the first and last meal of his every day would be me.

and because it’s expected of them. It only counts if it’s followed by a suggestion to make solid plans in the near future - “Let’s have lunch on Friday! What do you feel like?” - read: not “let’s hang out sometime!”

The only exception to this rule is if the two people are too far away (different states, countries, continents) - in this case, the “I miss you” would only count if followed by an hour or two of conversation. 

Hearing the words “I miss you” hold no value to me anymore, because 9 times out of 10, “I miss you” never followed by any plans for actually meeting up and hanging out. “I miss you” is said only when it’s my birthday and you’re looking for something else to add onto that generic “Happy Birthday!” wall post. “I miss you” is typed and sent in a simple text message; it doesn’t come in the form of a phone call or face-to-face visit.

“I miss you!” has become generic. It’s the easiest, fastest, and most effective way of letting someone know (think) that you’ve crossed their mind. And that’s exactly that - crossing one’s mind. Didn’t “I miss you” once signify the prolonged desire to see a person?

“I miss you” has become a phrase to mean “Oh hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while, and probably won’t until next year after this brief conversation is over. So, yeah, we used to be good friends and have fun times together but the fact of the matter is that we’ve both got new friends now, and well, I don’t have time for you any more. But let’s pretend that we’re still good friends because that’s easier than letting it be explicitly known that we’ve drifted apart.”

I miss you, but I won’t make the effort to see you.

I miss you, but I would rather spend Friday night with my other friends.

I miss you, but I don’t really think about you all that much.

I miss you, but I don’t miss you.

At all, really.

I want to collect her laughter, and store it in a pretty glass jar
I want to collect her smiles, and store them on my internal hard drive
I want to collect her dreams, and place them carefully in a sandalwood box
I want to collect her tears on a porcelain plate so I could wash them away
I want to collect the graying stray strands of her fox-tail hair,
             clipped neatly between the pages of my notebook
I want to collect the beauty and gracefulness of her soul in my cupped hand,
             for all the world to see
I want to collect her English lavender scent and keep it under my pillow at night
             to soothe away my nightmares —

— I want to collect her, entire and whole. 

I wanted to dive into you
and swim in your depths
I wanted to dive into you
and float in your blood
I wanted to dive into you
and find my way into your heart —

From across the street as I watched you walk away,
I suddenly became afraid of the water. 

The train used to come by once a day when I was a kid, snorting and coughing up black smoke as it passed. Sometimes I would walk down by the tracks — don’t you dare play on them, Mother always warned — and watch the freights thunder past. The trains mostly carried mountains of rock, or bales of hay, or logs of wood, but once in a while you could see people sneaking away on them, too.

When I was five, my father took me and my brothers to see the train for the first time. In one of its many dozen cars, I spotted two thin, worn-out faces. It was a young woman and a young man, and they both couldn’t have been older than twenty five years old. They looked at us with eyes so daunting that I, to this day, would never be able to forget. 

“Where are they going?” I asked my father. 
“I don’t know,” he responded as he started to pull us away.
“Can we go on the train, too?”
“No.”

Since then, I was always drawn back to the train throughout my childhood. I wanted to know where they were going, who they were, and why they looked so grim. Every time I saw anyone on the train, I tried to ask them where they were going, but they never heard me over the sounds of the train. All I knew was that they always looked tired. Dirty. Grim. Like they had been carrying something heavy on their shoulders, and weren’t allowed to put it down.

It wasn’t long until I started fantasizing about running along and hopping onto the train, too. There were times when I felt like those people looked on the train: tired and worn out and wanting to run away to someplace new. When my father got cancer and couldn’t work anymore. When he died and Mother cried for days on end because she couldn’t feed four kids with what she earned doing people’s dirty laundry and sewing up old clothes. When I overheard Sammy from down the street call my mother a dirty whore because she’d sleep with strange men for money. When Mr. Harrison from the store told me that I looked so pretty all grown-up and tried to put his hands up underneath my skirt but I said no and cried and tried to run and he said that I would grow up to be just like my mother — and he raped me on a pile of bags of flour next to dusty cardboard boxes.

I carried my burdens silently and as best I could. My thirteen year-old self didn’t tell a soul what happened that day, out of shame and embarrassment and fear that people would say that I had become my mother. Instead, I kept returning to the railroad tracks and watching for the train to come. When it came rumbling into sight, I’d close my eyes and wish for the courage to jump on, to get carried away. I thought that maybe if I got on the train, I could leave my burdens behind. My wishes did not come true; my courage never came.

I never found out who the young couple were, or where they were going, or why they were running away. But I knew what they must have felt to have made the decision of leaving their families and all their worldly possessions behind. Pain, guilt maybe, and lots of shame. I often think and wonder about them. Had they been able to find happiness in the end, or had they perished? 

Whoever they were, and whatever they were running from, I sincerely hope that the train brought them to freedom and happiness, things that I was never able to attain.

The way I imagine life, and how we live it, is that we’re all on “paths” in the galaxy. In this infinite amount of space, there are millions and millions of paths, imagine them as lines if you will, and they’re all constantly being changed.

Many lines will cross over one another once, but never to be seen together again. Others will cross multiple times, while running parallel to many for a period of time. Events and the decisions that we make cause these lines to vibrate, jump, and turn direction. They may veer off to the side, or completely take off in a new direction.

It’s a game of chance, not fate. There is no pre-drawn blueprint of where our lives will lead. The smallest thing can cause the largest deviation in our path - a stone on the side of the road which causes the wagon to break upon hitting it at the exact right force, at the exact right spot. 

Sometimes I wonder about the different decisions that I have taken, and how if I had done something else, my life would be completely different right now, for better or for worse. 

Do I regret a lot of things? Definitely. But those things have changed me and made me into the person I am today. I am the me that I have always known, and I’ll never know any other. So I’m embracing my path, I’m embracing all the rocks, stones, and pebbles; I’m embracing everything that has knocked me over, everything that helped me up - and I’m going to embrace everything that I continue to encounter every day. 

And you should, too.