My heart is crying out like a baby bird stolen away from her nest. Everything hurts. Hush be quiet. Quieter still. Don’t misinterpret your sadness as romanticism. Romantic neuroticism. These words spill out of me, echoing my distressed mental state. Sometimes It is hard to tell the difference between lovers and murderers, both have such passion. There are stains everywhere - I’m a lover of nostalgia but some memories are best forgotten. Some loves are best forgotten. I try to bury the bodies in mountains of empty notebooks, I can’t write in them - my words aren’t worth destroying their crisp pages. I resort always to the incessant typing on my old, broken laptop. Sometimes the lag hides away my future thoughts and then there is an empty, incoherent mess of unimpassioned wording.
Sometimes I have to hold back my mad desirous urge to cling on to you as tightly as I can, in hope that we would merge into a single entity and I would never feel alone again. The times when your skeletal, raw hands touch my skin, I feel my muscles contract in a moment of fear-stained love. Shivers rattle down my spine and the hairs on my arms raise ever so slightly. As I lie in bed, the dawn slowly coming to awaken the world from it’s facade of dormancy, I can’t help but be reminded your warm, ever-loving presence in my kitchen just twelve hours prior. In the middle of cooking a late breakfast, you pressed your heart beat upon my upper back and wrapped your arms tight around me. Your prominent jaw rested gently upon my head. A stillness ensured and your pulse echoed throughout my ribcage in a strange moment of absolute harmony. And then you let go, just like that we continued our separate living. Simple memories hold a bizarre poignancy in the plethora of nostalgias I keep dear to me.
The house was once a home, but now the paint had crawled off the walls in fear. The hallways scattered in childhood memories. This woman was definitely my mother. I could see myself in the careful methods of dilapidation and in the form the house had taken. In fact the abode was a study of my mind, so much so that I found myself unable to distinguish reality and thought. My bedroom was a rotting image of my former self, the books, the paintings, the diaries. The big looming window that once gave me nightmares had curtains now. All this had been thrown into the blender of complete mental illness, or perhaps a desperate attempt to cure a lonely heart. That house was as much a representation of her heart as it was my mind. I share my house and so I’m forced to keep these heirlooms of the heart and it’s affairs secret, keeping the shrines of those I have loved and lost locked behind closed doors, picture frames and old books. On occasion I have been known to bring them out, shed some tears and place them back again. Coexisting with the past is both of our excuses for melancholic living. The home had only grown older, nothing had changed. If my world was as stagnant as her own I would surely surrender to the same illness - I leave the cups of my lover lingering days after he’s left just to meditate upon the happiness he gives me. I hope the pink walls of my bedroom, childhood teddies and plastic jewellery bring you joy.
I can’t be sad, the flowers in my room will die and then I’ll never forgive myself. I did find myself today - I found myself in the sunrise, the balcony overlooking the city, the vein-like structures of dead trees and the bright eyes of the boy on the morning train. I found myself in the book I was reading. I found myself lost and hallucinating amongst foreign trees. I found myself until the thought of you crossed my mind and I found myself drowning. I don’t know who I am again. All I am is a neurose. I bloom when my thoughts are not thinking ones of you. I miss you / I miss you and that’s all I am right in this moment.
___________________
I found myself in the rain and I found you in me. All is well.
Void of the internet: please recognise my sadness as a passing whim. I am in need of this space to acknowledge the fact I am currently feeling especially self loathing / deprecative / sabotaging. My inability to control these emotions enters me into a state of vulnerability which only serves to further trap me in this mindset. So instead voicing these concerns to those closest to me, I will take it upon myself to type it here, where I can pretend no one will see.
Incidentally I can hear my father and his girlfriend kissing / I hear this every night and I feel angry. I feel angry that you’re not here and that I’m not happy. Selfishness is a terrible thing. I’ve become attached to your energy, not so much your physical being but rather how I feel when I’m in your presence. I am able to carry that around with me for a couple days, but once the energy is exhausted, the come down is atrocious. I feel resentment; Why have you done this to me? Me of all people! I’ve been having twelve hour rehearsals and this has driven me to my capacity. I am brimming with anxiety and illness. I wish I had someone’s arms to crawl into at night, to tell me that it’s going to be okay. I know you’ve said it a million times but once more can’t hurt can it? Here I go becoming all sentimental again - everyone tells me I take life too seriously. In three days this will be over and in ten I should be filled with bliss once more. In sixteen days I turn eighteen and hopefully these existential and spiritual crises will be resolved with the illusion of superiority that comes with coming of age.
Memories playfully haunting me in the daytime
In the dark my mind is filled with manifestations of the past, dream-like formation.
Watching parts of my vision fall out from underneath me, in triangular tessellated cutouts.
Once again that isn’t a reality / a mere illusionary figment of the imagination.
Last night the walls melted crawled out of your house and
made themselves welcome in mine.
I didn’t sleep well last night, but I never do;
Your heart beats too loud, I could feel my whole body convulse.
Our bodies have to be careful to compose themselves with a mindful delicacy
in your small unforgiving bed.
(The gutter is broken and singing out to me)
I didn’t write anything yesterday, perhaps that is the only reason why I might be a bad person.
I only have fingers for this purpose at this moment.
I feel like something strange has happened and for once I don’t want to play the role of the journalist.
I feel like the days are turning into endless nights and like my eyes are growing larger and my heart is beating slower and my lungs have gotten deeper.
I know my fingers have gotten faster at typing out this nonsense.
However if it weren’t for this nonsense I’m almost certain I would have lost my mind by now.
The problem herein lies that words have become too beautiful and precious. I don’t want my name attached to half the garbage I speak… have you ever actually listened to anyone talk? I think for now I will be quiet unless need be - confining myself to the written word until I am able to contribute to the collective beauty of existence.
Tonight is very cold and my heater has mysteriously vanished from my bedroom. The house is empty and all I can hear is the monotonous clock-like dripping of a broken gutter and distant cars driving along dampened roads. The blanket which seemed only too small last night is now engulfing me. I am swimming amongst a collection novels, notebooks and pens, alternating between reading and writing. Tonight is beautiful. Sometimes I wish I could spend the rest of my life this way.
( Inside me everything is still.
It’s been a long time since I felt so calm.
Like nothing could go wrong in this second.
Or this one.
Or the next.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened except the birds kept chirping.
And my fingers kept typing.
And my heart kept beating.
And the nothingness inside grew warmer.
And keeps on growing warmer with every word. )
This haunting dream state; my eyes feel hollowed out as does my chest cavity, early morning lovelessness. I think I would just like someone’s fingertip to trace upon my back as I curl up to rest. That’s the problem here, I’m trying to fill up a space in my bed I feel that belongs to you and suddenly all my notebooks and journals don’t seem so meaningful. I’m not sure any of them would exist if it weren’t for love.
I feel very useless tonight, caught up in my own self loathing and inability to rid myself of egotistic mindsets. I attempted some drawing but was displeased with the results. I feel like I’ve invested so much time lately in works I end up disliking with a passion. I fear that if I don’t fall in love with a particular ‘thing’, I will end up making a living doing something I don’t love. That may be my greatest fear. School seems to be the biggest creator of anxiety in my life, and in my mind that is my day time job… will I spend the rest of my life like this? Wrapped up in the cold blanket of anxiety and stress and crying myself to sleep at night? Is this what the rest of life holds for the unimpassioned?
- I don’t know why
- (I do know why)
- But I am extraordinarily happy
- (Stop trying to believe you’re sad)
- Everything feels absolute
- (Nothing is ever / everything is always)
Dream lover, I like this. He is a fifty year old French man. He has hollowed out eyes and long yellow fingers from years of chain smoking. He left home at the age of eight, upset with his parent’s conservative outlook on life. In this time he began to associate with poets, painters and musicians, he lost his virginity and did heroin at the age of eleven. He eventually moved in with his brother due to his lack of financial stability. At the age of seventeen, he locked himself in his room for a year drawing and writing over every centimetre of his walls and once he ran out of space on the wall, he drew on the sheets.
He left for England at the age of nineteen hoping to get into Oxford. He was rejected and moved in with a boy who let him live there free of charge, due to the fact he was madly in love with him. In this time he wrote a book called ‘The abstractions of the human condition’ part fact, part poetry. Only three copies ever sold. He eventually moved back to France, hoping to live again with his brother. Upon his return he found out that his brother had died due to an overdose and that he was not actually related to him in any way shape or form. He started working nights at a bakery, and studying writing at a lower level university during the day. The man whom he thought for all these years was his brother, had left him the house in his will and he lived there alone.
After a couple years he graduated and worked at a magazine which featured up and coming writers. He sorted through piles of anonymous love letters, prose and poetry. One day he came across a letter so beautiful he tracked down the writer and asked her to marry him. She flatly declined. He stayed in her garden for weeks and lost his job. Eventually she took out a restraining order against him. He returned to his empty house and wrote for months straight, trying to recreate the beauty of the love letter he had once read, which incidentally was never published, he kept it to himself, pretending as if it were addressed to him. One day he woke up and never wrote again.
He refuses to speak about the years between thirty and forty. One night he cried in his sleep yelling out over and over again. I had woken him up but he refused to say anything and went back to sleep. All I know is that he had been a publicist for a classical pianist who killed herself, there may have been more to that story than I know. Due to this, he was involved in the music industry, scouting young girls with beautiful voices.
We met one day in a library, we were both there for strange reasons. I had taken too much psilocybin and found that books were the only company I could handle, however the words were too overwhelming and he was there feeling nostalgic over his past conquests as a writer. He spoke to me and I responded with some rubbish about how bizarre it is that the skin of an animal caresses the literary achievements of Fitzgerald and Nabokov. He offered me a lift home and in my drug addled state I agreed. We eventually saw more and more of each other.
He once told me he prefers it when I don’t speak as my being is more poetry than anything that I could ever produce. I would have been upset if he did not proceed that by kissing me gently on the nose and telling me to read him a paragraph from a book sitting on my bedside table.
