since before i loved you,
i dreamt of your eyes:
two slices of blue gulf
stripped along the horizon,
glistening
with a million years of rain.
i wanted them before i knew you,
i’m sure.
only they can penetrate me
with the force of a thousand burning suns.
i can feel them on my lips
through the sound of your breathing.
i love therefore i am.
———————————
sometimes i find it tough to show you that you’re the only one that matters in this life. and here you are: here i am.
Posted in excerpts
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through my paperround last year i met a wonderful man. he used to walk his dog as i’d deliver papers and we started talking around the time i started writing this blog. i think he’s 82: he must have mentioned it a while back. and i’m afraid there’s nothing literary about him: his existence is one of uncouth coutesy.
i quit the paperround a while back now but i still see him every sunday. nine o’clock in the morning, like church. he’s my little christian connection: even S is nowhere near taking his place. he gave me a bible with a picture of him in his youth stuck at the back, so that i remember him. secretly, i think, he believes that it will help me find him in heaven: he believes i will go there after all.
to my friends, this man is “the old man”. to me, he is much more than that. it may be true that i meet him every sunday partly because i feel like it’s my obligation, but also because somewhere beneath my skin there’s a tendon that connects me to him.
his wife died last night. or the night before that. and there’s no more words because i’m hurting for him. because how can one even begin to describe his pain?
i had made them a card only this march: they celebrated their 60th wedding annivesary.
sometimes he told me he wondered if she ever loved him but i know that was only because he loved her more than anything else. ever.
and it’s a little late for him to tell her, but i hope she knew. i think she knew.
Posted in chapters of my life
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it’s time for answers. or questions. whichever.
a fellow writer inspired me to think about a few. and they started the clock tick-tocking inside my mind: what did a girl like me want anyhow? what is the dream, the true ideal?
1. i’d like a picture of you on my windowsill by my bed: to keep, to hold, to treasure. it will be my reminder that you exist and when i wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if i dreamt up my whole life, i want it there to touch. it’ll be solid in my hands. a relic. and it’ll be in a mosaic picture-frame we’ve yet to buy. in barcelona or in paris (just because i like the way you say it) or in a magic place far away.
2. i’d like to have you on call, running to me whenever i need you there and sometimes just because. you know: for no reason, just because i want to be in your arms where it’s never lonely.
3. and i want you to have eyes for nobody else but me, following me, stalking me, penetrating me anew with every gaze. i want them to ask me for affirmation of my love every morning and i want them to drown me whole, as if they were not eyes but lagoons of clear-blue water in devon, on hot summer afternoon, when all you want is to immerse yourself whole in water .
4. but more than anything, i’d like to know that this is where you want to be: here with me.
5. that will be all.
Posted in chapters of my life
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will anybody tell me if i’m missing out on life?
will anyone write me a letter just so i know?
and everybody seems to be making a film, a compilation of their thoughts right here, right now. irony is, i’m wasting my words on the wind, across the telephone wires that stretch inside my head. and when i am brave enough to speak my words out, they are spoken to you alone. what about the rest of the world? how will they ever know?
you made a film with your friends. i guess that’s what you do in youth.
me? i used to leave my colouring books blank for fear of spoiling them. funny me.
and whenever creativity came to me, i wrote the words, drew the pictures on scraps of paper. i still have some of them. little pieces of my mind written in quickhand. 
and though none of them relate to you, all that i remember of X is there: they are silent exultations, utterances of pain and dreams. they are free.
sometimes, i still wish i coloured those pictures in.
and sometimes i know there’s no use wishing: it’s all too late now. i’ve sketched my life out in this morning sunshine. whatever happens now was always meant to be.
Posted in Uncategorized
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how vain i should be to reread my own posts, but sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, i find myself scrolling through the past on the computer, mouthing the words or simply caressing them with my eyes. because within me there is something i have not yet understood. an undercurrent of a river lost in my old, unpracticed tongue.
rio de la plata maybe. or river of the sun.
even the sun has sunspots, darker on the background of virginal white; and so i have the blind spots: i always find them when i try. no light is enough to banish the spot of darkess on my sleeve: the drop of blood refusing to wash off in hot water. it would wash off in the cold, i know, but it’ll never get the chance.
chances are far and in between, don’t you know?
and i find myself every time, unexpected, like red peonies on a rose bush in may.
находжу себе кожен раз в шматку чорного хліба.
but what is there to find, other than the poems i had learnt by heart in years three and five. and seven. wordsworth’s daffodils.
the yellow vibrancy of life.
Posted in chapters of my life
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glittering soot on her eyelashes 