your life is blistered…

your life is blistered
by the setting sun
and dreams we dreamt
as if we were living
for one life only

the jokes we told
today: the ironies of life,
the laughs we laughed
callused by bitter strangeness 

adieu
to you
is but a foreign language
to me it’s broken glow stick lighting up the sky

 i’ll say goodbye
but not in english

i’ll say goodbye
and it will be forever new.

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last weekend i was away with friends. trekking. miles walked under the coldness of october sun with you, with Y and others. according to Y it is over a year since he began life anew with his blonde. i know it isn’t. the day he professes their anniversary is the day i spent crying in his arms. it was the day when i almost begged him for a platonic kiss. it was the day he said “how can it be platonic if we are in love?”

49. and to think i used to call him mine

if he ever tried to retrace his steps, Y would still be here. there’s only so many lives a man can lead. whilst i lived out my three, not quite a cat but near enough the slinky nine, he could barely grasp onto one.

so here we are again. and he won’t admit that he was wrong to have jilted me at my elusive altar and though i’m not bitter, i still think it should have been me to have waved the first goodbye. i was never the taker for seconds.
now we speak for barely more than seconds.

and we had a conversation today. somehow i manipulated minutes out of him when he claimed to have none. and he wants me to call on a weekend. and he listened to my poetry of loving women and war poets. it’s been a while. but i’ll let him live his life. that one life he holds onto like a raft in a burly sea.
those sort of lives were never meant for me: i like mine long and luscious, like sweltering summer days.

and when i read him my lines, he stopped talking altogether, pondering, wondering, what it was that i meant, knowing it concerned him but not knowing how.

and to think i used to call him mine.

21. someone who i don’t want enough to love

resolution is still lost. questions posed, answers comatose.
and one question haunts me, a bat out of hell. 
why can’t i just say to X you know what, boy, it ain’t working, so lets just pretend that this never happened and walk out of each other’s lives. how bout that? 

but that’s a stupid question. and though i have to look deep inside myself for the answer, i know why.
i’m both cruel and wicked at times, and yet, my heart is not made of glass and his puppy eyes always stop me in my tracks of obliterating his dreams.

and it’s driving me crazy, this enforced entrapment by one single look. this fear of kicking to death someone who’s already down.
and i tried to say goodbye over the weekend, but he wouldn’t let me.
it’s like he sensed it coming, texting me, writing e-mails, calling persistently, telling me that we’ll get out of this rough patch and be as happy as we once were. he even got his friend to write me a message to ask me to give it one more shot. and tough i didn’t believe him that we’d be happy, because i never felt happy with him, it was too much effort to turn away and never look back. it was too much of something i didn’t have.

so, here i come, still in chains: never his, still not yours, tied by rules and conventionality to someone who i don’t want enough to love.
still a hunter, a white tigress on a prowl for her next piece of meat.

i may be wounded, but i’m not dead.

18. his arrogance will be the death of us

the weekend sweeps me off my feet like you never could.
still, you do it better than X.
he’s been on my mind persistently for the last few days. not because i miss him: no, i’m glad we don’t see each other much. but rather because his presumtion of his own greatness is driving me insane. take for example yesterday – just to prove his superiority over the poor old me, he went and asked all his friends whether they thought he was better than me.
i think you can guess the result.

but, hey, for some reason i didn’t care.
it didn’t upset me at all, but it did make me wonder why he was doing all that. is that his way of trying to retain me in his arms? i don’t think he realises that i never was in his arms and god forbid i ever will be.
he is my project first and my boyfriend second.
not even a close second at that.   

that may sound ruthless, but believe me, it ain’t so. i’m only trying to help him, prepare him for the future. at the beginning i thought we could work, but then he disappointed and i thought i’d be a clever idea to try to “improve” him.
just for the hell of it.
i always wanted to “improve” someone – make them appreciate the arts more, motivate them to study harder, show them what it’s like to see perfection so close up, but i realise now that this process requires you to genuinely care for the person and now i’m not sure whether i care any more.

his arrogance will be the death of us.

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“The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.” – Friedrich Nietzsche