Tra Sole e Parole

My sister’s friend just got a divorce. She left with 3 kids and not a single penny. I wonder which hurts less the regrets or the what ifs?   I remember my highschool teacher. Friends said she was never married because her fiancé chose another girl. She died alone at 43.   I wonder which hurts less the regrets or the what ifs?   Is it better to move forward knowing our foundation is a sandcastle built too close to a tide or— is it better to watch you place a ring on someone else’s fingers, and dance under someone else’s song?   I wonder which hurts less to choke on the thought of how dare you marry the next girl after me  or— to hold your hand knowing the only reason we were together was because I was always there?   I wonder if time has enough hands to heal all the bruises on my body, all the scratches on my wrists from gripping the rope too tightly.   I wonder which hurts less.

When time passes by, how do you differentiate memory from imagination, truth from perception, love from delusion?   Like when you hold an ice cube and it melts, you wonder was it ever really there? When you miss someone and they’re gone, your wonder did they even exist? or— the sharp pain in your chest is merely an imagination?   How do you know something happened when you can no longer see it hear it, touch it, taste it?   How do you know someone was there when all your senses are starting to forget how it feels to touch their beard after shaving, how it looks when they first wake up in the morning, how it sounds when their lips curled up just enough— to say “ I love you” ?   We used to watch TV until 3 in the morning, now I stay up til 4, brew tea with bags under my eyes and think— did I imagine all that?

Before that day arrives, I hope you can tell me long before the ink dries on the invitations,  the bachelor party is thrown, so I can buy myself a plane ticket to an island far away. You’ll be out there debating peonies or lilies and I’ll be here planning my itinerary. Perhaps I’ll disappear beyond the Bermuda coastline, become one with all the shipwrecks, because at least they know how it feels to be broken too. I’ll travel to somewhere far enough  where the wind won’t whisper your name and the air doesn’t smell like you. When that day arrives, you’ll be standing in your sharp suit, flooded with so many congratulations, and I’ll be lying on the beach, sipping a double-shot martini convincing myself that this is not a tragedy. You’ll be posing for family pictures, and I’ll be pressing my cheeks into the sand,  hoping it will absorb my sorrow and not give it back. But if I’m honest, before that day arrives, there’s still a part of me  waiting for you to drop by one la...

Lately,  I realized
 the tales about "the one"
 might be wrong. I used to believe that
 before I was born,
 God decided to cut your ribs
 and created me.
 With his bloody hands, He gave me an eternal gift,
 promising I’d have you forever. But what does forever mean, when time becomes a concept I can’t seem to grasp?
 The day you were mine— was it yesterday or centuries ago? Maybe the one doesn’t stay forever. Maybe the one only lingers for two years, then leave. We are two perfectly matched puzzle pieces, destined to belong to different canvases. You, on the table across the room. Me,
 in a pile of stranded pieces, waiting to fit into the perfect picture. Ps: congratulations :)

Love is a four-letter word. It is also four bedrooms in the house we didn’t get to grow old in.   The greens, the warm neon lights— held dreams of the live we thought we’d lived.   But dream is a word for something distant, an imagination too far to touch. What do you call it when it’s already in your hands— and then it’s gone?   As if a thief came in the middle of the night and stole the only thing that mattered most: Us. The day I left the house, I woke up and found you sitting on the couch. Meaning evaporated from each unspoken words and silence became the only language we knew. A broken record that finally stopped spinning. The day I left the house, I could feel all the years we should’ve had— slipping like loose change through a pocket full of holes. Piece by piece. Birthdays missed, anniversaries uncelebrated.   That was the day I left my heart buried in your garden— among the flowers we never planted, beneath the footsteps of children — we never had.

  Maybe we met because you were meant to teach me how to drive, or push me to finish school. Maybe we met because you were meant to hold me— when my days felt relentless. Maybe we met because you were meant for me.   Or maybe, you were simply there,   at the right time, in the right place.     And maybe — if you hadn’t been there— my life would still march forward, unchanged. I’d still learn to drive, finish school, face the days without your arms around me.   You just happened to be there. Maybe you weren’t that special after all. Maybe it was all me.   It was all my love, my devotion, that I poured endlessly into you, building an illusion of a man so grand— a prince charming to pull me out of the water, when I was never drowning.   Maybe it was all me. Or maybe it was all you.   All your jokes that lift the weight off my heavy heart, all your smiles when you come home after work, all your tight hugs, and warm kisses.   But mayb...

I still see him in strangers’ faces,

 In every black sedan that passes me by,
 windows up,
 a ghost behind the wheel. I see him in every corner of the road to his old apartment a place that isn’t mine anymore. I see him in old pictures of myself in the skin he used to touch, the lips he used to kiss. Now he's become a daily thought a lurking shadow behind the trees, dividing places into: those we visited and those we never got to. Perhaps there’s no getting over this. Perhaps love doesn’t move forward; it just sits heavy on the chest — 
 like an anchor with no rope. Perhaps there’s no love after this, or at least none like ours. No more sweet or sour, just stale. Perhaps, after this,
 there will be no "more," only less.