Star Dust

There's an underlying pain that lives with those who choose to feel with the intensity of a burning match. There's an underlying pain within my soul.

I auto-consume myself, often, in flames that bring my courage to ashes in a constant cycle of destruction and rebirth. A Fenix of sorts.

Every time the remains of my spirit are puzzled back together to look like functional organs, limbs and, at some point, a whole body again, the heart turns into a new version of itself, different than what had ever been... and when it burns again, the crush of it all is crude and desperate and sincere as if it was the first time, its first devastation. Always changing. Losing pieces to never be found again. Creating new connections that were never before. 

There's no instinct to this process... it doesn't come without dilacerating parts of myself each time, turning to cinders and smoke all that I am, all that I believe, all that I had made my purpose. 

Each time it all comes back to life, there is a brand new chance for another big fire to ignite the spirit somehow, somewhere, sometime. A little more cynic, there's no denying, jaded, if you want... the blaze, though, not even a little less powerful.

Left behind, looking back, there's a landfill of all that clung to myself in the past, a tortuous cemetery, a ghost town. A biblical war zone of all that I killed, not quite sure how, not always sure why.

Life is this surprising and releasing realisation that there's always power for destruction. Either relative or absolute. It's within you. A choice you will always have... to burn some, or all, to the ground, and become another self... in an explosion, one day, become just star dust. All lost. Whole, at last.

Slow Show

At the edges of a memory I had learned how to be alone, holding it all together, barely, maybe, just so I couldn't hurt myself no more. But you came rather close, suddenly, you stood in my shadow, I felt your breath and it pushed me out of my haven... a slow drift that only you could avoid.

You took me out into the weather and got me lost from the path that was my own. Now you can sit there, dear hunter,  and see me running like a deer with no pasture, fleeing with no strength before its pursuer. Just watch as I slowly die in the wilderness and enjoy the show.

If by chance I survive, I'll avoid losing sight of my shelter ever again and will have some uncertain futures to digest within... I'll realize, hopefully, how to close it all out to the world for good. No foolish words no more, just a slow bow after this slow show ends. Accepting, without further questioning, what I had chosen long ago. No voice to this romantic heart I own, such idiotic clown. Mind only, my cynical and dearest one!

If life was the movies playing in my head...

Let's not stay here tonight.

Let's not pack but let's leave.

Let's go away from the places that keep screaming back all our fears and travel together to another land of innocent dreams.

Let's dance wherever we may stop.

Let's laugh, let's be silly, let's get mad and be sad as we know life is always this tragic adventure.

Let's travel the world until there are no places left to discover and there are no more secrets inside us to uncover.

Come away with me and let's believe, just this time, that the world can be made simple again... 

Maybe, just this once, there won't be any heart at stake... 

Maybe, this single time, love will be more than a hateful place... 

Maybe... 

Maybe, my darling, this will be the day that is the beginning of all our days!

Contradiction Affliction

Sweetheart, why do you think it took me so long to remember what took longer to forget? 

It feels like a trial at times, when I find myself falling for the same emptiness again... would it be easier to nurture the loneliness?

I sit here, broken wings, same patched heart, waiting and wading for someone that won't believe when I say there's no saving me. There isn't.

Don't get me wrong, my honeybear, just hear what I usually can't pronounce... it's not that I'm afraid, it's just that I can, for once, see what's real and I find myself crawling away with the desire you carry inside. 

You see?! Salvation comes in form of a conflict I can't seem to resolve. Contradiction is an affliction I'm not able to escape.

I want to finally pull my head up and avoid the shadows that a cursed soul left behind... avoid the blow I feel over and over again, when the past insists in coming back to take him and leave me, belly down, in this late years, fighting the wars he left me in. 

I want to be cast out of the shade by an unknown hand warmed by the light of this failing silhouette, drunk on the sadness of a world of might-have-beens.

I want, dear stranger, for you to disarm me and take me where the fire doesn't have to be made of my own hunger. I'll be your ghost playing outside of vision, somewhere in the mists of devotion and like a ripple, I'll appear, I'll live and I'll rejoin this darkened abyss...

... Or I'll just want to shelter myself forever, from the certain madness a stranger's salvation brings... protecting my crippled existence from  this yearning for everything that did me wrong. 

It's inconsistent, I know... Eternal masochism it's what I see!

I hear the crazy ones calling it love... And that's when I know I, too, have turned insane.

If life was the movie playing in my head...

Let's stay in tonight... leave your songs where they belong, in your record player and our home. We'll exist in this moment like we were not forbidden ground. There will be gin. There will be love. 

I won't be a shoulder to cry on... I'll just be yours tonight. Just this once.

The song.

The song came while I was driving through the city that saved me from your shadow. It took me instantly back to death... to the moments when you were still haunting my instincts, driving me to this perfectly clear moment when I felt my soul part from its body.

The song came and my mouth could taste that preceding feeling, when the leaving hadn't yet arrived. I was whole, but knew already I would fear the world to come, for in it were previously written certainties no heart would ever wish for.

The song came and innocence vanished from me all over again, as this guy incessantly reminded me that "you just walked away"... I felt my bones crack in the cement once more and a pool of warm blood slowly blended with my own lost sense of possibility... the sweetness escaped my broken body as it ran from a foreshadowing darkness.

The song came and it was never a love song. Not then. Not now. It took me drifting out to sea and almost made me fall into this nauseating pain that spread to my core.

The song came and it left me, time and time again, with no shoulder to cry on. There was a right before, when you came running to my arms, conflicting with everything that existed right after, forever... a distant day of an eternal California spring that took you away, howling and biting down every last believing piece of my spirit... as if wolves had been raising you in the wilderness of my dreams.

The song came and it will keep coming, at the most disconcerting times, taking me endlessly to that moment when living made me die while still breathing.

The song came and regardless, while this uncertainty flocks and gathers at my feet, I'll cling to these torn limbs and I'll fly high, up above, where my useless legs won't be needed no more.



"Today you were far away

And I didn't ask you why
What could I say
I was far away
You just walked away
And I just watched you
What could I say."

Aaron Dessner, Matt Berninger

Together. Alone.

Everyday there's pain, pleasure and death in this process for existence.... a struggle bending up against the mountains whose true geology has to be more than fear, or they are but dust.

Everyday we leave pieces of ourselves behind, we lend them to the times we live, the people we meet, to never see them again.... and when all is lost, in the past that was your yesterday's future, there is no more survival.

Everyday I am someone who needs somewhere to long for... I am someone homesick of this stark land of an uncertain address... homeless of a country and homeless of a heart.

Everyday I grow increasingly unclear of all the certainties that kept me from losing it all before... that saved me from drowning... legs, arms and spirit tied to someone not fighting my wars.

Everyday your hands on my body resonate through me as if it was real...as if you were real... as if we actually existed in more than a parallel universe of dreams and romantic quotes.

Everyday you become more of what i ran away from, a sweet, sad, little pray that was never to become more than hope.

Everyday there's this anticipation that won't ever subside. I'm waiting to lean up against you in the water.... and though I can't swim, I'm trusting you'll take me back to my fortress now. 

Together. 

Alone.

If life was the movie playing in my head...

Let's stay in tonight... you and I, connected by more than this virtual line of (sur)reality. 
I'll cling to the dim and dying light and hold on to what's left inside of me. We'll lose ourselves in each other's tales and find ourselves in each other's whispers.

My soul will come to rest with the sun already rising... I'll want to lay my head on your shoulder after the wine has mellowed our words, after all the books are read, all the stories are old and the music goes silent.

As the fire tints the horizon, it is your light that will bring me to rest upon the rocks... 
If I stay here, beneath the shadow of every heartache, will you come to find me in time?

From gold.

There will come a day to be soft again.

To not let the universe make my sorrows run wild, nor let the pain allow hate to sink in… A day to not let bitterness steal the sweetness within.

There will come a day to take pride that, even though the rest of the world may disagree, I will just love life for what it is.

It's all but fading memories in the end.

Why would I want it to last forever in my soul? Smells to smell eternally, sounds, feelings and hopeful words to stay endlessly as ghosts? Why desire that the aching reminiscences of what is past, live now and forevermore?

Memory is meant to fade... to color.. to black... Love is forever, but memories are not. And that's called luck.

What keeps my head up when nobody's around is keeping my feet off the ground.

Though I have been quiet, completely silent if anything, there is a time and place to discover light and poetry. Kill a memory. Build a story. Miss a past and still keep smiling to this new face and this new desire, found as far away as you are.

Oh darling, dear, won't you take me by the hand, like in the words I read, and lead us all the way to the promise land? It's slightly askew but entertaining...draining, maybe, can you see?

It has got me wondering which is worse... the day I fell into his eyes or the day of the big surprise, when he fell out of the edge of this world.

But sweetheart hear me out, as I am certain of this one thing. There must be no middle to me.. opposites only, antonyms... truth and lies. Before and afters. Birth and sudden deaths. Friends and foes. The brightest love and the darkest hatred.

It's taking too many hours and too many days, baby and I just want to hold you... as if an end of a wait has begun.

Let me be elusive and i'll leave... peaceful and easy... I'll leave the dark shadows on the outskirts of an old soul, to follow a new light that is yet to be turned to dusk.

I said there were mountains in my way but they're slowly disappearing.

How wonderful is it, that I can feel you touch my skin?! And as much as I build thick walls around it or put my heart on rescue mode, it is all momentary and dissolving, so all I can do is throw my love into the sky... and see it fly. 

"I'll hold, so near and cold 

You've exhumed my love 

I'm sold, and our story will grow old 

But you'l make dust from gold 

And I'll know that your heart was once like mine, 

Watch the flaws unwind 

And i'll throw my love to the ground 

And i'll tear you out."

                                                      Ali Lacey

If life was the movies playing in my head...

Let's stay in tonight in a different world this time. I'll wait for you to come home, to kiss and hold you, to whisper in your ear everything I have been trying to shush. We'll make it ours just this once, silence the fight outside and we'll let happiness embrace our bodies. We'll exist in each other, fight for each other... I'll let you win my broken heart and you'll take it gently to this new life I daydream so much about. I won't feel your absence anymore and without a sound I'll bury my fears once and for all.

Twilight.

"You do me good", I always told you, feeling deep down how much that good was so wrong.

As I face, forcefully, the dictatorship of this fleeting time we were given, I can no longer avoid you, your energy, your presence and my love.

I haven't laughed this easily in a long time and I better stop now before I start crying... before I start cherishing what is not mine.

I know at this random moment again, with a feeling close to presumption (but that isn't more than a certainty coming from what is left of the good side of my soul), that I am what you need and you will keep being forever the only one for me...

I keep dreaming while I am all awake looking at you across a wire, crossing the distance of an ocean, trying to still feel the smell you left behind, hoping to find, this time peacefully, your hand resting in mine... And all these dreams keep this cut you made dripping and I don't thing my blood can thicken.

Time comes and it will go, sooner maybe than we expected, and all the while I can't forget the things we did.. and all the while I can't forget the things we never will.

As I sink in all that surrounds me, when I'm tired of being down and I got no fight, I feel you as strong as the world, steading these fatal tides, controlling the storm I fear and being the storm I dream.

I understand now, as much as we would build a house around this, or put a name to it, it will all be still temporary and softening and all I can really do... is love you.

You are good to me, you are a sight to see... You are wonderful and it is beautiful...  Know that I could make you smile, if only you would stay a while...

But you're somebody's baby now.

"Break my legs so I won't walk to you

Cut my tongue so I can't talk to you

Burn my skin so I can't feel you

Stab my eyes so I can't see...

Your love is killing me."

                                Sharon van Etten

If life was the movie playing in my head...

Let's stay home and find yourself again, break your soul in small pieces so we can puzzle it back together forever. We'll share the same old gin as we used to and the same old love we could never really speak. We'll be truthful just this once... we'll forget this new someone we so vainly parade for each other and as one we will be whole... tonight and forevermore!

The moment before.

What is the weight of a promise? 
Is it relative to time, feelings, thoughts, moments? Or is it absolute? Unchangable? Everlasting? 
Is a promise always a promise... does it remain a promise despite any private pain or pride?

Does it ever loses its value over sadness or regret... over solitude or ego?

I remembered this moment when I was awakened by this smeared feeling of a broken will and lost love. I was already empty the day you came by and, as you turned your back to say goodbye, I was left with a greater emptiness within me. In that moment I gathered the bewildering night, the scream that was more silent than silence itself.

As I let you go, us both looking at this sea rolling its waters on the sun-soaked sand, I knew each wave exhausted my life, my love, my hope. Each laugh, each smile I felt coming at the corners of your mouth, disintegrated another piece of me. That mouth I almost dared to love, how could it laugh so freely, so casually with me, after being so uncompassionately mute just a movie scene before?

You closed the door behind yourself after one more night of broken wishes and I discovered, as I felt the lonely apartment embrace my bones, that not all promises are created equal. Promises can be but vain words of dangerous needs and a desperate spirit.

As I heard the thoughts you didn't whisper in my ears, it took but time to understand I had stayed for what I had never really wanted. I stayed for a dream in the dust.... for vows that were left in the shadow of others, like menacing towers... for desires you were writing for someone remote from me.

I'll walk on water now with you... always expecting the moment when I'll drown on the weight of the lessons I had to learn.

I walk with you.

I stay. 

I stay as I see you always and again...
at that point...
that moment...
when I once was in your sweet, broken heart, full of sweet, perfect promises...
that moment when you existed before tearing me apart.

"It won't ever get old, not in my soul,

Not in my spirit, keep it alive

We'll go down this road

'Til it turns from color to black and white

Or do you not think so far ahead ?

'Cause I've been thinkin' 'bout forever."

If life was the movie playing in my head...

Let's stay in tonight like the old days. Let's just be lazy and caring and quietly exist in between these long hours that run so carelessly. Let's treasure these ordinary moments and feel them extraordinarily with each look... with each sigh of content. I'll lay my head on your shoulder while listening to my tired moody songs and it will all be meaningfully perfect again.

Forevermore

"Give me what you are thinking and all that you're feeling", you once begged me, as I battled the emotions I didn't want to feel deep inside my soul. 

I had just reached a peace, an insight on lost love, that made me so sad for being so perfect. You did me good and that did me so wrong!

How could I confess such sad beautiful thoughts, my dearest baby?!

Some people become part of our lives, not by choice, but by naturally belonging to us... Like a bone is part of our skeleton, like our lungs know how to breath, like our heart knows how to keep pumping blood, these persons become, just as lightly and, in that way, just as heavily, part of ourselves. 

Symmetrically, some moments are not to be understood, not to be dissecated to rational meaning, but to be felt and mindfully unified with our spirit.

I love this magic part of life where some paths become unmistakably ours, even if you didn't knowingly choose to travel them. 

You came to me as this sneaky gentle creature that made me feel my once trustful and wholesome self... The person I fearfully and sorrowfully hid for so long.

For so many years now, I missed this imaginary place I once called home... I missed that safety... that peace... I felt homeless. Suddenly, as you held my body tightly close to yours, I could take a deep, peaceful breath again. As I felt your embrace, I could sense my muscles relaxing and my heart slowing down. A peaceful security invaded my soul. 

On those brief moments you became my shelter, my happiness... You were my home!

After these moments of mellow joy, I knew if I could I would only want you. Wherever, however... Forever! 

And I dream.

And when I dream, I dream of you.

And I want.

And when I want, I want you. 

Each and every minute that I can, as I know that soon enough I will only be a dream to you, a lost memory that time will forget. 

I want you...  For it was you that found me when I wasn't sure I still existed anymore. 

If I could I would beg you for eternity.

I know I can't.

Instead, I'll beg for you to embrace me just once more... So I can be home just this little longer. So I can be home this little moment that will have to last forevermore.

If life was the movie playing in my head...

Let's stay in tonight. Together and not far apart.

Let's share embraces of this strange love that keeps us dreaming, kisses of hopeful disbelief and long stares that say what this goofiness won't allow.

I'll hold you and I'll caress you. I will silently pray for you to let me show you what happiness is like.

We'll stay up all night until we can no longer fight the sleep away from our eyes... Then I'll let my head fall on your arms and holding me tight you'll whisper me sweet words of good night.

If life was the movie playing in my head...

Let's stay in tonight, dear stranger. Talk it all out, build known forces from unknown characters, learn all there's to learn from each other and find peace where once there was only loneliness. There will be no ocean in between, nor any land we could have conquered, for we are certain we'll end up where we belong.

Wanderlust.

"You are living a choice that is no one but yours", you once told me, as the tears, frightened, salted my thoughts once more. 

As true and plain as it may sound when I hear your harsh words, choices are no simple deeds. 

It is me choosing this path, these dreams, this raving wanderlust, but it is also me giving up everything I already know, my lifeline and my core... and these are no parallel roads.
It is one and the same path where I must try and endure towards some distant place, where I'll belong to a fantasy that I only know to be true in my mind. 

It would be easy to shine in this territory, to stay and be bright... it would be comfortable not to burst the balloon, not to exhale that last breath of air that will destroy it in this dimension...  but what am I to do but to go on higher ground, far from who I let under my skin, with no one else around, no one to understand and all the time to look through my darkest corners... What am I to do but to go where nothing is compromised and everything is yet to come, where nothing is crossed and there is not one thing that is lost? 

How could I deny myself from exploring what is still not mine to be known and how could I not give myself to a pain that I know to be only temporary?
Could I ask you about the insanity of my choices another day in the future?... And from my rearview mirror I'll ask you about your accommodated cowardice someday... Some other day, my love.

You might call me crazy and deny me the right to this almost paralysing fear.... this brutal fight.
You might want to make me carry my choice as I would bear a cross in my back... And I'll bear it, my dear, as I bear this open heart that won't ever stop beating for the dreams I can just dream... still!

It is my choice.

My cross.

My tears.

My joy.

Wanderlust.

"Do you believe
In what you see
Motionless wheel
Nothing is real
Wasting my time
In the waiting line."

                   Zero 7

From the bird's-eye view.

As I start packing my soul for another change of scenery, the feelings start to get overwhelmingly familiar... 

My life is suddenly on a bird's-eye view again and I stand on the outside of my own self, observing the people that make my present days, go on and move on without me. 

Standing on a corner I shut everything down and let myself go on auto-pilot... 

The reinvention of everything seems ridiculous at these moments when the warmth of my habits, my people, my daily routines, seem fundamental. However, I know this comfort brings no true peace as it leaves no chance for improvement or for the elevation of the spirit.

On this journey towards a version of me that seems almost unattainable , I feed on the conquest of these new levels of discomfort the cross-over brings. 

I dread the knowing pain of letting go and yet it keeps me moving... it keeps me changing, adapting, progressing... Striving forevermore for growth, knowledge and awareness. 

Sounds almost masochistic... And it does feel achingly cruel!

For now, as I flirt, restless, with the edge of a new abyss, life seems suspended in this eerie aura of thick air and crushing emotions... everything feels like a slow-motioned goodbye and the tears start to blur my vision too often...

...And while deliberately overcoming this lingering feelings of fear, I overcome myself once more... in a cycle that will keep me on an everlasting quest... 

Never content, always adapting.
Never resigned, always tolerant.
Never complacent, always myself.

"So i will follow the feeling
And sing fever to the form
Oh my fever to the form

Cos' the very thing you're afraid, afraid of
It keeps you clean but unclear
Clean but unclear

Is the dirt that you're made, you're made of
And thats nothing to fear
No, its nothing my dear."
                                               Nick Mulvey

Mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits...

The heart is no stranger to mistake. It is constantly in touch with the good and the bad of our spirit... the lighter colors and the darkest shades, calibrating the inconsistencies and desperatly trying to save our souls. 

It is able to formulate and illustrate beauty or ugliness through the shadows of the emotions we carry inside, often trying to compensate for the frailties we won't admit. 

It searches for balance changing directions time after time and becoming incredibly invested in the pursuit of true happiness, trying to strive and search forevermore.

In this heart's quest for eternal bliss, shielding our soul from one's personal demons and masking a neediness we might not want to accept, is no dishonesty... There's nothing but a sense of instinctive protection that can trick the believer we hide within to hold on to feelings that are not complete. 

As we fear rejection and our own weakness, we easily create noisy illusions of love... mistakes we plunge into, because life will always seem lonely enough without little empty spaces in our bed.

When realizing and facing these fantasies of a love that never really was, some of the people we get close to, even those we might have deemed greatly important to us, become strangers.

The thought alone is depressing as you might one day look back to only find the shadows of some of the people who made you, you... people who were great comfort even if just momentarily, lovers you unknowingly loved so incompletely.
However, in this clarifying moment, there's a distinct certainty that the heart you thought was broken is still beating as a whole inside your chest. There's no part of you left behind. There's no part of you to be rescued... it's all still intact, piece by piece, ready for another mistake.
Ready for the final mistake.



"See, honey, i am not some broken thing

I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee

No my heart is gold. my feet are light

And i am racing out on the desert plains all night."