the thief

A THOUGHT PASSES, fleetingly vivid at the edge of consciousness. The same thought passes again a few wing beats after, without consent, a thief at the peak of daylight. It keeps coming back, more urgently now. The gaps between them slowly dissolve like how cigarette smoke disintegrates into the atmosphere, like butter in warm bread. Thoughts reeling, converging into more than an abstract image, into a moment.

I think of you this way sometimes. In loops, circles to which I revolve. You moving from the edges to my very center. And I dream fully awake. That space in between conscious thoughts has never been the same since we have met.

still there. still there. gone.

Sunrises turning into sunsets. We live for these moments. Yet in the gathering darkness, I cannot get myself to look at our horizon with clear eyes.

because as long as you love, there is hope

You belong to me in at least one lifetime, within the same song, under a different sun.

on memories we burn

That's the tricky thing about memories. Those that are causing you pain are also the ones keeping you intact. You burn them out of impulse, and when there's nothing more left to burn, you set yourself on fire. Destroying yourself is only the foolproof way of erasing a memory.

pinball

STILL a faint taste of you in my mouth, indelible words I can only speak in whispers, in the dark. Meanwhile, hours’ worth of memory eggrolls in that hollow space where I have kept you. Alight, alive with emotions are the broken parts it touches only to fall in some crack somewhere. I blink and there it is again. Intact, like it has its own consciousness, a living organism beating with my own. It spins, rolls, bounces off my walls like a twisted game of pinball that I keep playing over and over and over again. I look at my watch. Still broken. All I have, I realize, is time and too many coins.