It’s a shame. It’s the same thing.

Today I dyed my hair grey. I’m sipping on my second glass of gin and I am thinking about you. I questioned myself if I loved you at all even if that love for you was different. Doubts can sometimes cloud a person’s idea of love and love most often than not causes reactions such as laziness. As human beings, we struggle to find proof that we are alive. Proof that the love was indeed real while it lasted. Proof that love between the person that you have invested time in, existed even if it meant we have to live with a broken heart. Just so that we could be acknowledged we were once someone’s priority and the pain inflicted onto us worth something to someone. Somehow, it just dawned unto me that I didn’t need proof to know what I had with you was real. I Just know.

I know that 1You are not a morning person. I know 2You make the bed whenever you can getting up. I know 3You have no gag reflex. Basically, you scrap your tongue. A LOT. I know 4You draw your eyebrows even if you only visited the grocery stores. I know 5You wear your dresses mostly paired with shoes. I know 6You wear an 8/9 shoe size.

I know 7You go to work in an empty stomach. I know 8You cook scrambled eggs without adding salt. I know 9Your love for pastries and assorted bread knows no bounds. I know 10You love gravy on your rice even though you’re not a big fan of carbs. I know 11You can bear food spicier than me -how is that even possible but you do. I know 12You chew your food with your mouth open. I know 13You love your wine paired with cheese. I know 14You love sweet treats and snacks. Anything from a cake to ice cream and devouring chocolates not mentioning the midnight craving for donuts. I know 15You enjoy cooking and baking. – To you, it’s very therapeutic. I know 16You could eat cereal, milk, and yogurt for dinner. It applies to assorted bread which I can never understand. I know 17You take all the shrooms & carrots without flinching by the taste I loathe. I know 18You love snacking on edamame and made Pluto a convert. I know 19You love your gin with fever-tree Indian tonic water. I know 20You love soda water. I know 21You take your Coke-Zero. I know 22You love cafe hopping and most importantly you love a good latte without sugar. I know 23You can never have more than a dose of caffeine a day. I know 24You enjoy trying anything and everything exotic from the menu even if it turns out disappointing. It has never stopped you or rather, you never learned. I know 25You insist on washing every single dish after use. Which is great for me. Really.

I know 26You hate driving on the road when the traffic is congested or with me pressurizing you from the passenger seat. I know 27You cry at any movies that make you sad. Probably every movie that we have ever watched. I know 28You love ‘One Piece’ and watching anime that has hundreds of running episodes. I know 29You speak illuminating Japanese and continue to learn Japanese by reading out loud from google. I know 30You love ‘Oh Wonder’ because you relate and identify so much with their lyrics. I know 31You read books & articles that have interesting facts & theories about almost anything. I know 32You love taking/ printing random polaroid pictures and stuck it on your wall of pain. – That’s just what I call it. I know 33You love photography & making memories by taking sneaky pictures and videos of people. Especially in my sleep and I still demand that be erased and burn in hell. I know like me 34You keep memories in boxes too.

I know 35You could fit into any top but always had trouble finding pants that fit. I know 36You take off your earrings at the end of each day before you go to sleep. I know 37You take your tea without sugar. I know 38You hate shaving so very often. I know 39You love trying new products and switching around your products such as facial foam all the fucking time. Though I often wondered how do you know if any of the product works best for you. I know 40You only use dandruff free shampoo. I know 41You sleep with your hair still damp. I know 42You prefer to sleep with the fan on and hearing the static noise it makes in the background. I know 43You love to boss google around and make the bot calls you ‘your highness.’ I know 44Your hands and feet are constantly chilly in the night. I know 45You don’t fart and when you do it doesn’t make a whiff. I know 46You love kisses, hugs & cuddles. I know 47Your love for smelling my scalp when I don’t shower is admirably violent. I know 48You hate your blanket stolen in the middle of the night despite the both of us having each for ourselves.

I know 49You always put everyone’s needs above your own. From caring for a drunk to buying new stuff for others rather than for yourself. I know 50You pack lightly on your travels. I know 51You love being tanned so I guess you love the sun. I can never tell. I know 52You want to get your diving license one day and check it off your bucket list. I know 53You want to live in a cozy house and live a simple life in Australia. I know 54You wouldn’t mind being away from home because you’re independent that way. I know 55You hate socializing because it tires you out. I know 56You’d like to own a Pomsky and name it ‘Neko’ AND a cat naming ‘Inu’ one day. I know 57You have an obsession brushing Pluto. I’m still uncertain if you are obsessed with her fluffiness or the chunks of fur ball floating and hiding in the corner of the house.

I know 58You choose to live your life minimalistic. I know 59You like an organized mess. You still don’t get a free pass for that. I know 60You keep losing your things. I know 61You get constant anxieties over everything that you do and beat yourself up over and over again. I know 62You hate digging into your savings. I know 63You are great with techs. You could be a windows engineer. For all we know, it’s a valid career. I know 64You enjoy long walks. I know 65You love –walking down- Sesame Street. I know 65You love cute vulgar socks with tities and anything stationery/ insignificant from dollar shops. I know 66You love collecting exquisite chopsticks that you do not even use. I know 67You have a high sex drive. I know 68You love buying and experimenting with sex toys. I know 69You have a black hole for 13-inch dildo.

I also know that this is the proof you need.

This is the girl, V whose great at 69.

The thing is

they don’t tell you in school how experience can teach you to heal in all the wrong ways. For the rest of the day, I thought of all the girls who’d asked me out, who I’d laughed about with friends, or had broken up with and never spoken again. Had I hurt any of them like this? It was impossible to imagine ever having that kind of power. My failure to fix it is a second kind of erasure.

You are intoxicated by the false hope that new people bring, that they are less flawed than people you already knew. Time will rip the apparent perfection and mystery, -this is how I know you were only in love with the idea of me- and I realized late in life that bouncing off one or the other isn’t the key. It’s just an endless treadmill of humans.

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first. But always be aware of the possibility of total defeat. Whether the reason for that defeat seems right or wrong. I’ve read something from before. It says, “You have to stop expecting people who don’t love themselves to love you the way you love them.” It’s true. I had found love within myself. I knew how to give my full self to someone when I made the commitment. But I have to accept that not everyone understands how to love as I do.

The Dynamics and chemistry between us despite liking the same music genre, sometimes understanding unspoken thoughts doesn’t keep me from feeling like the kite that you can never catch. It feels like we were at different places at different times. I can’t help but wonder if this cliche would ever be different as time passes. Would you heal? Would you hate me because I left? Would you become a different person because of me? Then again people change eventually or eventually changes. Would we have done things differently then?

They are the ones who drive you accidentally mad. The ones who promise you absolutely nothing but deliver something you were never expecting; something exhilarating and tantalizing and oddly, unexpectedly comforting. Something you didn’t think you’d get to hold onto but you suddenly don’t want to let go. Learning to love without attachment is the work of a lifetime, and most of us never quite get there.

Being with you feels like deep-diving into a pool of chlorine. Every molecule of you wanted to embrace all and every part of me and all I could felt was drowning. It was rushing through the top. Yet, I could never seem to write you into words despite your constant plead with me.

You wanted all of me even when there was nothing I could offer.

I can’t grow innocence. I cannot allow myself to be vulnerable. It is difficult to hold on to only words a person could offer and trust with your heart hanging on the line. Never knowing when the second shoe is going to drop. And this I wrote, is proof. These pages are proof. Because they are words I wear and still wearing on my sleeve. I am saddened that it has to take breaking my heart for you to see me, v.

David Foster Wallace wrote:

“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny, inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

(…)

And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali – it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.”

This is how I felt. For a long time. It is also how I could never comprehend the latter like the former. If I couldn’t understand the paragraphs fully. How can I expect anyone to understand me?

.

Clay: “Still not sure I believe in love.”

Ellman: “Have you ever been in love?”

Clay: “No. That’s my point.”

Ellman: ” How about Hannah?”

Clay: “Yeah, for a long time I thought I was in love with her.”

Ellman: “OK, so what’s the difference between thinking you’re in love and actually being in love?”

Clay: “I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know what love was. I still don’t.”

Ellman: “You don’t know what love is, but you’re confident you can say that it’s a lie.”

Clay: OK, maybe not a lie. Maybe a… [sighs] Like a fantasy? When you see people for who they really are, the fantasy goes away, and then so does the love.

Ellman: “So love is just some ideal. Which means that no one can ever truly love anyone else, and no one can ever truly love you.”

Clay: “So you think I’m just avoiding? And no fair saying ” It doesn’t matter what I think,” because I’m tired of that tactic, and it does matter to me… what you think.”

Ellman: “I think, I wonder… if you do believe in love, but then you love so fiercely that it hurts sometimes. And you’re afraid of that hurt, as anyone would be.”

Clay: “If you love someone,  you’re going to lose them. Sometime, somehow.”

Ellman: ” Yes, quite possibly. [sighs] But we… love anyway. Don’t we? ok. So what exactly do you believe in?”

Clay: “I believe we’re all alone, and that no one can save us but ourselves.”

The truth is, you’re right, I have been in love before. I’ve done a lot of what I’ve done out of love, and where’s it ever gotten me? Love has made me angry, paranoid, afraid. Love has made me a monster, more than once. Love has only fucked up my life, has made me question my relationships, my closest friends. And God knows, love has made my closest friends question me. So you know what. Fuck love.

I don’t want to live my life based on someone else’s idea of what’s right, or what’s moral, or what’s good. I want to figure it out for myself. Even if I make mistakes along the way. It’s never wrong to be a human being and love someone as well as you can.

How much I hurt, it’s my fault. Always. I fall in love with girls too fast, too hard.

– 13 Reasons Why

Please, tell me

Does feeling sad feels better or not knowing sadness feels any better?

It’s in the Polaroid

Have you ever had a missed connection and wondered what would be different; what could have happened given the right circumstances at the exact moment when opportunities were to present itself again. We knew better.

Three years and nine months was however long it took. We should know better now. Have you held a book and felt as if you have read the ending to that story. I saw chapter 23.

I met her and saw ordinariness. She froze me in framed polaroid and put me on her wall of pain like nothing out of the ordinary. She’d kiss me tongueless. Her fingers are still lacking an inch even standing at 175. She’s devoured every single word in my abandoned space over the past four years. She asked why haven’t I, and wouldn’t I write about her. I wasn’t in any position to. At least that’s how I felt then. Yet she’s making me feel like a written book when she wrote me into perspective; she’s put me into perspective too. She has a heart bigger than an infection and she would go to great lengths just to put a smile on my face.

We started to discover strange commonalities that logic would chalk up to coincidence, but my heart recognized as something else entirely. We were awkward in all of the same ways, and it was oddly comforting. I had no idea that the joy I was cashing in on would inevitably lead to more pain than I had ever felt before.

Hindsight hurts; clarity still feels uncertain. She looked at me differently, so she fell into her love for me. Potential is never a sustainable fuel for love. Is the only thing truly keeping us apart from her inability to love herself more than I do her? The “what ifs” weren’t steering me away, but closer from the me I believed she deserved. Don’t get me wrong.

Undeserving of the love I incurred upon her because its intensity is more than I knew what to do with. It’s the knowing of the ending that I cannot reciprocate because I never learned to draw within the depths of myself the ability to accept the love of another being to surpass mine. Attempting to control everything will not magically turn me into who she needs me to be.

I don’t want you to feel bad when you hear this, so I’ll choose to feel bad by not saying it. I will hurt so you won’t. We sacrifice ourselves so they won’t feel pain, but in doing so, we collect hurt that isn’t ours to carry. Unnecessary burdens become just friends until the bitter end. And it will end bitterly because there is no happy ending for carrying unnecessary pain.

Monotony may be striking to you, but I want so much more out of a relationship. I recognize that once it is beating its hardest for someone who will nurture it, you will look back at this moment as the single biggest mistake you’ve ever made. I’ve decided to enjoy those things rather than label them. But I’m not quite ready to change where we are.

So what do you do? What do you do when you find yourself sitting there, attempting to justify and make sense of someone else’s ambivalence and your own inexplicable need to love them when they haven’t asked it or earned it?

You let go. You move on. Part of me doesn’t want us to ever get to chapter 23 so we could always come back from whatever that happens to us like how we did. It’s selfish, but it is also true, I don’t do exes.

The Concept Of Breaking Up

“On average, a healthy heart beats 115,000 times per day. When excited, the heart rate can double. The heart pumps 2,000 gallons of blood through your entire body 24 hours a day. It never rests. The heart is the hardest-working muscle in your body. But when it’s damaged, it’s just like skin. It scars, and scar tissue can be very dangerous in a heart. It weakens it. And eventually, a heart full of scars stops working. Scarred hearts don’t heal, but over time, the scars can change. They can become smoother, softer. And some scars can even fade away.”

-Meredith Grey

Day 28.

It is human nature to forget pain. People find excuses all the time, so they wouldn’t be lonely. “Maybe it’d be different this time round,” “Love will conquer all obstacles,” “We will eventually find solutions,” I am at the stage of constantly missing a person that I forgot how much it hurt the day my heart broke. I recalled my first heartbreak and told myself, never again. Then I met someone. Every heart breaks gets tougher to move on because every pain from the heartbreak is different. I want to be able to look back and remind myself, we broke up simply because we wanted different things.

Thus, keeping your reality in check.

I got your message on Day 6.

There were days I couldn’t get up and do life and there are days I couldn’t stop to think about you because work gets overwhelming. Good days and bad days, time forces you to move on. A little bit and a lot every other day. Eventually, you will realize a person can live life without having anyone. Some things just happen and we don’t get to know why. Is it really the worst thing in the world knowing it’s out there if you want it? 

One day, I’ll write a book about all the types of love and all the heartbreaks in the world.

You shall be named the girl with ‘W’ as her initial.

I’m not angry at her. I hope you don’t.

Day 12.

It’s day twelfth of our breakup. I’ve never stopped writing since Day 1 when I got my heart utterly broken, smashed and in ruins. Today, I felt slightly stronger to write about us. I don’t hate you for any of it and it is important that you know that I don’t. How could I? We were together for 2 years, 6 months and 16 days. It feels like time was never enough. Even on that very day that we decided to let each other go, we were making plans to a play date and travel plans that we will never get to go on.

I gave you all the best in me, the best of me and the last dying bit of my heart. It felt like abandonment. I was a child that was too much for you to handle. I was suffocating you because I wanted all your attention. I was too stubborn wanting all your love to myself. I was difficult. Truth is, you didn’t know what you wanted. We have been dancing back and forth not knowing what you felt for me was more than a friend or less than a partner for what feels like 3 years now. How can I be mad at you when I am your first to every damn magical elephant flying out of the world experiences when there isn’t a damn ex-boyfriend or girlfriend to compare to. For you to realize that you’re giving up the stability and trust that we have built over the years; a person to come home to every single night. The truth is I am way out of your league and the sad part is we both love each other deeply that we must be apart.

I cannot fix us. There was nothing to be fixed and nothing of our personality can change to make things better because things are perfect the way it was. The universe just played the biggest prank of all time on us. I am bitter. I am bitter because I will not be the person that could sweep you off your feet and make you fall in love with me every fucking damn morning and go to bed longing for the sun to come and sit you down and melt away the stars. Yet, you are the waves that keep coming back ashore and always, always slipping away from underneath – with me sinking deeper each current carries. You dug me a grave that flowers can never grow and flourish without your fingers. You walked out of the door that I opened and shut me in a room of emptiness to fill the void.

The sound of silence can be quite deafening. I’d always woken up to your text messages from the subway at 7.50am because you’d have started your day earlier than mine. I know my phone will ping at 1.45pm after you’ve had lunch and couching on the WC from a food coma. At 5.25pm we’d decide where to get dinner and bitch mostly about how fucked up our clients or our bosses were depending on who fired at us that day. We’d text our way home at 9.35pm so whoever gets home first get to wait up. I’d go to bed much later than you at 3.00am and leave you messages so you could wake up to my texts. We have cultivated a habit together. Right now every ticking second feels like a forever long of nothingness. I can’t be on social media snapping every fucking thing I do without sending to the first person I always share to. I can’t because I can’t bear the thought of you thinking I’m having fun after breaking up with you. I don’t see your story because I know I will cave because fuck, I miss you. I can’t because my heart will continue to shatter if I were to chance upon unfamiliar faces. I went radio silent. Every single damn day, I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Someone once told me: “You can never ever prepare your heart for a breakup no matter how much time you spend doing so.” I’ve been through a fair share of breakups. I know the drill, I know the protocol. As funny as this may sound, when it happened, I cried like a little bitch. I have never been through normal relationships that ended with mutual understanding and respect for each other. It has always been someone cheated; they slept with a person and I slept with two; they slept with three and I slept with five. Let’s do the numbers and compete how fast we can move on to another. I actually felt stupid and even guilt to chat someone up. We are playing let’s count how many months we are willing to mourn this loss before knowing someone new. Well, fuck my life because I’m stuck. I am clueless as fuck how to play this game of charades with these new sets of rules:

1. Move on by not sleeping with/ using someone
2. Move on at your own pace
3. Cry a lot

I got busy. I exhaust myself physically and mentally every day and deprive myself of sleep so that my mind can shut down without lying in bed drowning in silent. I drag myself up every morning and do it all over again. I’d stared down the barrel of the gun and repeatedly say “I love you” for the umpteenth times even I, myself cannot convey and no one can ever comprehend what I love about you but I do. I replayed the scenes of that night when I held you in my arms and the both of us broke down crying with a magnificent view on the hilltop. Moments of the last salty taste on your lips, the smell of your hair and the touch of your skin before I stood up and walked away. So how do I know you are the one even if you didn’t. Simply because I chose to make a conscious choice.

You are my one even when the future is bleak and unknown.

A cry for help

Today I am wearing lacy black underwear
For the sole purpose of knowing I am wearing them.
And underneath that?
I am absolutely naked.
And I’ve got skin. Miles and miles of skin;
I’ve got skin to cover all my thoughts
like Saran Wrap that you can see through
to what leftovers are inside from the night before.
And despite what you might think, my skin is not rough; nor is it bullet-proof.
My skin is soft, and smooth, and easily scarred.
But that doesn’t matter, right?
You don’t care about how soft my skin is.
You just want to hear about what my fingers do in the dark.
But what if all they do is crack open windows?
So I can see lightning through the clouds.
What if all they crave is a jungle gym to climb for a taste of fresher air?
What if all they reach for is a notebook or a hand to hold?
But that’s not the story you want.
You are licking your lips and baring your teeth.
Just once I would like to be the direction someone else is going.
I don’t need to be the water in the well.
I don’t need to be the well.
But I’d like to not be the ground anymore.
I’d like to not be the thing people dig their hands in anymore.
Some girls know all the lyrics to each other’s songs.
They find harmonies in their laughter.
Their linked elbows echo in tune.
What if I can’t hum on key?
What if my melodies are the ones nobody hears?
Some people can recognize a tree,
A front yard, and know they’ve made it home.
How many circles can I walk in before I give up looking?
How long before I’m lost for good.
It must be possible to swim in the ocean of the one you love without drowning.
It must be possible to swim without becoming water yourself.
But I keep swallowing what I thought was air.
I keep finding stones tied to my feet.

-Sarah Kay from 13 Reasons Why

Drives Highway

Guilt has compelled you to sacrifice your heart to your conscience. But guilt is useless.

Bourbon Vanilla

I want a gentle fistful of her hair where her ear meets her neck and I want to steal kisses in between breaks of laugher.

.

I once crafted a beautifully written draft under this title. Those words can’t seem to reach out, nor convey such graceful thoughts at this moment. Often times, people that know a couple seldom have the chance seeing two sides of a coin. Here, I hope you’d read this piece and this piece that I hold very dear to my heart because I can’t say it any better.

“Sometimes, I feel like ripping apart my skin, and searching for a reason for why I feel this empty. Maybe my veins are tangled. Or something is lodged in my ribcage. Because it feels like something inside of me is missing or broken.”

She’d pick a fight with the sky if she didn’t like the shade of blue. She didn’t understand how doing nothing with her was better than doing anything with anyone else even on my birthday. When it comes to you and me, there can be no decisive victory. Every crime of yours.. feels like one I am guilty of. The dead, at least have the luxury of being done with what they lost. But you and I, we still itch.

‘Cause you never think that the last time is the last time. You think there will be more. You think you have forever, but you don’t. Sometimes, you can’t explain what you see in a person. It’s just the way they take you to a place where no one else can.

I am proud to say that I have lived with no regrets the last four months dating you. I have done things that I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. I have kept all my promises to you other than building a pallet bed with you like we said we would. Go on a trip to JB visiting cafes like we said we would. Staycay in a hotel with breakfast in bed like we said we would. Watching ‘Danish Girl’ at The Projector like we said we would. Waffles, salmon and canvas painting at PasarBella like we said we would. Spending a couple more jolly holidays and your birthday together like we said, if we could. If you add little to a little, and then do it again, soon that little shall be much. The thing is we are living on borrowed time. I am contented with what we have already shared so I can live with that.

You make a list in your head about what you want in a lover, like brown hair and a sweet voice. A sharp mind and a soft heart, a sense of humor that actually makes you laugh like you mean it. This and that. And it’s all bullshit. Because people aren’t list. And I’ve always wanted to be the person who made someone realized that. I want to come across someone with a list in their head that is nothing like the person I am, and I want to show them what they didn’t even know they were looking for. People who think they know what they want are fooling themselves. Nobody really knows what they want. Not until it’s right in front of them.

You once asked me if I ever had a lover that was also my best friend. Right now, I want to tell my best friend how much pain it is to have to lose her for all the right reasons, but I couldn’t tell her because she is also my lover. No one ever walks away from love, knowing they can never go back. When you lose a person, a whole universe goes along with them.

There will be nights at four in the morning, when we see each other’s status on Skype lit with a bright green ball of light. I hope that it will be oddly comforting to know that our presences is just right there and we could sit in silences knowing.

I miss you, too.

Five Eight Six

I imagined your tears streaming down your cheeks standing in a corner of that little cabin in the subway as you illustrated. When I look at your face, my eyes are always drawn to your parting lips. The lips that left me a bruised red in the dip of my collarbone and a half-empty forgotten cigarette pack. I don’t think that they are meant to be romanticized. They slip out things like:

“You’re beautiful.”

“Last night I dreamt of you,”

“I love you, but I am not in love with you,”

I didn’t say anything then, but I knew better. It’s not that those particular words hurt me or that they were difficult to hear, it was the realization that came after. We don’t choose when or how we fall in love with people even if it is just a fleeting moment or person in time. I was sighing in relief that I wasn’t experiencing those happy moments with that one person (you) because that would have meant I am in love (with you). While you were battered in guilt.

Guilt is often boiled down to a person’s morals. Do guilt associates with betrayal in this context? You wonder if you would be happier with them or without them. You wonder if you would have just been settling to be with someone that you really weren’t meant to be with at all. You become scared of the depth of your own emotions, but the more you try to overcome these feelings, the more they manifest into the deepest and darkest parts of your mind.

There was always something off about two people being together or the two of us as a matter of fact. People rarely land on the same page. You would never have feelings at the same time, you would never be available at the same time, and you would never want what the other person wanted at the same time. Time worked against you, yet you can’t help but ask yourself, “but what if we were happy together?”

Well, guess what. Sometimes a person will hold you and they will kiss you, but they will still leave when the sun comes up. Sometimes, all they want is to be with you at that one moment – for one skipped heartbeat. Is it enough for you. Is this what you deserve. Is it okay if they’re only yours till dawn spills in through the window.

It’s not okay, is it? Assuming that we were on the same page, you do everything you can to be the umbrella, and shelter them, but you forget that getting caught in the rain never hurt anyone. Sometimes I am so thankful that I will never be together with certain people because part of me just knows that it would have been horrible.

The only thing that gives me comfort whenever I am in the state of questioning of what could have been is realizing my experiences are completely individual to the love that I had or have for this person. While knowing that the experience itself is not. The feeling, the questioning, the “what if” may fade away, or perhaps it will stick. The thing is, breakups are never easy and they take longer to end than the relationship did to start.

Just because sometimes the person you want is nothing more than just all your illusions directed at the fleshy body of another. Other times, they are all you’ve ever wanted but not what you need. And on the rarer occasions, they’re all you’ve ever needed and wanted. When this happens, do we simply deny ourselves and walk away from each other.

The lips are fickle and changeable and they will tell you things you never thought your ears would have to hear. If you don’t mind, lean in for another kiss. If you do, walk away. For I am unsure how many people I have kissed to come to terms with the realization that I am okay with what’s given to me. Therefore, I do not ask for more. This sort of contentment doesn’t equate to being naive. Things never work out exactly as planned, especially when I begin thinking and making my choices based on a person and ignoring every red light my gut tells me to turn around.

People often think that the person whom we fall in love with consumes our every thought, takes ownership of our irrefutable happiness, is also our best friend; someone we want nothing more than to spend time with, laugh with, and love with our whole being ignited with fire. These people also hope, that that person, or persons, are gentle, careful, and safeguard that piece of us, we have given to them as if it was a part of them. But, that would be too easy; too obviously perfect and true.

No, we might not happen overnight and no, it might not end like the perfect romantic comedy. It might happen gradually and had the potential to be one of the wisest decisions we have ever made, but love has its costs. We traded our friendship for intimacy and chemistry for the familiar. But here is the catch, how can you be afraid of losing something uncertain if your desire to take risks and step outside of your comfort zone is almost non-existent.

When you do leave, leave the door ajar because there will always be someone after you, and vice versa.