contemplation on time

There are three women, three fictional women to be exact, who have made their place in my heart. Even if their creators never created them, they'd still exist. They’ll find ways to come alive somewhere on my body, like a sprout.  Naoko is the one that dies first because she can’t have sex with her lover: like me. Maria is a whore, but she finds love almost instinctively: like me. Tereza is the one that believes in coincidences and dies tragically with her lover: also like me.  When my body closes up and I feel like nothing can enter, not even the breath that sustains me, is when Naoko is alive. I have cried so much when I’ve been unfriendly towards your body. It's almost like I am a disgusting binary: one that craves you inside me, another one that rejects touch and runs away.  I had my first kiss when I was fifteen, like Maria. I didn’t know how to kiss, but I still touched my lips on another person’s. I must've been brave at fifteen.  I kept my mout...

There is an old picture of my mother and her brother, where she's leaning on a car and staring straight at the camera. She's wearing a high waisted skirt with a tucked in polka dotted shirt. Her hair was long, longer than mine ever was. I've spent a lot of time as a kid, simply scattering her pictures on the floor, and looking at them.  These days when we go shopping, my mother sits down somewhere, and says, "Call me when you pick something." She's getting old. She agrees with whatever I pick, and sometimes she barely even glances at it.  I remember when she was ecstatic about picking my clothes. She had ideas. On non-uniform days she would ask me before bed, "what're you wearing tomorrow?"  When I feel uncomfortable in my clothes I think about this one specific photo of my mother- and how she leans on that car.   I was thinking about my mother's clothes. She...

I am huddled up in my sheets and I haven’t turned the lights on since 4. I’ve set up the whole mood to begin writing something. For the past three days this week, every day I frantically wake up at odd hours; sometimes at 3am, sometimes at 6.30am, sometimes at 2 in the noon with an intense lever pulling at me. “ If I don’t write this exact thought I’m thinking, right now it’ll die” But my laptop doesn’t start, my phone hangs, it’s usually too dark or i’m too lazy to pull a pen out in an old fashioned manner and scrawl. My thoughts run too quick and my hands never catch up, it’s a curse and not once have I been able to complete my whole idea. They never exist on paper, only inside me. But then maybe an hour or so later, I’ll be typing away and anybody can guess: the thought is tainted now, too many spikes of unwanted interjecting rods have poked into it’s skin, and now it’s a whole different organism. Whatever i’ve written, consequentially looks disfigured. This isn’t wha...

                                                                                                                     My father is an avid reader. I paused before writing this sentence because I felt like ‘avid’ wasn’t a word that was justifying enough. He read so much that one time when I was 12, I brought my friends home and the first thing they said, almost simultaneously was ‘wow, this looks like a freaking library’. Oddly, not once had I thought of this. I grew up among tons and tons of books and it seemed perfectly normal to me. He would buy books out of a sheer impulse. There are times, he’s told me, in college when he was down to literally his last bucks but preferred to buy a ...

September was her month and it looked like she’d taken the blue out of everything in the world and painted the month with it. All of this gloom and suddenly 500 kilometres wasn’t what I was worried about. I was afraid of calling you on that dreadful day. but your new best friend gave me your number so I dropped you a text instead. ‘Happy birthday’, i said. A high school musical.   A few inside jokes. Some songs I would’ve never listened to if it wasn’t for you. These are the only things I would’ve missed if I hadn’t met you. Yet, between us, am I the only person who has lost something ? Something I think about more often than I’d like to admit. Something that slightly aches where there isn’t much to ache. To write this, it took me a year and two of your favorite songs. I’ve read these lines a thousand times and each time, I feel differently but none of them are gonna make it on this paper. Each time, I want to introduce somethin...