My hands are of your colour, but I shame to wear a heart so white.

Entries date from 2009-2011. 

All other entries locked for my viewing only. 

My mother told me once about guilt. Her own guilt she held in the palm of her hands, like an offering. But your guilt is different, she said. You do not need to hold on to it. Imagine this, she said, her hands running along my forehead, then up into my hair. Imagine, she said. Picture it, and what do you see?

A bruise on the skin, wide and black.

A bruise, she said. Concentrate on it. Right now, it's a bruise. But if you concentrate, you can shrink it, compress it to the size of a pinpoint. And then, if you want to, if you see it, you can blow it off your body like a speck of dirt.

She moved her hands along my forehead.

I tried to picture what she said. I pictured blowing it away like so much nothing, just these little pieces that didn't mean anything, this complicity that I could magically walk away from. She made me believe in the strength of my own thoughts, as if I could make appear what had never existed. Or turn it around. Flip it over so many times you just lose sight of it, you lose the tail end and the whole thing disappears into smoke.

I miss reading words that move the soul.

Tonight I cried for the first time in months. All that pain and hurt in its immediate aftermath, I could deal with all that because the conviction within burned stronger than the tears could quell. I wanted to give you up, and that was why I could find it within myself to let you go. I was done with all that running away from God. Like Jonah, I did all the running I could. I ran hard, and I ran fast, but it was a treadmill I was running on - I'd expended so much energy only to discover I'd been stationary all this while. It was easy to force myself to move on, at the start, or at least to pretend. And I must say I've never been happier, never been more at peace with myself and with God than at this stage in my life. No part of me wishes to linger on in the wake of those moments, and nothing will ever draw me back into the abyss where I fought and failed to overcome the darkness without His guiding light.
 
But then I am only human, and there are days, and there are moments, when a mere lyric from a song can spark off a whole torrent of memories, and then a whole torrent of tears.

I hear you're doing well now, and that suffices.

I love child things because there’s so much mystery when you’re a child. When you’re a child, something as simple as a tree doesn’t make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow - you haven’t got a handle on the rules when you’re a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.

David Lynch

***

I used to do this all the time when I was younger. The window in the living room overlooked the sea (we were staying on the 17th floor of an apartment then). Every afternoon, I would position myself between that vast window (the dimensions shrank continually over the years) and our dining table. It was always three steps forward, three steps back. (I was obsessive-compulsive to a fault.) I liked to pretend I was in a submarine adjusting the telescope lens. Forwards, and I would be so near the living room would be squeezed out of my vision, yet it always seemed as if the waters were receding further and further away from me. Backwards, and instead of diminishing in size the sea and the ships loomed ever larger. It was counterintuitive to a young child's mind. And it fascinated me. Every day - always three steps forward, three steps back. I never varied my ritual.

kitesong.blogspot.com

It speaks for itself.

Look at the sky, you said.

What? I was nonchalant.

See those stars? (Your earnestness was endearing.)

Uh-huh.

Don't you think they look just like swords?

Swords? What are you talking about? They look just like stars to me. Aren't swords supposed to be more...elongated? I was deliberately disagreeable. And jealous, too, because I couldn't seem to see them the way you did.

No, they're swords, you insisted. You're looking at them the wrong way.

Right, so now you're insinuating that I lack creativity and imagination. Well, they look plainly like stars to me. Swords indeed! I sounded more miffed than I really was. (How could anyone possibly get angry at you?)

They're swords, they really are. They're the tips of swords.

Oh! I exclaimed, startled.

Yeah, see, that's what I've been trying to tell you all along. It's like someone on earth threw all these swords into the sky and they got stuck there. You point at a tiny, flickering light in the distance. There, that's my sword.

After that night I never looked at stars the same way again. It doesn't matter that you're no longer next to me, or that we're no longer a part of each other's lives. But what stars, I hear you ask. For aren't they all just glittering swords in the sky?

Aaron and I were trudging the sad and lonely route from the library to the Summit for dinner when the bright lights of the Upper Quad beckoned.

Couple of minutes later, a glass of red wine in one hand, a plate stuffed with hors d'oeuvres in the other...and Wen Juin stumbles excitedly onto the scene, carrying 7 perfect little glasses of tiramisu. ("Can you believe they were going to throw these away?") A flurry of hands, and the little vials of rum-filled goodness were downed to the last trickle. (Have you ever had tiramisu that trickled down your throat?)

20 pairs of still-greedy eyes rove the banquet table while the air throbs lustily with desire. We are sprawled irreverently on the granite steps and there is an aching in our groins. "There is tiramisu on your nose." If you strain your ears hard enough, you can almost hear the faint strains of chamber music and the hushed clinks of wine glasses. The ground underneath your skin has taken on a curious velvet quality.

But the clouds are heavy and bruise-coloured. Like new wine in old wineskins that threaten to burst. A hiss, a crackle, and a flash of brilliance lights up the Federal building. Everything is laid bare.

This is my moment of reckoning. You are my nemesis.

"But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down."

You say, wait. But what I hear is this: weight. That essence of inertia solidified into something physical and tangible and raw. I see it in the shadows under your eyes. In fingers that twist themselves, over and over, into a hundred little knots that bind my soul to yours. I hear it in your tread. Excess baggage. Deadweight.

Do not blame me for turning away. Old sins have long shadows. Do not weigh me down with your soul, and the baggage of your past.