Almost

It was a near miss - I spent many days thinking about how close I was. But the opportunity was snatched away from my grasp - and it saved me.

The night will soon be illuminated by fireworks, releasing acrid smoke into the atmosphere. We revel in the sentimentality of new years and make resolutions which are never meant to be met. But it is an almost-possibility which we continue to make.

I still remember last year's resolution. It was meant to be an almost-resolution - an almost-promise to myself that I would learn to live again. And here I am, one year later, making more almost-promises. It is a deadly circle of unfulfilled promises, dreams and aspirations that we get ourselves stuck in year in and year out. But it is the hope we harbour in our hearts which make each unfulfilled year bearable and each almost-promise worth making.

I had no hope but everyone else had hope for me. So they took the dark away and thrust me into the light.

Fireworks explode into the night and I promise myself, once more, that I will learn to live again.

Lives Overlooked

The night bears down heavy blows on her friends. I wasn't her friend but I could feel the atmosphere thickening with suspense and ominousness.
 
She was one year my junior and I remembered watching her eat her lunch in the dining hall with her other Year Eleven friends. She had an elegance which only she seemed to possess - it made her stand out amongst the gaggle of makeup-heavy girls. She never really spoke to me with the exception of the occasional "hi" as we passed each other in the boarding house. Nothing more than that. It wasn't enough for me to think much about her as I graduated and left for university.

Three years later, I received word that she was in a coma. Lying in a hospital bed somewhere in the states, it was almost surreal to think that she would cross my mind again while I was sat in a small room in the English countryside. It reawoke images of a young girl in boarding school - a girl who I never really knew but wish I did now.





Letters praying for a speedy recovery would soon flood her family home - and mine would be one of them.












Hearts pulse wanting you back
Lights shine giving you strength
Lightning whips scaring away death
Please come home and give us faith


Get well soon.

Never did I think...

[silence]

Dispersed

Sink into similarity.
You do not see me;
You see us
and them
never me
he
she
or it.
Disappear into crowds;
Identity spreads thinly;
The many feet of too many
The many eyes of a united crowd.
All the same;
All a group
where no
one
exists.

Change

It was always the boys and I who were sat on the swings, trying to go as high as we could go. I was five and they were eight and ten - young cousins trying to outdo each other on the playground. Every now and then, someone would go running home in a flood of tears with an injury of some form. But despite each fall, each scrape, each bruise we still went back to the park to play competition again. Ten, eight and five, we were. Ten. Eight. And five.

The humid days in the park soon became a past we no longer talked about. We were now twenty, twenty-three and twenty-five. Days spent in office erased all recollection of the events of our childhood. Only on the rainy weekends spent indoors would I remember the days when the cousins and I played on the swings. I wondered if they remembered it as fondly as I and wondered if they thought about the past on gloomy days in the Australian outback just as I did on wintry days in the English countryside.

There was never much communication between us since we parted ways. They left for university long before I did and never really came back. I caught them during the small slivers of time we spent together, but the stories we could share soon dwindled and we were left with nothing much to say. Gone were the days in the park when we laughed, screamed, cried - perhaps, they were never meant to be relived over the Christmas dinner chat. Now dressed smartly in our work clothes (or at least I would like to think I dressed smartly), we left it all behind and all that's left is the acknowledgement that much has changed and that we could never revert back to the childhood we once had  fifteen years before.

August 23, 2010

Coming home was a bittersweet moment. Returning to see the familiar faces was meant to be a point of excitement but I knew the familiar faces also brought back a familiar pain. Is that what families are supposed to do. I don't see joy in my return and neither do they. The next time I return no one will turn a blind eye at me. Sometimes I wonder whether I should even come back but at the same time..can I stand being away for that long?

Sometimes I wish I never existed. Non-existence seems so much easier.

Lessons to be Learnt

"At some point she has to try"

"People are starting to notice...eventually, they're going to think: why bother?"

"I think she's very insecure about herself..."

"She is very vulnerable"

"..and so I think she is afraid to talk to people because she thinks they do not want to talk to her"

"but you see: people don't see that...people will not perceive that...they just see her the way her actions portray her..perception is a horrible thing"

"Yeah I know...because our perception of her is based on her actions..and they aren't reflecting her in the most positive light"

"Her actions and her inactions..."

"Umm..yes inactions...definitely"







Actions speak louder than words. Inaction speaks louder than actions.

And I curl up under the covers

while the night is ignited by fireworks

to prove 

that the unresponsive

can only ever lie alone