It’s when your thoughts crawl out of your lips—”I need a break from it all.” It comes out as a whisper of a shout. How long has it been?  It’s when your eyes aren’t shielded by those pieces of glass. The ones with the fingerprints. The ones that your eyelashes brush. And people look faceless and things wear a coat of gauze wrapped tightly around them. All you can see is yourself. All that you are is yourself. And that’s how it always will be.

It’s when you realize the words with the gossamer wings do not have the strength to travel to your fingertips. The ones that hide from you until the day you forget what you’re looking for. Then they will rain from your eyes and drip from your hair. And you’ll cry for the past and their distorted sounds.

It’s when you shake your head and murmur, “God, how long has it been?

Nighttime—a symphony of sounds. It’s strange how the dry brushing of skin of skin, a sandpaper rhythm, can so clearly paint the picture of your sleeping form: the fluttering eyelids of dreaming, the pale movement of breathing, illuminated by the elixir of night. If I lived entirely by sound, the world would seem so much more beautiful. I would no longer mistake sunset for dawn. I could lace myself between each incision of sound, stretch amidst the silence, hold my breath to the slow pattern of your own.

Nothing sings louder than the last word of a book, nothing buries itself deeper in our bones than the curves and slants of its letters. The silence that follows it is perhaps the most difficult to endure — the familiar feeling of endings, announcing its arrival like a shadow. That ringing of dying passion, of settling heartbeats, never quite stops haunting you.

That last word, whatever it means, is embedded with a meaning all its own. It can speak of what is not when what is proves itself inadequate.

We are merely
the fading rivulet of ocean,
the paling scar on a left knee,
the ribbon of dusk amidst the night,
the beam of light cast
so thinly from a hand mirror
(which only in poems remains, in midnight rain,
in memories of memories).

Trying desperately to figure out
what it is
that prolongs the end 
by a thousand echoes.

It is not music who sings to us—no, it is quite the opposite. Music is but a breath of wind on the first hearing. It is examined by the second, contemplated by the third, yearned for by the fifth, and loved by the fourteenth, until what we hear is not the emptiness of unheard notes, but a mirror of our thoughts. The piano flourishes with our hope. The violin weeps with our heartache. Cymbals whisper our secrets. Trumpets tremble with our anger. The beats that so often move us is not that of a song, but of our own hearts. Music has nothing at all to do with itself.

Today I saw the world saturated with golden light, in complete contrast with its usual grey pallor, weighed down by the millions of forgotten words and lost hours that cling to the nape of your neck like the perfume of a hot day. Like an omen carried by the wind, I somehow knew it could not be breached. I melted into the unnatural silence, comforted by the unspoken fact that no one would be searching for me—they couldn’t: I’d entered a world all my own, yet at the same time a world that I knew would never belong to me. I was suddenly aware of the breathing silence, of a realm that would never to cease to exist, with or without the addition of my beating heart. I heard the aria of the trees, the bells of laughter, the shadowy lurk of sorrow, the faraway pulse of rain—sounds I’d consistently heard but never quite listened to. I’d found the place where dreams are born. It could not be seen on any map, but rather, through them.

I thought that the coolness of the wind must come from the ice in our veins. My lungs had often detected this emptiness from its slow ballet through the trees, but not so much as when the breeze kissed my skin, summoning my blood to the surface in the form of a rose. I’d marvel at those winter mornings when we all looked like pale sunsets, smiling our elegiac smiles of shared sorrow.

I never quite understood the world of opposites, how something so biting could give birth to such warmth. I still don’t. All I know is the fluttering of our hearts is more than enough to draw up a storm primed to consume us all.

Fill my lungs with the sea air, drown me in your water’s searing embrace. Sing to me the sorrows of the sea, the ghosts of night. Lure me into your motherly pulse. Whisper each secret of your delicate veils. Your breathing becomes hissing; you are one with the carbon sky. The sun rises. Collecting your belongings, you retreat toward oblivion, weeping for the moon.

i once had a dream
that our eyes were black X’s
and our faces were shadows
that the light never touched

i once had a dream
that our hair was pale dust
and our lips were crimson hearts
that never stopped bleeding

i once had a dream
that the wind never sang
and your lips were too rough
to ever touch mine

i once had a dream
that our hands were shards of ice
and each scream was too silent
to ever reach our ears

i once had a dream
that the sky was lost carbon
and our songs were never heard
that the ice kept getting thinner
and we all fell through

i once had a dream
that we were all questions
that no one dared answer
and slowly, slowly
like the tick of time
we disappeared

I love the sound of rain against my window.

Like the gentle tapping of fingers on a wrist, mostly imagined and barely heard.

This hushed serenade, this erroneous heartbeat, is so satisfying to hear.

Summer is both the happiest and saddest of times for me. Summer is sleeping at dawn and waking to the ghosts of sunset. Summer is basking in the silence of the night and weeping over the silence of breathing. It’s a time of warm epiphanies and piercing realizations. It keeps the purest forms of delight and heartache locked in a tiny wooden box, locks it up with a rusted key, only to release them when one feels the lightness of its touch. It’s neither living nor existing, and that has always both thrilled and terrified me.