Becoming Your Own Sequel

Image: lubow

If it can be broke, then it can be fixed
If it can be fused, then it can be split
It's all under control
It's all under control

Do we lose fragments of ourselves along the way?
Does the compromising, the conversation, the cynicism take its inevitable toll?
Are the losses worth the end result? From the days and ways we choose not to remember, to the people we don't like to be reminded of?

All you need is time.
All you need is time.
All you need is time.

Castles in the air.
"Happily ever after."
Magical myth making enmeshed in our dreams and aspirations, thanks to Disney, romantic comedies, Bollywood blockbusters, and trashy novels devoured on airplanes.

The dust has only just begun to form.

New and shiny and pretty.
I can almost taste the glimmering joy.
This is how it's supposed to be.
Is it too late? For me, for you, for us?
Have we seen too much, done too much, said too much?
Have we made it impossible to create a fairytale conclusion for ourselves?

Mmm, what you say?
That you only meant well?
Well, of course you did.
Mmm, what you say?
That it's all for the best?
Because it is.
Mmm, what you say?
That it's just what we need?
You decided this.

Can I recapture myself?
Can you recapture yourself?
Are we irreversibly altered?
Is innocence forever lost?

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

What about the promised wisdom? The promised lessons learned from experience?
The honing of spirit that pain is supposed to bring with itself?
It is hard to feel anything except like a patient etherised upon a table.
Was the story supposed to turn out like this?
Really?

i carry your heart with me
i carry it in my heart

There is no escaping it.
There is no going back to the start.
There is only change - now and for ever after.

There's still time for you,
Time to buy and time to lose
There's never a wish better than this
When you've only got a hundred years to live.

This is it then, I suppose.

I have become my own sequel.

A Monsoon of Quiet Loss

A ramshackle heart. 

A balcony. 

And monsoon.

Rain that brings with it memories of joy and love, now long gone. A breeze that carries the notes of freewheeling days, splashy puddles, raindrop-fresh giggles, and crystal clear convictions. 

A day that reminds me of Before. 

Before the anticlimax, Before the petering out, Before the endless vacuum.

Most things in life don't come to an end with a flash and bang, with drama and effective stage exits. They just...fade. Not with a bang, but a whimper - isn't that how the world ends?

Fleeting, fleeting love. 

Oh-so-deceptive as it first makes its way into your heart and your life. 

Whispering of ever-afters and rock-solid permanence. 

Singing of beloved tales and classic films that seem to bear testimony to the sheer dependability of love. Lulling you into believing in the magic. 

Love.

It makes the world go round, it's all you need, you can't buy it, it'll see you through the time of cholera, it is a story in itself, it's hard on the knees, it bites and bleeds and lives and dies and begs and pleads.

So when it finally happens, when it's-there-one-minute-and-gone-the-next, you feel like you've been punched in the gut and had the wind knocked out of you. It's not like it went kicking and screaming, on the heels of terrible betrayal or irreconcilable differences or one of those equally loaded phrases. 

It left quietly, one morning, while you were making toast for breakfast. 

So, you try desperately to retrieve it, rescue it, bring it back - at any cost.

But it's gone. For good. 

The devastation is heart-stopping, because it's the aftermath of a storm so silent and insidious that you never even realized it was there. It's left rubble in its wake, a debris of pointlessness and dreams no longer dreamed, of songs that just sound like empty words, of broken promises, of dangling conversations that are punctuated with sentences that mean nothing. 

It is a wreckage that reeks of absence, of failure - not of high-strung emotions like anger and grief and guilt. 

A quiet collapse. 

Love: a house of cards that the slightest random bit of breeze can topple with a soft swoosh.

Thus, the balcony.

And the ramshackle heart.

And a monsoon of loss.