January 27, 2014

After the storm.


After the storm has passed and the waters of this ocean are calm again, I find myself wondering if you ever think of me, if you ever ask yourself how am I doing... What is my life like... What makes me laugh these days?

Do you ever think of the time we had together and the moments we shared… All the dreams we dared to tell one another and the fantasies we dared to live as one?

Do you ever stop to try and understand my side, who was I then or who I became? What were the choices I had?

Do you ever miss me, dear stranger? Not only as your lover, but as a person you met… as a person that was somehow part of your life?
Was I ever important to you, tell me honestly?

Do you ever question if we will meet again in our lifetime? Will we talk someday? Cry at all this? Laugh? Will our footsteps trail the same path somehow, somewhere, sometime? Will we ever be more than a ghost to each other?

Do you ever wonder if things could be different today… better, maybe?
Did it ever occurred to you that perhaps you could have given me a little more? More time? More compassion?
Did I even truly deserve anything more than what you gave me then? You gave me so much afteral. I am so thankful and yet I am so mad… or sad.

It is all mixed up in my mind to be truthful. It all collapses between my brain and my heart. 

I know I had my reasons to fail, to fail you, to fail everyone… to fail myself in the end. But why did I take it so badly and why did this all have to happen this bitterly?
Was it all a mistake, you believe? Was I, or we, mistaken all along… or when did things become a mistake?

I felt we had something that was magically ours… I thought that nothing, not distance or silence, nor chaos or death, could ever break the connection we shared... everything was little to describe what you were to me. I did believe the two of us, even with all that separated us, had a grace no one else had.
Did these feelings ever made any sense in your mind? When did it stop making sense? Why was that grace lost so instantly? Was it ever there in our hearts?

It is still so confusing and always so disheartening!
I don't know you anymore... and yet I care about you so profoundly. 
You are now a stranger, a shadow only, a silhouette, someone I had to cast away even if I loved you so deeply. 
You became just someone I once knew, a person I had to declare non-grata when I never actually intended to fight this kind of war. And why? Why did I have to fight like this? Because I loved you? Because when your love was gone mine didn't stop existing?... And how did your love fade so fast?... And why did mine persist so strong?

Can loving someone become such a big error? Does it deserve such punishment?

I am sorry, dear stranger.
I am sorry I question so much.
I am sorry I try to guess so far.
I am sorry I loved you.
I am sorry I didn't know how to hate you right when you first said goodbye.
I am sorry I didn't know how to not love…

Sometimes, all you have left in life are but toxic choices.

I am sorry. I am sad. I am sorry.
Forgive me, dear stranger. 
Just forgive me.



I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.
(…)
And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair."

Ted Dwane, Ben Lovett, Marcus Mumford and Country Marshall.

January 23, 2014

If life was the movie playing in my head.

Let's go to Vegas tonight... Go out all night, go crazy and wild, play the same cheap slot machines and go back to the hotel room only when the sun is already out. Our tired bodies won't win and we'll have breakfast on that same bar on the Strip, 2 for 1 Coronas and a yard-long margarita to go. The music won't let us sleep by the pool as our restless hands search for one another. It will be perfectly decadent... It will be love.

The dive.


When you love someone, a lover or a friend, that person attains the immediate value of ALL the things and ALL the persons in the world. Their opinion of you becomes an absolute truth, a sentence you uncomplainingly accept for yourself. You become the good and the bad they see in you, the virtue and the evil, the splendor and the insignificance! It is a power you give away. A power that can make you invincible, indestructibly talented, beautiful and capable… but it can also make you absolutely defeated!

She discovered all this the hardest possible way...

When the love that once embraced her was gone and regret took its place, bitterness dominated, making her soul too heavy for the body to carry, too somber, too crushed. Only then she recognized the force of that control she hadn’t noticed was not hers anymore. It was now a losing game when carrying on seemed impossible without that strength.

All of us search for the same understanding, the same comprehension. All of us string ourselves up for love and acceptance, for a bigger than life plan that will reveal the truth and make us recognize, not only all that we have ahead, but also all that we were and went through… a plan that can assure us we were not wasting our young years. This road is but a narrow clifwalk that needs all the balance one can gather.

When she lost the stability she had neatly built, even if just for a moment, when the shoulder she was leaning on was so suddenly gone and that lover she trusted disappeared down a palm tree road, it became momentarily hard to see any kind of bright vision ahead. Abruptly a gloomy feeling embraced all her body grasping deep for what was left of her heart… the darkness was so dense it extinguished all of the light and she briefly stop being. 

The way back to the surface from the deep hole of suffocating loss is a slow ascent, a controlled process of decompression, stage by stage, letting the air and light in gradually and teaching the lungs how to go from shallow to deep normal breaths full of oxygen…full of life. It is a path that must be taken gently to avoid shock… a difficult route to reach again the sunlight and the rainbow colors there is to enjoy... 

She had to learn to grow back to herself. Grow back her bones, her loins, her skin… stand again and walk again, with her own two crooked feet. For too long life lingered like a hazy dark fantasy, until she realized she had to trail alone through the tortuous, unconfident road, if there was any hope of retrieving that lost power… 

…And if she ever gets it back to herself, she will think twice before letting it fly away with anyone, for they one day might be, merely, someone she used to know.



"You wanna climb up the stairs,
I wanna push you back down.
But I let you inside,

So you can push me around.

If I leave before you,
And I walk out alone,
Keep your hands to yourself
When you follow me home.


I don’t want love."

Michael Jay Lerner, Peter Joseph Silberman and Darby Austin Cicci.

January 13, 2014

If life was the movie playing in my head.

Let's go out tonight, just you and I. Let's dance to some tired 80's songs or a top 40 pop single, drink shots of PatrĂ³n and act like teenagers again. We will go home after the music stops, laughing and still dancing while making silly promises to each other. You will give me a piggyback ride up the stairs, to your room and the world will seem ours just this once!

January 09, 2014

1329 days. 31 896 hours. 1 913 760 minutes.


Memory fades... it is meant like that for a reason. However, to this story, there is no reason, no proven science, no foolproof logic… and the memories remain.

1329 days passed. 31 896 hours or 1 913 760 minutes, and still, your story continues to fold into mine.

Dates became these time-full numbers that agitate the memories I tried to kill when I killed you in my imaginary world.

Dates turned out to be mementos I couldn't tear off of my spirit, relics of a long lost time I didn't want to let linger like it still does…

Dates converted into memorial services of all that we once were, from the day we first met and went dancing, to the moment I last saw your face, disheartened and weary.

Measuring time became a cruel task, a punishing job when looking back shows me a dark paradise deciding the halfhearted future that rests before my eyes.

Of those minutes, that are now left behind since the day my eyes first encountered yours, I don’t know how many I spent thinking your hand was still tightly grabbing mine.

Of those countless hours, I know I wasted too many daydreaming about you in my arms.

Of those days, which can already be counted in years, I know there wasn’t one that went by that I didn't imagine your smell, your face or the shiver you caused my spirit every time I could feel your warm breath down the line of my neck.

To this day, it is still your smile that I remember when the storm settles inside of me... that genuine curve of your lips, your big eyes smiling along, semi-closed with an almost childish spark to it, lightening up all the angles of your face. It still is the warm memory of that smile that lulls me back to sleep when the nights seems to want me awake. 

As time passed and feelings kept strong I had to decide, for the sake of my own heart, that you had to go... I had to let go. It seems, though, that a conflict will always be present…
In my rational mind I killed you and made you inexistent to me, and yet, you persist in the depths of my emotions and I couldn't ever help but save your love as a keepsake. 

I became these battles and, just like humanity was born from conflict, I am now made of the sum of all these struggles I stage both with others and with my own self.

I am not only the mellow, understanding spirit I try to nurture day to day, but also the enraged pitbull, too attached to the lost owner of its soul and desperately seeking for any survival instinct there may be lurking within.

It became a world of discrepancies, clashes, wars… killing or remembering, rage or love, you or me. 

In the middle of all this recurrent turbulence it seems, at times, that my life became but a continuous poem to you, this endless mournful song counting all the days you were not there and that ended up being all the days that I longed for you…

It feels that my whole existence is now solely this never-ending, somber elegy; an ode marking the date that never lost its meaning, when my soul achingly exploded in a million tiny pieces, each only a fraction of their whole self, each fighting to find again a way to complete themselves with each other, searching frantically for you... for their lost part. 

And as my soul searches, I start drowning in the emptiness of what I (can't) find…



"I run East until it turned into West
I walked the gravel to the snow, to the sea
But I found nothing that could look back in me
I found nothing that could look back in me
And I am as empty as the day I left
Before I came back home to you."

                                                    Jeffrey Martin