Losing Her

I was two when my grandfather died. A two-year-old is too young to understand the loss of a person. Too young to feel the weight of the grief death leaves behind. But I remember sleeping with my mother’s face cupped in my small hands every night after that, so maybe I didn’t exactly understand grief at that time but I did know loss, enough of it to be terrified of losing someone again. That fear dwindled as I grew up, memories already blurring, leaving their remains until they just became a part of the past that lost its magnitude with age.

You Are a Memory

I am thinking of you in the cold December nights, hoping your memories would warm me in places the chill seemed to have taken a perpetual hold. I think of you with my palms running up and down my arms and knees pressed to my chest, souvenirs sinking in my skin with a warmth that I cannot explain. And yet, for all its tenderness, it is not a warmth that stays, fleeing as soon as my body unfolds and stills, ripping out of me just when I start to lean into its sudden familiarity, leaving behind a cold that does not belong to these December nights. This cold that stretches beyond seasons and time, occupying every last inch of me and reminding me that these memories are here because you are not, seeking to fill your absence but only amplifying it. And I am realizing that memories can barely get you warm enough until they turn into yearning. 
December nights are when I wait for you to fill the empty spaces you left and wake up shivering with sun streaming down my face, wondering why I cannot feel its warmth.

Of a Girl Even You Couldn't Break

The first time you saw her, you could only think about how you would like to lock her smile somewhere only you could see it. How you envied the wind carrying her laughter to the parts of the world unknown to you. How you wanted to narrow the world down to the walls of your house where  it would echo around every corner and fill all the abandoned spaces. And like a child who was never taught to hear "no", you could not let her drift away, could not leave her alone.

You Are Meant To Light Up Your Darkness

On sleepless nights, you try to remember when you began feeling like this. You go as far back into your memories as you could, trying to determine where it all started out. But there was no starting point, no sudden creeping of this feeling that dragged you down as you grew up. Because even when you were young, you knew how sadness felt like, didn’t you? Apologies on your lips, eyes somewhere far away, despair slipping in the cracks of your skin while your heart beat in an unforgivable staccato rhythm, drenched in misery, quietly sinking into the familiar darkness. You close your eyes and you remember those school days: sitting in the back corner of your class, tracing the holes in the desk and daydreaming about an alternate universe where the loneliness doesn’t follow you to your bed or slip into your dreams; holding your breath under water, lungs burning, your body straining to come up for air while a part of you longed to stay there, wondering how drowning feels like.