Peekaboo

And suddenly, just like that, he´s there.

´Miss you.´
´Miss you too, it´s crazy.´

He´s there, that cute, lovely thing with brown eyes, the warmest heart and the most joyous laugh I´ve known. We spend days walking around mountains, laughing, whining, cursing, talking everything and finding new things to agree on. From movies to diets, from music to shapes of clouds in the sky. We´re most friendly friends and nothing more, watching each other closely for any hints.

´Dragon in flight´
´I was just about to say that´

On the last night he kisses me on a bridge over a busy street. The night is cold, with the moon barely visible through the mist permanently residing over the city. The bridge smells of freshly cut wood.

And suddenly, just like that, he´s gone.

In the candlelight

They stop people on a busy street. Hello, would you like to come in and light a candle?

She ingores them, walking on. Then changes her mind. Turns around, takes a left into a small alley and into a small church. Wants to pay for the candle, thinking it's a money collection like many others. A woman there simply ignores her, gives her a candle and takes her inside.

The church is lit with candlelight. Some girl is singing accompanied by a man on an acoustic guitar. It's dark. It's peaceful. It's welcoming. Write a prayer intention, whispers the woman, handing her a piece of paper and showing her a simple white box with a small hole at the top.

The girl lights a candle, then sits down in one of the wooden benches towards the back of the church. Another song fills the air. Slowly, the tears start to fall. She sits there, hiding the tears in her hair, staring into the flickering light of the hundreds of candles. Eventually she makes up her mind, starts scribbling fast on the piece of paper she was given.

An anonymous girl in an anonymous church in an anonymous city, writing a prayer intention praising the strenght and courage and love of her anonymous mother.

All was not fine after all.

The lights went out

And with one click she's gone, that girl with big hopes, big dreams, that girl who trusted the wrong kind of people, made wrong decisons, gave up on what was love and took for love a lie that wasn't.

That girl that used to be me.

Two evenings of reading about her choices, you know the ending, you know it won't be good, you know all you wished she had known at the time; but she didn't and there's nothing to do about it now but to accept it. Like a bad chapter in a book, just go through it and hope the next ones will be better for the protagonist.

Everything will be fine in the end; if it isn't fine, it's not the end.

I cry for her now, for everything and everyone she lost, for everything she was but is no more. I love what she is now, I miss what she is no more. I cry for the love that wasn't.

This life is such a lie

I'm unsure as to what to think. Is this supposed to be a joke? A katharsis of sorts? Karma, catching up with me?

Stories. The stories I could tell. There is bitterness within that fades away with time but may never be gone completely. There's a little of self-pitying too that I try not to indulge in too often. The hate is gone, mostly. There is anger, still lingering in the shadow.

I wonder if there ever was love. In me.

The other side? Smoke and mirrors and taking for stars what was only a night sky's reflection in a dirty puddle on a side of a cobbled street.

No subject, no photo

And then he comes to me looking for strength. It was always him, it's always been his job to be optimistic and strong. He would always call, cheer people up, talk, comfort them. Now he's coming to me for optimism. For comfort. Now it's him who needs to hear that all will be fine. And my heart breaks seeing him like that.

It will be, eventually, I'm sure of that. Maybe I'm silly in my childish faith, but there is just no other option.

Everybody's asleep. I can cry now. Tomorrow we need all the strength to comfort her.

We spin and turn, I'm in your arms and before I realise you lift me high above the crowd and spin me around and around and around. I can't sit still you say and I just smile. Somewhere in between I let go, I let feel. It's surprising, exhilarating, liberating. Intoxicating. Tempting.

'Your hands are cold'. If I was a verb I would be waiting.

Morning brings back reality with its greyscale and bitterness. Snow underneath my feet. I watch my steps.

Deja vu

Why do you keep coming back, always, continuously, stubbornly; your face, your smile, your hands, the smell of that summer, and of the following summer. Why are you still haunting me - it's not even you, I know, it's only some vision of you - cause you’re not there anymore, you’re not even you anymore. And I'm not me anymore either, not that me that you once knew.

And yet, in my mind, you’re still there and I’m still there, only wiser. And all that is happening again. What wouldn’t I do now to make it real, what would I do?

Your face on that photo, your voice in my dream, and I’m yet again finding myself in an empty space, with eyes empty and heart empty, yet aching.

This is silly, she would say, it’s only a sign how emotionally immature she is, that girl from Paris at sunset, who never felt anything like that ever again since he was gone. This is me, emotionally immature, never been able to feel anything like that ever since you were gone.