The tree is disappearing. 

I remember seeing it for the first time, on Wednesday, glowing golden against a slate sky. I sat outside a second-floor computer lab with my back against the wall, a floor length window in front of me, watching the rain outside. Watching a beautiful tree glistening in the rain, yellow leaves shuffling in the wind. I took out my notepad and wrote him a letter that day.

Because that tree was mesmerizing.

I wrote to him about a tree. A tree. Yet the words flowed out of me as though they were never mine— like they belonged to the page all along and now they were going home. Black ink traced the sharp turns and awkward loops of my thoughts and I find myself settling into the rhythm of writing all the little things that came into my head.

Later, he thanked me for my letters.

Later, I saw the tree again, having lost half its leaves overnight.

Later, still, I think about sitting in front of the same window, watching the same tree in the same rain on the same afternoon.

So many people grow old to grow wise. They grow remembering mistakes, remembering not to make the same mistakes, remembering because to not remember one risks growing stupid. Some people live for the cause and the effect, and the journey and the end, and the root and the fruit, and many other important things I find difficult to put into words. I thought I could simplify my life like I’d cull numbers and letters in algebra, substitute a with b when a is equivalent to x, make you a function of me, or make us into a summation. What does it feel like to be the proverbial spanner in the works, I wonder? All I know is what it feels like to have a rip spanning every compartment of my ordinary little life, and not knowing how to seal it shut. I’ve lived my life hoping to grow old to grow wise. I’ve made mistakes and remembered them all, I’ve remembered for fear of becoming stupid and now I’ve found that the rules I’ve lived by no longer make sense. Some people blur the lines for others, some people tear through other people’s lives— sometimes even parts of their hearts, and these some people are the ones who challenge us to reinterpret what had been taken for granted all this time. Some people break others because they themselves are too broken, it’s almost scientific the way their brokenness seeps into others, along an osmotic gradient no one got around to calculate and graph. These people blow card-houses to the ground, makes the ground spin beneath our feet and at the end of it all we don’t know which side is up and which side is wrong. How do I build my world back from ground zero again? How would I bear its loss?

I wanted to write a song. Something I’d hum under my breath when I’m all alone. I haven’t a pick, and my guitar is out of tune; I don’t need to strum to know. I hear it groaning on—

I’ve developed a craving for the suffix -scent:
evanescent
iridescent
pearlescent
fluorescent
phosphorescent
incandescent

I wanted to put bright words into my mouth and chew them and swallow them and burn like a star.

I fall out of love in pieces, piece
by piece. There are no particulars, nothingness
owes no obligations. A liberation
I tell myself this is all I have to bear for now words
and snapshots are enough: soft
hair curling above the nape, an overwhelming
vulnerability I’d lay my lips upon, fractured;
piece by piece. Refractions of fear—
faceted splinters of loss weeping, no
I mean sweeping its cool fingers across my
bareness I recall only fragments, flickers of light
years.
Scallops of sun caught in a wintery
lambent sea the colour
of eyes the shape
of moons turning and dawning, piece by piece.
I forget again, remember again, the way
another’s mind seeps into one’s own
lamented breakages occur, too, piece
by piece an orchestra,
amassing sighs and sounds of clean,
uninterrupted Truth
I’d drink to that I would something that’s
something clean, for a change.

This afternoon while I lay curled up on her bed, my mother sat beside me and told me some people have hearts colder than stone.

She told me, I don’t want to see this pretty daughter of mine hurting. And because she’s always done her best for me and I’ve always done my best for her, I told her I’ll stop.

I can’t stand anything beautiful right           now

no looking,                                                  

                                                                    nor thinking,

                                                                    smelling it, even

they all of them accentuate

that                                                             ugliness which I

cannot seem to 

                                                                   obliterate

                                                                   .

22. long walks, short walks, walking

6. the smell of peppermint gums along the creek

11. other people going about their business

1. other people smiling at me

12. fresh coconut juice from the shell

3. reconstructed plans of the palace of Knossos

17. everything yet to happen

22. time/perspective

I leave the house so soon after dawn that the clouds, or whatever there is of it, are still freshly stained pink. The weather has been too warm for February, and my heart too exhausted for someone who is in love. I tell myself that this too shall pass but what exactly this is remains undefined. It’s a mystery fiercely guarded. And everyday I feel myself changing as numerous sets of new codes are written into cells to be divided, leading to a metamorphosis.

I fear the iron core inside of me, I fear its hardness and its strength. It is my weakness and will be our undoing— I’m sorry, I already know.

I sleep with a burning back— for days, days and days— and wake with restless fever. Sweat pools between a nape and two shoulder blades, a glutinous stain, a delta of tar. A sea of lost ships with transparent sails: I tell you I’d be your beacon, but you’ve seen through my flames and oh, I am only embers. That’s right [I’d forgotten].

Fear becomes less of an emotion and more, alternating between the size of a pea and a pea sleeping beneath mattresses, or a pendulum swinging into and away. It’s an omnipresent soundtrack— aggregate of doubting beats. You are music to my ears, my poetry and my prose; the lens filters to my film, subtitles for my silent heroine. You read the smoke [I eat it].

I close a fist around budding petals and I feel the wrongness of it in my bones. I’d decapitate a life, force stop a future and bleed of nectar. See, I’d do this for you: a realigning/this and much more/much less/much.

A woman on the harp and a man on the violin played la vie en rose while I sipped lemonade, remembering how the drive up the mountain had risen through a forest green as a dream. How my heart used to taste like clouds— intemerate.

One day in early summer we went to the gardens and laid on our backs. The grass blades glowed under the curve of his neck while his hands rested beside him like wounded birds. I turned to talk to him, then I couldn’t take my eyes away.

Two weeks ago we went to a book market; a small one. We started at the first stall then wandered off on our own. Then we’d find each other, stay for a minute, and move away again. I longed for the freedom of roaming, yet I craved for the small, ambrosial homecoming for every time we’d come together.

I collect moments like these, as wondrous as famed jewels, hoping to use them the same way the ancients decorated their majestic edifices. I hoard even the precious semi-moments: a kiss on the forehead, a hug so tight it hurt, a time we couldn’t stop laughing, finishing each other’s sentences, beginning to talk at the same time, turning around to find him looking at me, poring over interior design magazines together, a sunset spotted with para-gliders on the beach, the nights I couldn’t bear to say goodnight.

We still haven’t gone to feed the swans together. There’s still that movie I wanted to see. I still want to swim in a cerulean bay together, once he’s taught me how. I want him to see me in that amazing dress. This must be how a dying person feels like, to have so many wishes destined to die along with her. And my beloved moments are the heaviest, heavier even than the tears and the disappointment and my fear of losing faith.

They’re the ones I cling to as I am immersed and sinking, refusing to let them go.

I saw you on the train today, dear one. You stared at the rain-splattered window and your eyes were as grey as the grey clouds outside. I looked at you and I thought, I’d forgotten how you could make your face look like that— expressionless, cold, clear as glass. I didn’t feel like I should come near you.

But I can’t stay away from you, sweet one. I was there, last night, while you wept. Your tears stained my cheeks too, as soon as they left your closed lids. Did you know that teardrops on pillows bring mildew and nightmares? That’s why you woke this morning filled with sorrow and despair; that’s why it rained for you today.

Why are you so sad, darling one? Your heart will find its way back to you, bringing you strength and wisdom, once you lift your eyes off the ground to welcome it home. Remember the lessons you have learnt in the past and know that no one is lost for long. The meteorites will keep you company on starless nights, as they always have; you are not alone.

The truth burns inside you, brave one, and you will follow it to the ends of the world. There will come days when all you want is to escape, to hurt, to build walls to die behind; and the storms thundering around you, making you kneel. In those times truth is what brings you light and makes you feel at peace. The answer has never left you, so tread softly, and have faith— you have nothing left to fear.

There should have been a sting, some kind of piercing of the flesh, as an indication of the source of this poison. But I see only the darkness. A transition of day to night without the crimson of sunsets to soften the blow. We are festering beneath the skin, blackened to the core, and I am wondering if this may be the prelude to our dying dance. How do people usually die? For there must be others as wretched as us. Does the heart die first? It must. It must as hearts are not designed to bear too much of this— hatred, anger, anguish— because they grow, grow, grow like choking vines and they separate, separate, separate the rights and the lefts. And this is how a heart becomes dis-heartened; such a vulnerable thing, it is. Once disassembled it is only muscle, fibres and vessels empty of blood. Only, only, only the hopeful feels the pain and I pray, pray, pray that we have been forsaken.

We could be leaf buds unwrapping ourselves on a precipice, beside a lily pond, or inside a cave where the sounds of phantom rivers echo. We’d be drinking from grains of rocks long dead and live sweetly ever after.