Dream

What an odd dream

I guess my desires

are desperate to 

take shape and

run free

A few

words of recognition

(Is it you?

Are you

                           here?

As if 

                           here is

one singular 

place

and we can only exist

in a common

                           here)

A series of light kisses

one landing after the other

trailing across

the length of lips

a sense of confusion

This has not happened

This is a dream

It's not even my own dream

Why it here? 

(Some times I wonder, when you dream of a face, does the person it belongs to also see your face in their dreams?)

Why don't I write

 If you

ask me "Why don't you

write to me,

anymore?" I 

don't have an answer. It's not

that I have nothing to say

though nothing exciting happens in any case.

But every time 

I attempt to reach you,

the wor(l)ds slip out 

from under my tongue

and my hands are too slow to catch them

and they say silence speaks on its own but 

in truth

sometimes silence itself doesn't speak at all. 

Why don't I write to you anymore?

I guess 

I don't know at all. 

It might be because underneath it all

I know I have changed too much

and no amount of words will turn me 

back

to what I was. 

Nest

 I want to nest by you

to shove my face

forcefully

shyly

at the nape of your neck. 

More than sex

more than desire

I dream we

wrap

around each other

into a ball

tender

hungry

desperate, lonely people

our fingertips guiding

our fingers

our arms

mapping the parts 

of the bizarre 

ball of flesh

of our small

minute

private planet.

*

   Sometimes survival over-takes us. The daily life becomes such a struggle but then you have everyone telling you that at least you're lucky: at least you have a job, even though the wage is not livable and you work unpaid overtime. Somehow I have gotten used to the heaps of work. After all our generation knew since before adulthood that we were losing ground. We watched our parents getting laid off and despairing over making ends meet and got used to the idea of never owning anything apart from what might trickle down if they're not sacrificed to necessity. 

  Still, it's getting more and more difficult by day to accept this reality. That this is all there is, the struggle for survival, the slow dissipation of the bonds between us. What helps me stay afloat is community, wherever I find it and as much as I have the energy to participate in it. It's the one thing that keeps me going. That somehow in spite of all the shit, we manage to try and stick together as much as we can.

  Is this alone enough to save us? I do not know. I am struggling to find the point in the continuous struggle when my mind hardly has any time to recover. I speak of the mind because the body has by now accepted the weight of working for 10 or 12 or 14 hours per day over time. I try to nourish it as a way of saying thanks, of trying to ensure that the machine will keep working.

  Most of all I can not stand the noise of this life. And yet, again, I am one of the lucky, the privileged ones. I am often isolated, sometimes I seek that out out of need. I have to choose: the recovery in silence or the community? And when presented with this choice, sooner or later the community dissipates.

  What am I rambling about? I do not know. I wish being tired and dissatisfied didn't make us sound egotistic and self-centered.

Silence and guilt

   I would be lying if I said that the silence did not hurt me, for it did. It hurt me in quiet, subtle ways. It was not just the thought that I would not get to talk to him again perhaps. It was not just the worry that perhaps something might have happened to him. There was also a small, sneaking suspicion, that perhaps I am being punished. Many people have punished me with silence -  it doesn't have the same effect as yelling. The yelling makes you shut down, it blocks out every other noise. The silence on the other hand has an eroding effect.

  I felt guilty for bringing up that the distance is slowly eating away at me. I did not say it all. I did not say how in spite of it all I feel like we have turned into Penelopes both of us, him waiting for me to arrive and me waiting for him to choose himself, to get better. I did not say how painful it is to sustain it all through a screen and meeting once per year. How lonely I am, how scared out of my wits I am half the time when he's not well. 

  I feel guilty for not knowing how to love better someone who can't choose his mental health when my own has also been collapsing for years. I feel guilty for not being able to sustain this better. I feel guilty for feeling that I have been chasing after a mirage. I feel guilty for seeing and not seeing that maybe we missed our chance or maybe it has not arrived yet. I feel guilty for it all.

  It scares me shitless. It does - I don't see how I can keep hanging on and I don't see how I can stop either. And there is another fear as well: noone will accept me the way that he has. And noone has understood and responded as quickly and openly as he has. Should that not be enough? I always wanted to believe that timing was mostly a myth but it turns out sometimes timing can truly fuck you up.

  I wanted to be more poetic about this. But sometimes there are no poetic words at hand.

*

   These days I turn to writing any chance I get - my writing is bad and without a flow but as imperfect as it is, it helps me process all the thoughts that have been running rampant. Taking a trip did me good but all the things that happened and those that were running in the background were overwhelming. My memories are inconsistent and I have to fight a losing battle to at least experience their aftertaste while it lasts.

  In truth I have grown so accustomed to being quiet and alone in the last couple of years that being in the presence of people - ones that matter - is almost a new experience. It fills me with the same rush of diving into the unknown and for the first time in a long time I found myself fighting against physical tiredness in order to win some extra time. That had stopped happening long before the pandemic hit, somehow I had wilted withing myself while trying to get better and fight the guilt for not being so.

  A new era is coming, that much I know. I do not know what it brings with it. But at the moment I am letting myself go with the "what the hell" feeling of the moment. It is odd to start taking off the shackles that you have been analysing for so long. It is odd also to come face to face with feelings and realities that you have tried to avoid for some time. In some stories no one can win the moral high ground. 

 The hardest thing has been to stop reminiscing about the past so much that you detach from the present. In my trip I saw people that I had not seen for more than a year and the gap of time required of me to be present 100% and to be open and receiving and to feel emotions bubble up within me.

  It was a freeing thing. 

  At the same time I realised how much I have been circling around my doubts. I wondered, in this impossible connection that I have built over the past three years, if I were in a better place psychologically, would it have taken me less time to realise that it's not covering my needs? I was near another person that was attracting me from the past and the reality of his physical presence made me almost physically dizzy - there was no sexual proximity but he was there and I could see him and hear him and it all had a different gravity. 

  I feel the end of many chapters approaching at the same time and it's scaring but at the same time I am tired of reading them.

  Soon I will leave.

Dog-days have been post-poned indefinitely

   The past month has not been so bad, somehow I managed to find some equilibrium in doing my official duties and over-looking the ones that I did in fact want to attend to. And then a sudden fight, it always surprised me when I get into a fight, I am much more accustomed to avoiding one, to staying silent and working around it. fighting shakes me, especially when I am thrown into the wrong without being certain what it was exactly that I have done wrong. 

  For two days I allowed myself to stay in bed and read and actually listen to music, as opposed to having just something to fill up the silence. And it was the oddest feeling, for I shut myself in the room and allowed for nothing else to exist other than my bewilderment and my anxiety and in a way my grief. And that was the most relaxed I have felt in a long, long time. Not that I do not still have a clock ticking time away at the back of my head. But that was the closest I have come in a long time to just being, in the moment, with nothing else to distract me from myself. 

  Some people think me crazy for wanting to resign and to leave this place but I do not see much of a way around it - there's hardly anything to keep me here except for money and even that money can not buy me the quiet that I crave. In some ways I have watched myself grow, I have in fact accumulated a small amount to buy myself at least a modicum of freedom for a short-while. I know more hard work will have to come but hopefully it will be hard work that I do not whole-heartedly detest. Perhaps I will like it so much that I will feel less guilty for not resting, or for having forgotten how to rest without feeling guilty.

  In the balcony the few plants we have have bloomed and I envy their certainty and repetition, the ability to bloom and hibernate and then with certainty bloom again. Dog-days are over but at least I can say that now I can rise much faster than I did in the past. My legs wobble at every step of the way.

  In my last post the last paragraph accidentally got deleted and it made me sad cause I remember I had felt very much in tune with it.