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.

*

   In truth I write still. Every morning, on the kitchen table, once I ensure that I am alone in the house. It turns out that this temporary immigration did suit me in the least but I have been making the most of it, or at least the most that I think I can make of it. After months of heavy rain the clouds have blissfully parted and I can feel the sun on my skin. Around me it really looks like spring, the incessant fall of rain encouraged the local flora to grow at a maddening pace. I imagine that by the middle of the summer it will have all dried up and resolved it self into the muted yellow colour that I encountered when I moved here. It should be alright.

  All this time I have been waiting for the nearing of the end, the time where this self-imposed exile will finish. I even set a reminder on my phone for it, in case I grew too accustomed, too complacent. I did it in the first few weeks when there was hardly any privacy for one to cry. This house still does not feel like my private space but at the very least there are hours in which all is good. I am alone. And now the deadline is drawing closer, just a few more months and I look at it with some confusion. For I am still unsure what I will do after I leave and everyone has questions and I have questions too but I would like to feel that just this once it ok to not have answers, to not have a plan that I felt was so necessary all my life.

  It dawned on me that I have forgotten how to be idle. There is always a clock somewhere, or a screen, something to which my mind inevitably gets glued to. And so time passes, and I stuck watching, waiting, for who, for what I know not. But all this immobility has made a bit more aware and awareness brings stillness and it doesn't feel the same as being un-moving. 

  There is no plan, just a vague sense that something might follow or nothing might follow. I would like to stay idle for some time, after I leave. And I think I would like to go to the countryside for some time. It will be nice if I get to go to the countryside with him, but I am also considering just going down to the village of my childhood, in the little hut with the toilet separate from the house but with good proximity to the sea. In the summer the sun is unbearable and the food is quick simple and meant to be refreshing and there's little to do after the luncheon apart from taking a nap and reading, perhaps even studying a bit. 

  Last time we went we used to leave the door open, I have similar memories from a past that has long since turned into dust. The people of the place has died and with them part of the identity of the place as well.

  I find it odd that I long for those moments of stillness, for the absence of most things of my daily life, while at the same time I enjoy languorous pleasures, I aspire to certain power, certain independence. I have often been teased of being equally a person of the port and the salon as well. I want to be alone and also to my solitude. 

  I have become aware that contradicting character traits are not a bad thing.

  I