August is Over

august-is-over:

Everything worth having in the world comes with a risk. Every great opportunity is essentially a great big gamble. And love, love is the greatest gamble of all. It involves risks that can destroy you as a person, but in return it offers you a happiness nothing else in the entire universe can ever rival. I guess that’s why each year millions of people take the risk, some are lucky they find something eternal, others well, they aren’t so lucky.

When you take a risk and you stake your heart and soul on the table. Sometimes you lose and when you do you can feel like you’re falling. Sometimes that feeling can consume you. Take everything you had and pit it against you. All you can do is helplessly watch. When you love essentially what you do is place your heart in the hands of another, and sometimes they underestimate how valuable, how fragile it really is. Sometimes they drop it and it shatters.

But the thing is, after such an ordeal some of us lose faith in love completely. We give up, we revel in what we have lost. Forgetting that your heart is never beyond repair. It merely requires the right parts and they happen to be in the hands of others. You see when you climb a tree to get the sweetest apple at the very top, you taste it and sometimes you fall having had the slightest taste of it. You can either decide that it’s not worth falling again for and just sit there, holding that bruised and ruined apple in you hands. Or you can realise how sweet such a fruit as love can be, and climb the tree again. Yes you may fall but a fruit so sweet deserves that risk.

august-is-over:

Sometimes I sit under the moon and the few stars that are not suffocated by the bright lights of this city that I have come to call home. I sit and I wonder how many others there are out there like me. Am I just alone in the thoughts that I have and in all that I seek?

How many people are there who walk a path like mine, paved with the loss of many they loved, hoping helplessly to glance upon the faces of those now lost. How many are there that seek to verify their existence just as I do, to know that they are living and breathing, to know that they are indeed alive only by dancing with death. How many seek a purpose in their life, something to make their worthless life worth something, to find something, anything at all to make their life worth living, to make every breath worthwhile. How many are there just like me, or am I alone in this pitiful existence.

I can’t help but wonder, if I am alone why do I walk such a different path to all those around? Why am I unlike anyone I know? Why is it that I cannot merely exist blissfully unaware of this hurt that stalks my every step? Like a beast waiting in the shadows to pounce on an otherwise vulnerable soul. But if there are others like me, who share in my woes, could they help me? Or are they just as pitiful as I?

I’ve known you for so long that it would be absolutely impossible to imagine a world in which you didn’t exist. You unquestionably mean everything to me, and that’s why I love everything about you. I love that big beautiful smile of yours and I love the way your nose crinkles ever so slightly when you smile. I love staring into your eyes, especially when you’re not looking, only to look away when you stare back. I love catching you staring at me when you think I’m not looking, I love how we laugh and smile when we catch one another doing it. I love those deep brown eyes that glisten and twinkle when I’m around. I love the swarm of butterflies you unleash into the pit of my stomach when I’m around you. They remain, even after all these years. Don’t you ever forget that I love every single detail about you, even the little things you probably don’t think I notice, like the crinkles in your chin when you pout and the ever so slight dimple you get on your left cheek when you smile. And all the things you may not be so fond of, I love them also. I love that thing you can do with your lips that no matter how long or how hard I try I just can’t seem to do. I love how you let every touch linger, like as if you’re trying to memorise that single precise moment in time. I just absolutely, completely and utterly love you with all of my heart. You are nothing short of amazing, and I know sometimes you are overwhelmed with just how much I love you, but the truth is so am I. It can be scary sometimes but for me, that fear of just how much I love you, reminds me of what a great loss it would be to lose you.

By the way… You are unbelievable cute sometimes, well actually most of the time. ^_^

Sometimes when I look in the mirror and I don’t see myself. Instead I see a ghost of me, or rather who I want to be. Standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, looking on in disgust. Sometimes this being screams discouraging messages. And sometimes he appears with a discouraging look upon his face, as if to judge me for every decision I’m about to make. Sometimes I feel like I’ve let myself down. More often than I’d like perhaps. But I guess sometimes when I look in the mirror I don’t see what others see in me. Instead I see what I have failed in doing. Failed in becoming. And what I’ve let myself become.

Sooner or later I start to believe this person, who isn’t quite me, but on some level someone I’d like to be, yet somehow also dislike, because he’s cold and callous, he is without heart and emotion. He is strong and fearless. Without attachments that the physical embodiment of me is so tied to. He’s everything I’m not. So I start to feel what he thinks I am. Weak, ugly, easily manipulated, stupid. Only now do I realise that maybe I’m starting to let this manifestation of what he tells me I am become true.

Memories are strange things, aren’t they? You sometimes forget things you never want to forget. Yet sometimes the memories you want to forget, haunt you. Sometimes you forget what a lost loved one looks like, no matter how badly you want to hold on to them, they just slip away. And sometimes you want to forget a hurtful memory, yet it’s there haunting and taunting you the moment you close your eyes.

Memories are a lot like the photographs we take throughout our lives. Meaningful ones that get misplaced or lost, bad ones that follow us on passports, ID cards, drivers licences and Facebook. But then there are those we have and hold onto, the ones we cherish, placing them into albums and looking over them every so often.

The memories we retain through our lives stay with us, they give us comfort in times of great sadness. They make us smile when we have a frown resting upon our faces. They make us cry, from longing something that no longer is. But without memories, none of us really exist. We use them to prove our existence, validate our being. Above all else, when we have nothing else in our lives, we always have our memories.

As much as you and I would like to believe, we are not individuals. We don’t stand on our own two feet, but rather, we are interconnected to a greater web of dependance than we realise. Love nurtures us in to who we are, and friendships bind us in to a greater destiny, to reach the full potential of who we can be. Friendships, love and creativity, those are the single most important aspects of individuality.

Love is a strange one. I keep thinking I know what it is, or that I’ve come to realise the full potential of what it can be. But then events follow that lead me to reevaluate the very premise of what I initially believed. Today I stand before you as a man, who loves a woman. She is the single most important aspect of my being. And there isn’t any lengths that I would not go to for her. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but if the past six years have taught me anything, it’s that love can fluctuate like a beating heart. And sometimes it can stop beating altogether. It can seem like it’s still. Dead. But love is immortal, so it can revive itself from a perceived death. It can flourish again like a tree that has failed to bear flowers or fruit for decades. It’s inexplicable. But it is, what it is. I love her more than I could put into words. As cliched as it sounds, as the lyrics of my favourite song say, “I really like what you’ve done to me, I can’t really explain it”. In a nutshell though she… Is the single most important aspect of who I am as an individual. She is the love of my life and one day she will be the mother of my children.

In life there are few friends who you can call true friends. I am privileged to far too many to list how they construct the fibres of my being. Friends are however as vital to individual strength as water is to all life. They give us borrowed strength and push us to our limits, sometimes even far beyond. They help us realise who and what we want. We support each other, cry on one another’s shoulders and help piece the fragmented pieces of our lives together, when everything we know falls apart. If nothing else friendships prevail over most things. Sometimes friendships can be more stable than love. But it’s because they are built with an entirely different kind of love that they display a stronger density. Love can be weakened by passion. The kind of love that underpins friendship is built upon trust and caring. That it what makes it so resilient to beatings.

Creativity is something I value immensely. Tumblr has been an amazing platform for the form my creativity likes to take most of all. The form of words. Words. Simple things, but ultimately they help me grasp a greater understanding of myself. Sometimes it’s difficult to speak to yourself. To tell yourself things you know are hard to hear. But when I write them down and read them back it becomes all the more easier to swallow. Tumblr has shown me that I can do things with words I didn’t know I could. That few can do, as I do, the way I do. By that I don’t mean that I can write better than anyone else, but rather what I write and how I write takes my own voice. It acts like a fingerprint. The way I articulate myself through words is unique to me. It gives oneself an aspect of individuality. To end, I must take this opportunity to thank everyone who has read these thoughts. You’ve influenced the person I am, and who I am becoming.

So you see being an individual is not about standing on your own feet. It’s about being a part of something greater. Something you can’t quite begin to explain. It’s an entire ecosystem of relationships fostered through love and friendships. Materialised by creativity that give us a sense of who we are. Take not for granted how these pieces build you up to stand tall. To set you out on a path that will lead to greatness of some degree.

I want a girl to show me the side of her that no one else in the world is privy to. I want to know her innermost insecurities, so that I can work to make her feel better about them. I want a girl who isn’t perfect, because neither am I. I want a girl who knows that no matter how she looks on any given day, she will always be beautiful to me. I want a girl who is complicated, because complexity defines the most beautiful things in the world. I want a girl with a smile that never leaves my mind. I want a girl who I fall asleep thinking about and whom I wake up thinking about. A girl who owns every piece of my heart. Commands the attention of my mind, a mind that is devoted to her. Devoted to carving and moulding speech and literature, with the sole purpose of making her smile. Thankfully for me, I already have her.