after all this time | ✎

v.

──

I LOOK DOWN at the pancakes as the warm maple syrup that is drizzled on them now soaks them in a brown, viscous, sweet puddle.

I observe individuals enter and then thereafter depart with a little mug of warmth, permitting my humming brain to have a breather, pleased to exist and to just be.

I've endeavoured to put distance between the two of us. I came for university, I came for the degree that I've studied and sacrificed everything for, for these past few semesters. 

But little by little, day by day, with excruciating stubbornness, he's slowly making his way into my life once more. 

I've tried calm communication with him, trying to show that I can hold space for myself without acquiescing to something I don't want.

No matter what I do, he doesn't - or simply won't accept that becoming anything more than just strangers will be damaging to us both because he's not merely only a stranger, he knows all my unknowns. 

We are two strangers who know every shameful secret, every hidden freckle, and every catastrophic flaw in each other.

I've tried my hardest to leave everything in the past, entangled in the imperceptible walls of our intertwined history. 

But of course, my mind is a kaleidoscope of memories that I wish I could burn, but yet some moments are unburnable. They conceal themselves around every intersection, almost as if they are ready to devour and ruin the pieces that are left of me. 

It feels like stumbling through the fog and I loathe the way that it destroys my insides. 

I exhale, returning my focus to the internship report that sits on a blank document, awaiting some words. 

do you have any questions about what is expected of you? what have you learned about the culture of the school? do you have any questions or concerns about your working relationships?

I'm required to answer these inquiries by 11:59 tonight, yet nothing of importance to these questions is on my mind. 

I drop my solemn head into my hands, with willowy dignity, and groan quietly revealing what I'm otherwise dubious to express. 

I invariably seem to get this overwhelming feeling of being entrapped in the writing process without the ability to move forward and write anything new, especially when it comes to academy reports.

School has never come effortlessly to me, I've spent innumerable hours struggling my way through my courses and reviewing examination questions until my skull ached. 

Everyone else seemed to get the material in a few hours and apply it, I could only grasp the basics and even then I failed to apply it.

Yet, I'm an overachiever, a perfectionist.