and people often cling to things that save. we used to hold our breaths and just exhale it into feelings we wished are unreal. we create ways to find peace with the hurt and to give life to the dead stories we didn’t have to become but we just did. there are many reasons you can find to have faith in making it out alive. and i found it with the words that just remain in a place where people are often afraid to visit and with the feeling that, sometimes, even i scare myself for letting it in even in the middle of the day. it is like a place where i even get scared with the thought that the aches i shared will be forgotten too and that, there will also be a time when i would even forget how to bring it with me. i die every time in that place and that’s how i begin. it is where i learned to love the most cruel part of me and where i hate the idea of getting used to it—too much that i would just choose not to write and by then i know, i’ll finally lose it all. from time to time, i soak myself with it for it doesn’t tell me to speak. it tells me i still have my heart in me even if i know i must have forgot it a long time ago. oftentimes, it carves bravery in my bones but it also keep me quiet—too quiet and calm that people would forget the reason why i keep loving it but also refusing to have it again. and some days, even if the thing they called poetry often heals, it is just a wound aching just like every first times.
this is the place where i tell stories i don’t even know i had. this is where i die so i could breathe outside it. and i know, you don’t know me or you just don’t know me that much for we are just souls who are kinder to our own scars. you only see me after the storms i became; after battles and dead ends. and i just appear after being stranger to myself. you only see me with the things i think are softer and can be resting places. and you won’t know me well. those things only my poems know are like names in gravestones and right there is where the battle and the saving happen. perhaps, that’s just how i remember it. there is where i even lie for most times, it should only have pretty things. there is where the hopeless gaining and losing and a moment of survival happen. the best of times. the worst of times. word after word scratches and they became a mark no one knows about. until the touch of fading heartbeats came when sadness no longer comforts. sadness etched in paper no longer comforts. or maybe, it still does. but not as often as i find home in every violence i kept in silence anymore. i know, the ugly things i keep on carrying are better in pages. but some days, even my fingers are refusing to turn them into bearable gaps to fill. my chest, sometimes, is too heavy to heave another war that i couldn’t even give life to something i know is alive. words seem like just words and the poems aren’t even kind to smile. but i know, in words is still the place where i would always choose to die. it’s just that—
the saving, it doesn’t happen everytime.
— 02:05 l. sin, after poetry
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»» photo (without the words in it) screencapped from the film: Beautiful Boy (2018)
