liham/lihim

one.

for your auditory enjoyment:
cloud nine, by kakie, juan periquet, cub fuque, & luis villanueva (https://open.spotify.com/track/388eLgpqeex2oOj9DxKEYI?si=Qd2k3ZJxR-WXRxCNyLKfIA)

-

"Did you mean it?"

    I don't want to love him anymore.

    I don't like that the memory of him is still stuck on my skin, that his warm calloused fingers have spent so long between the creases in my knuckles. Now they've etched their place there like permanent reminders of how I will never be enough.

    It wasn't my fault - but if he was the bullet, I was the trigger and everything we'd ever shared was the gun that shot us both, an intoxicating, sickening rush of flame and passion and all things beautiful - but neither of us remembered that fire burns when you get too close.

    So now, I stare at the sea, the slow rush of low tide waves caressing the sand like a back and forth ill-timed lover unable to touch his amour, lulling me - dreamlike - into cool, undisturbed, yet still altogether painful healing.

    It hurts so much.

    I wish he was here. I remember when we were sixteen, on the cusp of falling, I watched him emerge from the very same water, his hair soaking - the feeling of impending danger slowly settling in my chest as he grinned like a madman and ran in my direction.

    It was a common friend's birthday weekend, and though he and I had never truly spoken, we'd been briefly acquainted several times before. From stories and passive mumblings, to photos and videos online, he knew me only as the vaguely intriguing girl who sang sometimes. And for a good while, I hated him for being the self-assured, entitled asshole I was so certain he was. It didn't help that he only validated this opinion at the time, when he picked me up off the sand, propped me up on his tall shoulders, and carried me into the water despite my fervent protests, entirely amused at my discomfort.

    I admit, I took these memories for granted - his lopsided smile, his relentless determination. Funny how everything I found utterly repulsive about him somehow became precisely what drew me in. There was more to him, I realized. Later I found those irreversible folds and creases, those frayed and worn ends haphazardly stitched together at the seams, and a handful of deep troubled scars - all hidden, perfectly preserved, underneath that sun-fed skin. I realized he had an insane, innate, capacity to feel - which he tried so desperately to keep secret.

    I detested him for a while, but fell for him so quickly in a series of close-knit simple moments. Like when he was the only boy who complimented my music instead of my dress at a party, and made an effort to converse genuinely with me when he saw I was significantly uncomfortable. Or when he offered to drive me home after a lousy night out with friends - and when he found out my parents weren't home, he asked if he could come in for a glass of milk and some Oreos instead of sex. A few times, he asked me to sing him to sleep over the phone. He made the effort to at least try and read my favorite book. And he always asked about the stories behind lyrics I wrote instead of just saying they were 'good'.

    But I didn't like him when he was angry and drunk, or when he dragged me to bars and clubs with fake IDs and bottles he stole from his parents' liquor cabinet (so we wouldn't have to drink the overpriced piss they sold at the counters, he said.) I hated when he kissed me with jäger-laced breath, because the medicinal smell and the bittersweet taste between his lips almost always meant his touch would be more rough and no longer gentle and considerate.

    He was electrifying and infectious - the smoke of his occasional cigarette slowly made its way from being a faint scent on my clothes, to a semi-permanent flavour in my mouth. He hated when I left. He detested it when I took a joke too seriously, or when I bit my nails, or fumbled with my hair. He hated when I didn't tell him I was at the hospital. He hated my older sister for making me insecure. Because of me he craved art, he prayed to God, and gained a profound appreciation and respect for things he wasn't necessarily quick to understand. And because of him, I craved unfamiliar newfound vices and found a strange comfort, a kind of liking, for chaos amidst a calm. He stopped being unkind. I stopped lacking self-awareness and confidence. We taught each other how to love, we made one another strong and brave adults out of fragile, half-hearted children. It was a balance of character, an equality of wills - because I'm a lot to take, but so is he, and it wasn't tolerance, it wasn't compromise. It was all-encompassing, unconditional love.

    Or at least it was for however brief a time.

    Did he mean it when he told me so? Even now that the lips that muttered and swore on those words have been pressed on another's?

    After a while, I hated all these things. But I don't hate them anymore - I miss his honesty, even if it came at me loud and harsh when a bottle was half gone. I miss falling asleep in his arms, stealing his t-shirts, buying a bottle of his minty cologne just so I could take the scent of him everywhere. I miss arguing with him whenever I had to leave. I miss the excitement in his eyes when I worked on a new song, I miss when he was proud of me for going to work away instead of upset at me for leaving him alone. I miss when he'd pick me up from the airport, face contorted in confusion, unsure whether to laugh or cry, his raven hair in complete disarray from not being able to sleep in excitement. I miss his mess, his clutter, his hands in my hair and his arms - always warm - wrapping around me from behind. I miss him because he was my rock, my steady, the only thing that remained real when life overtook me. I miss when he loved me.

    He used to love me.

.    .    .

for your auditory enjoyment:
battlescars, by kakie - coming soon

-

    "I didn't mean it."

    I see her everywhere.

    Not just in the magazines and the papers, or on TV or ads. I don't just hear about her when she's playing on the radio, or when the latest news makes an appearance on my social media feeds. I see her not just on the billboards of the big name brands or hear her on this hit song or that hit song or on every single chart topper.

   I see her on the left side of the bed. I see her in my clothes, especially the sweaters. I see her in the cup of coffee I pick up on the way to work. She is in the guitar which has sat, unused, in a dull and lifeless corner of my room for nearly a year now. She is hidden in the dozens of books she left with me, her nose stuck in a new one everyday, poring carefully over time-worn and tearstained pages. She is the music I listen to when I need to remember. She is the letters, old handwritten words, I read when I feel that dull ache begin to build up inside. I see her in our friends, whose laughter and light chatter will still always reflect the empty place she has left among us for months on end. They will speak about her on occasion, when she calls or sends a message and I go elsewhere because I know I am unwanted. She is the hours of sleep I've lost without her singing to me from wherever she was, even on a crackly, distorted Skype call from halfway across the world. She is the moon which reminds me of inconstancy and change. Her soul is in the stars she would wish on so faithfully on clear nights, the same ones I catch myself pleading with now. She is my nightly prayer, my newfound superstition, hundreds of unsent messages, words unsaid. She is everything good in me, and every worthless mistake I've ever made. She is that dark blue box tucked away neatly in my dresser, untouched, with remnants of film photographs and movie stubs and everything else she left behind.

    She lingers in the pieces of her heart which lay scattered when I broke her. And she endures in all this only because she endures as she truly is, in my memory.