Sometimes I wonder if bodies can anticipate love the way the trees anticipate rain with the help of the wind. If our arms can flutter likes leaves in a placid wind, awaiting the final storm, our hearts fashioned by a spirit of anticipation. And when it finally sets in, we are drenched with rain and we revel in its fluid splendour until we realize it is getting cold, and it occurs to us that we are beginning to drown.

You know, I used to write these things complete with a mention of 'you', but now there is nothing and no one and I feel quite sorry for it all.

love is touching souls"/ Well surely you've touched mine/Cause part of you pours out of me/in these lines from time to time

the thing about loneliness is it doesn't demand spaces - it fits into any nook and cranny like a key into a lock. give it the smallest cavity within you, it will fill it. give it the liminals between two different emotions, and it sits comfortably. give it a vein and it will infect. give it a person and it will mold a being left only to itself in that utter isolation, profuse in its poetry and in its ways that are always faint suggestions of tragedy and stupid drama.

and i am used to it, i have forgotten how it was to love; when suddenly in sleep i would see him there next to me, and he would behold me in my vulnerability, in the calm of slumber. 'loneliness' is easily substituted by 'solitude'. humans are clever, we trick ourselves by using slightly different words to explain a precise state of mind and heart, fooling us into believing the reality that the other word represents, so vastly and yet also so subtly different from the true state of things.

but when i am beside myself, when i am not in love with a specific person (though on my good days i loved everything), i sit still and contemplate what I have. there are moments when I simply purvey the body and its bones, the unwanted flesh, the lucid collarbone, the fair skin. the past few days, and weeks, i seem to have been too tired to eat in excess, and so my stomach fills with nothing. it is a strange thing - but when i eat moderately, or not at all, i feel less tedious and lethargic. i feel my propensity for weightlessness (in the context of it being something beautiful and serene, like the way peter pan always looked to me as a child) increases. it is how i have painted the stomach as a vessel for ache and beauty and love in poetry sometimes, i have believed that since it is, anatomically speaking, somewhat in the centre of a person's body, it can be the centre of emotion. and in the days when i was busy and did not get many chances to eat properly, i felt an odd sense of purity. it is a difficult thing to articulate, really.

still looking at all the bones in me. i have always held them with a certain fascination. your flesh is subject to change - skin can get flawed, fat can accumulate and dissipate, but bone remains constant. of course you do lose bone density as the years progess - of that i am aware, but it is not something you can see manifest itself when you are still young. but they never lose their structure. i stare down at my hipbones, my eyes hot with intent and scrutiny. they protrude in a manner that is unoffensive, there is a certain grace in the way it pushes gently the skin that envelopes it. they make smooth curves, that rise first upwards but dip down again into the flesh, slowly and imperceptibly.

so to rehash what i said, i have forgotten the bloom of love. you know how it is - it plants its seed in you, and once it ripens and the fruit turns to flower, you find that the petals hurt you sometimes, however soft and pillowy they are as sepals on plants outside of the vicinity of your body. the petals - maybe pink, maybe yellow, maybe blue - rub against the insides of you, and by some strange diffusion release their perfume into your bloodstream. you are intoxicated. you think of nothing but him. you wax lyrical and poetic in ways previously unknown to you. you take a picture of yourself and pretend you are posing for him, that he is a painter and he can see the compassion in you, he can see the love and longing in your bones and in you. i have forgotten this.

i promptly decid to end my cycle of masochism and simply stop loving.

i am dramatic once more and pretend this is epic. but if you knew me, if you read my pithy, desperate words of unrequited love, you would have known, perhaps, my ardour for him. and you would have known that i thought myself incapable of loving. i even did stupid things like write : "how do you stop loving someone?" and answering myself in writing once more with : "you don't. you don't just stop loving someone." i was thirteen, fourteen, i was idealistic and shows like My So Called Life only made me more so, although i'm not sure why. the flower, shrivelled and grey, the petals nothing more than some dried cadaver of something beautiful that you left in a heavy book to press and forgot about.

i want to reclaim this feeling. i want to love. i lied, i am not used to loneliness, even though i have always been alone. i watched television into the wee hours in the morning when everyone was asleep and cried softly, the belly of ache resurfacing, that in spite of being empty of worldy foods and tastes it was flooded with far too much of something else, this ache that clawed at me and made me damp with its longing.

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x