If I could talk to you, I couldn’t tell you everything because it would make both of us sad. You changed me though, definitely for the better, but that change of attitude brought about many smaller changes that have swelled up into a battering wave, rising higher, and battering continuously. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you I’m getting too much attention and I don’t know how to manage, how to refuse tributes. You would laugh and accuse me just as everyone else does, but just maybe, you would understand how it hurts. The first crash of waves into you is thrilling, exciting, unexpected, refreshing. But the nature of the ocean is to wear majesty into sand.

i am inspired–inspired to try

giving up

I’ve been diving, hard.

The mounting pressure popped me in the ears, hitting the space behind my brows,

The ocean pushed into me as an army, desperate to penetrate,

The salt coerced enlistment of my bodily tears, joining forces to blind me,

and depth’s darkness grew as it fed on hope.

I dove harder,

because I saw him sinking,

and I thought I saw his arm wave at me.

It could’ve been the careless undulation of water,

but what if.

I wouldn’t be able to live anyway.

More pressure, more ocean, more salt, more darkness,

but maybe his lips were moving at me.

It doesn’t have to be seen for it to be possible,

so I dove, because I could die just to know that was true.

But desperately deluding fear can’t fight off exhaustion forever.

The currents turned, I gave to it, looked to the surface, and saw what I’ve known all along.

He had let me chase his shadow.

He watched me sink for his sake from above.

 

I want to sink again,

this time for my sake,

because no one will save a suicidal in love,

diving towards death for shadows,

but unlike a freshly drowned body,

mine can’t fight the density of the ocean anymore.

It floats face down

and rejoins the sky in shame.

What is it about this warm poison that intoxicates me into single-minded lust?
Is it chemical? Emotional? Is there a difference?

I am in as much love as I am in hate. I think.
As far back as my inflexible memory stretches, each day counts the savage internal battles to decide the war between love and hate.
Which is it? Is it love or is it hate?
Should it be love, I as an individual lose to the tragedy of unrequited sacrifice.
Should it be hate, I sentence the solidifying passion and tenderness in my soul to death by cynicism.
Love, or hate?

————————

Today, I recognize ego as the source of all pain. Ego makes pawns into men, makes phenomena into purpose, and makes death into god.
Today, my ego shall make innocence into philosophy.

————————

Thinking about love, I obtained that which I have been craving.
I feel sad.
I feel the slow cooking of the mind
in despair of fate, cruel at the limits of design,
in unappreciated suffering of innocents,
in the unnoticed destruction of beauty.
This sadness is a state of the mind in cooking,
an act that can stop with the heat but never be reversed.

————————

I sat behind the wing that remained large while all the things I knew to be large fell away into smallness in mere seconds. All of a sudden, I felt suicidal and wanted to take a leap all the living feared. I wanted to feel oblivion, to be oblivion.

In just moments, we were hundreds of feet higher and i wanted to connect to this unfamiliar atmosphere. With my fists through the window.Would I put everyone in danger?  Would I go to jail? Would it affect my future? Then I saw the design from above and wished to play as god. I would roll a boulder methodically over those thousands of chips people lived in, people lived for, over those colorful nuggets that people drove around. In a motion like mowing the lawn, I would return the world to the way it should be, without human purpose imposed upon it. The urge to kill was strong in depraved compassion. I wanted to destroy the destruction.

Then we entered the clouds, and my dream came true.

————————

Like us, the earth covers its bones with its flesh, but we carve it out like bark. How sick we are as humans. While we do not scoop out the skin and flesh of breathing animals for pleasure, we scoop out the living flesh of the earth for modernity.

Though you’ve never asked, I answer.
Because you inspire me as a living, touchable, conversable person. You’ve shown me how you’ve lived on your own terms for your own contentment. You’ve given me confidence and a new kind of resilience. You’re the biggest contributor on my life philosophy after my parents. You’ve demonstrated tremendous courage, initiative, and determination; I feel like I should be able to do anything as long as I want to. You’ve inspired a different kind of desire in me as well. Before, my desire blossomed in my fantasies with misty hues of indescribable passion. Now, they’re rooted in memories of you, still passionate but now describable.

Lastly, I love you because you are my perfect tragedy. You are the love story I weep for with all my hearts. You are the love story for which they break and glisten in splendor as shards.

 

When I hear the sound of rain, my soul chills with a yearning to touch the dewy drops on his brow and to drink the rain from his lashes.

When I escape the layers upon layers of ceilings and the walls give away to windows, I might catch the blue left after the sky has cleansed. And I’ll think of you, because no one else has loved that blue as you have.

When their gazes search me, implore me, your invisible arm reaches over my shoulder and speaks simply, truthfully that I belong to you.

And when I run, fighting for strength with weakness, chasing vindication, aching with millions of cells respiring at capacity and reporting their pain to their guardian nerves, when I do, I run towards you, because you can drive me to desperation.

 

————————

those with their high concepts will fall to delusion, because the higher you go, the thinner the air gets

————————

I’ve never seen so many different types of clouds in the sky at once. There are the tiny puffs of cotton candy hanging so low that they pass by faster than the nearby trees. There are the large paste-like clouds hanging where they normally hang–that spot where kindergardeners draw their shapely bouncing arches. There are the high and thinly smattered clouds like cotton stuffing stretched just beyond the capacity to cover the exposed sky. And finally, there are the thick cumulus in the distance, puffed with volume.

We drove in and out of a rainstorm. Like a nightmare, it swelled and faded, leaving only streaks of tears on the windows as evidence when you wake again beneath the blue.

I haven’t written in so long, I forced myself to write something. Results:

 

like a poison my body instinctively rejects,
thoughts of you surge seeking expulsion,
resisting my desperate attempts to swallow and stomach the bitter mix
of bile and reality

survival is hard, it is pain and struggle’s father and child.
survival is the reward and punishment

these days, I’ve been dreaming of beauty without vanity,
but such a concept is planar, one dimensional,
for light without shadow eliminates depth.
beauty without vanity is too simple, too inanimate,
so why do I dream of it and punish myself for what still exists?
I pity vanity–misunderstood and underappreciated, and
vanity returns the favor, finding me blind to that which I can feel the absence of,
torn by illusion and truth alike

Here are my top ten words, compiled from online collections, to describe love, desire and relationships that have no real English translation, but that capture subtle realities that even we English speakers have felt once or twice. As I came across these words I’d have the occasional epiphany: “Oh yeah! That’s what I was feeling…” 

 

Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start. 

Oh yes, this is an exquisite word, compressing a thrilling and scary relationship moment. It’s that delicious, cusp-y moment of imminent seduction. Neither of you has mustered the courage to make a move, yet. Hands haven’t been placed on knees; you’ve not kissed. But you’ve both conveyed enough to know that it will happen soon… very soon.

 

Yuanfen (Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. This is a complex concept. It draws on principles of predetermination in Chinese culture, which dictate relationships, encounters and affinities, mostly among lovers and friends.

From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the “binding force” that links two people together in any relationship. 

But interestingly, “fate” isn’t the same thing as “destiny.” Even if lovers are fated to find each other they may not end up together. The proverb, “have fate without destiny,” describes couples who meet, but who don’t stay together, for whatever reason. It’s interesting, to distinguish in love between the fated and the destined. Romantic comedies, of course, confound the two.

 

Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair.

 

Retrouvailles (French):  The happiness of meeting again after a long time. 

This is such a basic concept, and so familiar to the growing ranks of commuter relationships, or to a relationship of lovers, who see each other only periodically for intense bursts of pleasure. I’m surprised we don’t have any equivalent word for this subset of relationship bliss. It’s a handy one for modern life.

 

Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.

Apparently, in 2004, this word won the award as the world’s most difficult to translate. Although at first, I thought it did have a clear phrase equivalent in English: It’s the “three strikes and you’re out” policy. But ilunga conveys a subtler concept, because the feelings are different with each “strike.” The word elegantly conveys the progression toward intolerance, and the different shades of emotion that we feel at each stop along the way.

Ilunga captures what I’ve described as the shade of gray complexity in marriages—Not abusive marriages, but marriages that involve infidelity, for example.  We’ve got tolerance, within reason, and we’ve got gradations of tolerance, and for different reasons. And then, we have our limit. The English language to describe this state of limits and tolerance flattens out the complexity into black and white, or binary code. You put up with it, or you don’t.  You “stick it out,” or not.

Ilunga restores the gray scale, where many of us at least occasionally find ourselves in relationships, trying to love imperfect people who’ve failed us and whom we ourselves have failed.

 

La Douleur Exquise (French): The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have.

When I came across this word I thought of “unrequited” love. It’s not quite the same, though. “Unrequited love” describes a relationship state, but not a state of mind. Unrequited love encompasses the lover who isn’t reciprocating, as well as the lover who desires. La douleur exquise gets at the emotional heartache, specifically, of being the one whose love is unreciprocated.

 

Koi No Yokan (Japanese): The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall into love. 

This is different than “love at first sight,” since it implies that you might have a sense of imminent love, somewhere down the road, without yet feeling it. The term captures the intimation of inevitable love in the future, rather than the instant attraction implied by love at first sight.

 

Ya’aburnee (Arabic): “You bury me.” It’s a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person, because of how difficult it would be to live without them.

The online dictionary that lists this word calls it “morbid and beautiful.” It’s the “How Could I Live Without You?” slickly insincere cliché of dating, polished into a more earnest, poetic term.  

 

Forelsket: (Norwegian):  The euphoria you experience when you’re first falling in love.

This is a wonderful term for that blissful state, when all your senses are acute for the beloved, the pins and needles thrill of the novelty. There’s a phrase in English for this, but it’s clunky. It’s “New Relationship Energy,” or NRE.

  

Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.”

It’s interesting that saudade accommodates in one word the haunting desire for a lost love, or for an imaginary, impossible, never-to-be-experienced love. Whether the object has been lost or will never exist, it feels the same to the seeker, and leaves her in the same place:  She has a desire with no future. Saudade doesn’t distinguish between a ghost, and a fantasy. Nor do our broken hearts, much of the time.

 

 by Pamela Haag from http://bigthink.com/ideas/41152?page=all

如果你可接受，我愿意属于你

will you?

yes, etched in the bones of the lover of my dreams,

we both lose in consummate surrender

of ownership of every last theory, thought, thing,

save those true engravings

and so, I dream, die,

I disappear

still loving, still in love.

Will you?

 

non temere

ma chérie, tu m’appartiens