the deafening of a heartbeat.

ie: something that we have come to be familiar with in so many ways.

We are used to the dawning of hope, inceptions of promise — something bland and stupid like love or things that last. Let me tell you that we have seen little bits and pieces of the end, captured the procurement of nihilism and antagonistic self-hatred. We are the beginning of the end, in the stories that should have never been told.

i. in the coffee shop. her name is scrawled on, it is generic and placid — just as the life that is reaming within the lines of creamer. her order was taken wrong but she doesn’t say anything against it; the apron-donned mass serves it with apathy, accent ridden from the dwellings of a hundred miles over. stir, the window is tinged with a hue of emerald. stir, the marbling of the floor reminds her of the corner tile she had grown to memorize in her mother’s home. stir, the eyes of the lone student in the corner are as brown as the earth, downtrodden with the miserly await of the future. they are just as scared as she is, she proclaims in her mind. tap, the liquid flickers and stains cream white tops, antiquated floral transparencies fly off from seams of lace and string. the humming of the air conditioner overpowers her mind. the apronness harbinger shifts from corner to corner, and she thinks she has counted the number of bricks on the back wall completely right this time — 152.

ii. along the riverbed we discover that what we call water lilies are actually overruns — poisoning, mutilating, encapsulating the mossy remnants of aqua over and over again. we throw flowers instead of coins, now.

iii. there’s something really off about me that i have really noticed. aside from the fact that i raise my arms in defense during inflections; my speaking has been degraded from eloquence to fear. uncertainty, takebacks, the loss of my voice and the rise of others because i am afraid of being corrected. of being talked over. of being the shadow gripped by self-medication. i can’t give straight answers without knowing what i am supposed to say. the sound of a chair being dragged, the sound of footsteps and knuckles clicking; i am ingrained to please when i have been destined to be. my teacher asks me if i’m alright, and it all comes to me — i still tell him i am sorry, i still speak in between hushed breaths and the fear of giving when it has all been laid down in colors, aligned in rays, broken down into fragments. the heartbeat resounds in the apologetic discourse — hands held up, burn mark crusade.

iv. two hundred, eighty-six. two hundred eighty-six from another fucking country and you still think that sorry is a fuck all fix. i am tired of waiting, i don’t think i should.

v. lecture hall, two minutes past five. the clock and lipstick stain begin to look the same. i learn that time is in perpetual motion; in the grandfather clock of space i am the incandescence of the belfry. he moves forward it straits, tugged – pendulums account for the sins of all man. two minutes past five.

vi. in the deathbed i discover that my grandfather has learned to forgive life in the years past when it has taken me a lifetime to forgive myself.

vii. between the faults of man i am the awakening.

viii. in the corner of the classroom i have grown more familiar with the side view of your face than i have with the ceiling-floor. in these seventeen weeks you have looked back twice.

ix. god remembered me as the sidestep of the church pillar, the benevolent rush against the cloth. the lies on the flier they distribute annually when we pretend to know ourselves and what we had become. genuflection for the testaments of others and prayers for the sins of the creators. did you know that the people who write the most about prayer are the one’s who never had prayers made for themselves — the ones who don’t believe?

x. i have begun listening to van halen, laying off the phenylephrine — sleeping in a lot more than i should, neglecting the ones that i should love and indulging the ones that i should have stayed away from. my eyes are drunk on prose and ramblings from egotistical rockstars. i have begun to search for signs in posts — the kind in forums and the kind in wayward roads, sometimes i picture the man running alongside me. the type that dodged through everything, ran in nautical miles on land while i questioned why the moon seemed to follow me and how magma collected itself in concave spouts of earth. he is a weary man with ashen folds and brown hair running across – shielding his brows. he is young, you can see it in his eyes — but he has seen the dreariness of the future and of the road and of running alongside young girls with picturesque fantasies and vivid dreams. he is running through crystalline tint and fragments of hope. he is running, and i am trapped in this cage — he is ashen but i am burning, of victor and dampness and of desire to fight. constantine, magdalene, victoria. he is running and he is conceived in my mind, killed in my eyelids — but he is the winner here. acacia, narra, molave. he is the one free, jumping, figment of my imagination soaring in places i never could. he is my phenylephrine dream, high on the things injected into my bloodstream when i was a kid, come to play again here in my dead teen years. im praying. he is still running.

xi. stuck in a rut between believing that i am an all-knowing god, that everyone else is below me, that i hold knowledge in my fingertips when the world searches their whole lives trying to find something worth it. i am built of passion and of deceit, of compulsive lying and obsessive drinking, of self-medication and brittle bones. i am a fucking god. whisper the worlds into me and i will contain them, whisper me your figments of love and i will obtain them. i toss around poetry and art like it’s my thing, like my backbone is made out of love and creation instead of desire and nausea.

xii. sometimes, though — i look out my window, into my ceiling, collection of plastic stars and sideview of cheap stuffed toys from travels all around the world. i give them names. i am a little girl, i do not know what love is, i do not know the meaning of the stars or where north is. i do not know much more about suffering than in the bottles i drink, i do not know but i desperately want to. i am nothing in the grand expanse of time. i tell others that. they tell me to shut up. some tell me that they agree too. i don’t know what i am or where i want to go. i’m a fucking god, but i’ve fallen somewhere.

xiii. they are all laughing at me. they are all laughing at me. they are all laughing at me. they are all laughing at me. they are all laughing at me.

xiv. i do not wish on stars for i have made them.

xv. reverse back to the staircase of mongolia. the sky is clear and the world is desolate. it is at a standstill. i am in between the war of industrialization and of nature. they dump out piles of sand in the wake of rising mountains, they instill pastel flags and monotone plaques to proclaim that they are the rulers of this part — now. i am the rising of the smog and heartbreak, one with loneliness and desolation, of barbed wire fences and gold souvenir shop keychains. i feel like i can conquer the world when i pour my head outside, talk to the sky and to the rubble; i tell them that i feel like i have awakened something. the vigor in the atmosphere manifests itself into hues and auras of hope. i feel like i live, for a moment.

xvi. lulls in sleep, disgruntling notions towards vagabond figures. i lie in the cold, an enigma of the past and the blizzards of the centuries foretold. i do not know where i am going — as the plastic stars have guided me, as the constellation charts fail to offer any insight on how to become one with the universe. i am glyphs of galaxies, unborn stars, fragments of conspiracy theories. i cannot sleep without thinking of the possibility that i will never wake again. i cannot stay awake without thinking of the possibility of the worlds that lie before me. i cannot live as i think about the fragility of time, the bounded hourglass of fate and of love and of reason, for our love has deadlines and conception a peak range. my body is chiming in with the demands of a world that does not love me back enough to care. i cannot live when everything is temporary, i cannot live when i have seen that love is a farce — that my bindings are tightened by how i have failed to reach out to the ones that i have deemed worthy of feeling. life is so fragile, life is so momentary, life is so filled with wonders and beauty and feelings and emotions and jars filled with memories of hope but we cannot explore what the world has offered to us in full — we cannot become one with the rainclouds, we can only study them, dissect them, dissect ourselves and play games in hopes of finding futures in the souls of others. i cannot sleep. i cannot live.

xvii. let’s start this at the end. we are in love. we are cinematics. we are camera reels, discarded polaroids, forgotten audio tracks. we are moving pictures.

xviii. you’re no different from expiry dates, printed on cans. mistakes and infractions that they lie about, say that they define our future. we’re no different from the people that we have sworn not to be on tv. we’re no different from one another, from our parents (the mistakes that we swore to never make just keep coming back to haunt us again and again, i am a fool and falling for the mistake that is living.) i am a mannequin summed up in bullet points and timelines of life events. i am the consumer, boiled down to my advertising history and credit score. i have been a fucking statistic since the day i was born. i am confined by interweaved lies held from the truth. i have been destined to conflagrate from the very beginning.

xix. the hardest thing about loving and our lack of self-esteem is that you tear yourself down and desperately beg for your words to matter; so that you could show people that they mean worlds within words. you have killed yourself over and over, sending off your fragments to nihilistic loves who will never understand, never receive the fervor, the creeds incarnated in their spirit. all you want is for them to know that they are loved, they are beautiful, they are empyreal, they are life.

you have failed to realize that over and over again; you are loved, among the stars, the dewdrops, the earthkissed souls, the chasms in your ribs and the vaults in your heart. we all confine ourselves to disbelief, to mistrust — we do not let ourselves be loved, we never see that we are loved. love is not fictitious. love exists. in pills, atheists, and liars. in fissures, daydreams, and sheet music. love abides; open, awaken, it exists. you are loved.

xx. her soul shoots up into contrails, they paint palettes of pigments down towards seas of soldiers and saviors and liars. they’re all kind of the same. it is a mix of stardust, narcotics, bile & dimethyltryptamine. she is malignant, perverse visions elude you, erode your lungs; but you take it in anyway, she is the kind of sweet demise that you see yourself in. same music taste, pale skin, eyes as hollow as your mother’s bones. the kind of humor that you spent years making up, the laughter and smile that you feel like you could drown in. it is a resonant sky, the reverberant beckoning is overseen by manifestations of her voice in drunkards and gangrel children. it’s the kind of erosion that kills you slowly, intoxicating, but deadly in the end. you breathe in, breathe out; sweet cessation.

xxi. my earliest memory is lost.

xxii. i no longer believe.

i never believed in god because i thought so badly that i could be one. what a fucking mess. someone going through hell over and over again with an immense desire to live, to push through, to go beyond. here is to what was sixteen years of attempts. here’s to everyone who won’t give up.