There’s something oddly harrowing about looking back onto the days of your life
when you dedicated it towards something as simple as a pairing;
isn’t that quite the embarrassment?
You look back reflexively and dismiss those days, months, perhaps even a year or more —
as easy as you dismissed the idea of ever giving up on them, back then..
They’re repressed, I beg to tell myself.
There’s nothing that I see in those times.
I’ve changed, I’m different, and I scoff at the mention of them;
like how silicone faces shiver at their old selves,
and how we dig through the crumpled up writings and love poems we made
in the lonely formative years of the fourth grade.
When I’m alone, I dig back through the archives as if I was picking up
an old book with tender loving, gentle embrace.
You rekindle the faces, bask in the nostalgia that takes you
back to the simpler days, the olden ones; when innocence was about,
or perhaps when innocence itself was the very thing you lost.
I fell in love with a fictional pairing; as many others do.
If I were to recall their stereotypes and their flaws in writing,
it was a young boy, determined to live up to the expectations of his family,
as does every child, as does every being.
He lost his own dreams in the decision that his would be theirs,
even though he couldn’t even sleep in front of the family
altar at night.
A girl, a bit older but nevertheless just the same.
She carved her name only after his,
from birth she knew that she was not an equal,
but a servant, a slave if you will.
Veins pulsed with the heart of mercy yet
eyes gleamed red with the desire to hold.
Her heart was his,
but not in the sense of love;
though in the sense that it would
follow his in utter sync, memorized and perfected
at every single beat, matching in the rhythm of time
beyond every single coffin they’d pass through;
all the gunshots and the slander that would rush through
the course of their journeys outside the wooden mats of
something that they struggled to even call home.
I wonder why I fell in love with something so unreal;
as if my life could ever come close to the fantasy of a
girl wielding a sword, dedicating her life and her soul to the
hollows of a tender young boy.
But we don’t exactly fall in love with mirrors of our reality.
Honestly, they weren’t even the most significant of people;
They were the side characters, the ones that only a certain niche really loved.
But to me, they were eternity, and I found myself skipping through every picture
looking for the two of them, calculating the distance; laughing at the
apparent reasons why they would never get to be together until I realized
that I was laughing at myself; that even though fiction is fiction they
still borrow from reality, and it’s not like lovers would always find their way
back to each other, as much as their prayers would heed for them to.
It was eventually conjured into something more… soulless, as the
happiness turned into a desire to spread their names, even at the cost of
disturbing the general population, or fanbase, if you will.
But I digress, each moment of doing so only justified the heartbeats, the
unwanted tears and the burying into my mind of the lessons that they spoke volumes of,
in the pixelated lines of dialogue.
Look back into the memories, and wither at the thought of your complete
will bending over the fictious ideas.
Look back and seethe at the thought of your
heart racing
at something that wasn’t even real in the sense;
but real
when you started to fall in love with it,
when you never felt anything until
your mind clicked and started analyzing the lines in between lines,
the artifacts in the pixels and the untranslated jarble that you
wished to know.
Fragile heart found melancholy in the falseness,
dissipate their feelings because this was more real than their fake hellos.
Loneliness, my heart was lonely, my being was lonely. It was another
way of reaching out to people in ways that I couldn’t with the real world.
I gave them normal greetings, shifting eyes and wandering, trailing
thoughts as my mind drifted off; none of them could share what I was feeling.
None of them could know.
They would laugh; that I was fully aware of, so why showcase my love for something
so utterly false when I knew that I could fake something else,
show them I don’t derive from the norm; show them that I am
just one of them, just as they are me.
We’re all hiding hollow hobbies, closeted or not, proud or not there are
multitudes of things we do not talk about beyond the classroom table,
the athlete scorns at the coach who touches her in places he should not
the musician seethes as he feels like he’s been loving something he
was forced upon, the writer throws away his books as they rip the pages
apart and call him gay and I, the one who clicks away, writes poetry,
forms pictures into one and writes novels about two fictional people;
I remain in solitude because I found hope in the story
of people I could never replicate.
But I’ve learned — haven’t we all?
Turn the shame into pride because you realized that
fiction is sometimes just better than your
darkening, damping reality. That fiction does not need to be
the mainstream media of thrones and dragons, or science fiction;
that even if your fiction strays from what they see as normal you
continue to reap it, the essence and soul of the writer who has
weaved these characters, stringing into your heart and attaching
you to them like you are inherently fascinated by their writing,
you applaud at their character design and look at the wiki for their
blood charts. You fall in love with something that real life
fails to give you, you fall in love with the love in words that you are
so sure does not reflect life in itself; who could love someone so far
as to dying for them? Moreover, to put it more into terms with their kind of love;
do you see any samurai women, adopted to be born and raised into servitude
towards a yakuza boy, training to be his protector?
Not really.
The world is dark, the world does not interest you as much as the
lines of dialogue, the screencaps of a game that you have not even played,
the soundtrack and the indescribable art, you are not alone but instead
of the barriers of desks in overcrowded classrooms that are a few degrees
too cold you are barricaded by oceans and waves, your communication is in
text and half of their faces… you aren’t even sure of what they look like.
Thank them because you were brought back to life.
Thank them because they were, for a very short time, your only reason for living.
You have a lot of years left to go, you’ll lose the shame as I did.
Laugh at who you were, laugh at how dedicated you were, laugh at the others
who are going through what you have; because they too, have finally
found comfort in something, they’ve found something that brings them
immense joy.
Keep silent once you realize that it was your lifeline, respect
the writing; the fiction; or perhaps the celebrities, the media, the songs, the toys, the shows, all that have kept you wanting for more, all that unknowingly, made you smile when you wouldn’t have.
When you have the time, pick them up. Brush off the dust,
listen to their stories, their melodies, the heartbeats,
recognize the person you were when you were utterly devoted
and recognize the person you are now.
My notion of love had been changed because of you,
my selfishness was transformed into the desire to protect for you,
and you taught me that love isn’t kind, nor is it fair;
but true love is patient. True love waits.
You hear those lines in those poetry books, the films, the cinema,
perhaps even from your very own timeline.
But you, you made those words make sense,
like hearing a movie’s title towards the end of the film,
or realizing what his last wish truly meant,
fiction made me grasp on to the idea of love,
when I was giving up on the world.
Sometimes, I am ashamed
because I was ashamed.
Look back unto the sword and the gun,
into the poems of love and woe that you weaved,
the songs that you kept on replay.
My life was devoted,
the gunshots were spinning, flying past the arches of my back
and the sword, streaks of silver splashing tidal waves,
keeping me afloat; renewal bathed the shoreline.
We collected meaning like they were shells,
and tangled ourselves in reason like they were seaweed.
The moon began to ascend to its throne, bowing to the sun
as they took their turns.
My memories became seafoam, sweeping in motions,
remembering, forgetting, wishing, dreading;
the nostalgia became the sky, my eyes were reminded
of those times.
You can regret your actions, but not what those
times had done for you.
The king and lionheart was playing.
Like every being, the ocean was begging to be remembered.
I stood still.
Aching limbs were hanging on.
My memories were no longer repressed,
they realized that they make me who I have become,
I stood even stiller.
There was no shame.