Alabaster Jar

This alabaster jar, is all I have of worth. I break it at your feet, Lord. It’s less than you deserve.

You’re far more beautiful, more precious than the oil. The sum of my desires, and the fullness of my joy.

Death

I feel like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered.

I don’t think I have ever felt more threatened in my life. Something that is completely and utterly beyond my control, the feeling that at any moment something terrible will happen and I will have to give up the plans that I have for the rest of my life, the taste of death.

I wonder how it will feel like. I wonder how it will feel like afterwards.

Truly there is no better way, than to trust in God. Because only he knows if I will die tomorrow. And if he wants me to die tomorrow, it will be for the best.

Trust in God.

Truth

My God died for me.

Moments

Yesterday was the happiest day in a long time.

There weren’t a million rainbows and shooting stars didn’t fall out from the sky. I didn’t get a new computer, or phone, or camera. I got home exhausted with a million things to do, undone. And yet.

My family went to the arcade, and we played and laughed and shot basketballs into moving hoops.

I got up this morning and it felt like a dream.

Commitment

There are a lot of reasons I stopped writing, but it seems as though they are almost too painful to talk about. I will save these for another time, for when my words will all tumble out perfectly, along with all of the pain that has been suffocating me, to make sense of all the things that currently do not.

It is very difficult for commitment to carry through, and perhaps I shall start to grow up. I’ll be committed to being committed.

Submission

How amazing it must feel, to lay all your insecurities, your weaknesses, your flaws and shortcomings, all that you are, no more, no less, no weaving of anything extraordinary, for the sake of your better face. Lay them all bare, at the feet of someone who accepts, forgives, and carries you through it all.
Please, God. Make me learn how.

War

War isn’t just on the battlefields of Iraq, in the lives of tortured civilians, or in the chambers of the White House.

War isn’t some faraway notion of bombs, of clouds of dust in barren lands, or underground hiding caves. It isn’t something only the army has experienced, isn’t a stranger to men in the comfort of their shattered homes, isn’t an intruding fool in the lives of abated housewives and beaten children. War is not all politics, is no one-up game, has no clear cut defining moment at which the end is declared. It is not clean, not good, not righteous, not moral.

And yet we still engage in it. Countries still unleash armies and tanks upon each other’s land, territory, civilians, traditions. Races and ethnicities still clash and discriminate, cultures still collide and take over empty minds and heritage-less souls. Families still feud and hate. People still are hurt, are wounded, still die. Minds tortured and used.

Hearts flogged and broken.

Prayer

Some nights it’s all I can do to wrap my arms around myself, withdrawing from the fact that my heart hasn’t been cradled in the longest time.

It feels like I’m in a continuous battle to be happy, to feel content, to feel a kind of peace that doesn’t shatter with the slightest of disturbances. It feels like I’m on an empty field fighting with my own spirit, with my own mind – my common sense on one side, my insecurities and neediness on the other. The result is chaos, earthquakes, and a scar right through the ground into which I fall and fall, and fall.

A lot of these nights, I call out to God. My prayer is always one first of thanks, for all that He has blessed me with, for all that he has given me. And then it is a plea for Him to make me better, to set my sights on Him and not anything else in the world. It is a plea for Him to heal my soul and to fill my heart back up to the brim, with what belonged there once that has been tried and taken away and tortured and flogged.

Some nights, sleep doesn’t come. I pretend that you are there beside me warming up what I have turned into – a cold, lifeless mass of flesh hating itself. I pretend that I am held by someone who understands what all this is, who feels the scars raw on his skin, who has been flogged and tortured. I pretend that empathy is holding me up.

But it isn’t. Because as I drift off to the place where my consciousness disappears into, something jerks me back into reality. And I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, praying all over again to be unconscious.

Peace

This morning I got up to a cold, dark room at 10 in the morning and found myself under the sheets, with no-slip grip curls in my hair and the window shades drawn. And despite the setting and the darkness of it all, I felt a very peculiar sense of stillness, of everythingness and yet nothingness… of a feeling I knew before the world started to fall apart, and then lost along the way.

And yet it was back. It also made me stay in my bed staring at the ceiling for the next hour or so.

I remember asking my heart, “Why this sudden transformation? Hadn’t you always felt like you were being split into a million little pieces, hadn’t you always felt like a volcano just waiting to erupt and self-destruct, hadn’t you always wanted to just disappear with the setting of every sun, and made me come with you?”

To which I found, not ironically, no answer. All I got from the one who knows me best – the one who has ached for my pain, who has carried it all on itself, who has hidden the parts that hurt and stung, who has been through the days telling me that it will be okay, and then the nights that made me believe that it won’t – was plain, still, quiet peace.

And I sort of liked it. Because it sort of feels good that you don’t have to think and leave your body to go in them and feel the physical pain afterwards. Because it sort of feels good that you don’t want yourself to disappear. Because it sort of feels good that life makes sense again, that your mind is just calm savannahs and preyless grasslands. Because it sort of feels good that you are back to the way you were.

And if you were wondering, why would you have no-slip-grip curls in your hair??? I would tell you, why… I don’t need any other reason to curl my bloody hair except for the fact that maybe, just maybe, it brings me a sort of pleasure that makes me feel like I am happy again.

Demands

All you’ve ever done to me is to demand. You demand time for you, you demand good grades, you demand good universities and you demand respect. You demand intelligence, hardworkingness, obedience, submission. You demand me to meet your expectations even when they’re not what I want. You demand me to do all that you want me to do.

But it doesn’t work that way, love and respect. It’s a two-way road. And it’s so hard to give you mine when you are so oblivious to the fact that all my life you have done nothing but demand so much from me and from other people, but nothing of yourself. And that, I tell you honestly, I cannot respect.

Fragmentation

When you fall in love, you give your heart to someone else. And when he goes away, half of your heart goes with him too.

That’s why it feels like it’s ripped into two. That’s why you don’t love anymore, because you have nothing to love with.

Dreams

I hate that feeling you get when you’re in a dream but you’re sort of not, you’re just floating in between. Something really painful is going on on the other side, but you’re half in the pain – you can feel it, such a monster, and you can see the ceiling above your head. But you just can’t move no matter how much your brain is screaming at your hand to slap yourself, your body to get up and take deep breaths, trapped in this frictional consciousness that your eyes flash in fear and your heart races in fright.

In my dream we were all seated in a circle, and it was pitch dark. There was a spotlight in the center of the room and someone was standing there giving out instructions. He said that the spotlight would go around in the circle and every time it turned a full circle one of us would disappear from the circle and that they should be forgotten forever. I think they were supposed to be dead. And we all watched, like hostages strapped to chairs. We watched as one by one the spotlight shone on our friends, made one full circle. We all sucked in our breaths, so afraid, so scared that our hearts were almost bursting apart with fear. And we all watched, wide eyed in horror, as the light shone on an empty spot.

The first thing I did was scream and scream and scream. My eyes flew open. I could see the ceiling and I could feel my hand. My mind was screaming at me to get up, get away from this crazy cruel thing; the nerves in my fingers were aching to move and wake up from this nightmare.

But, like all the other times in my life, all I could do was just stare blankly at the ceiling, float in between the fear and helplessness, and watch as one by one my friends were taken away, leaving me alone.

Crowds have a way of making me feel like I am the only person left in the world, so alone and pathetic.

I know it’s all the irony in the world plus all of that on Mars, but maybe it’s because no matter how many people there are around me, none of them is you. And then all that is inside me just wants to fall apart and cry, because it’s the only way to put all the pieces back together and carry myself afloat.

It’s so pathetic how all of you can change within such a short period of time. You choose to not be who you were, what you were, and then its like a typhoon blows over you and you come out bruised, blind, but alive. And as a souvenir you carry the scars all through your life, and you walk out to face the world blind and bruised and alive, wishing that you weren’t. Your favourites aren’t your favourites anymore. The people you thought you would know and love all your life suddenly come out all different, you wonder if they’re the same person they were.

And the worst of all is, you don’t realize how alone you are in the world until you come out blind and bruised. People just aren’t really who you think they are.

Someday

You would think that all this time apart has made up for all our ache, but it hasn’t, unsurprisingly.

It’s gona be okay, right? One day I will not find myself awake at 3 in the morning thinking about you and all that we used to be, what we have. I will stop finding Mellow in my arms when I wake up, I will go on a day without thoughts of you, one day I will be able to remove my status from Facebook and not feel bad about it. One day I will be able to fall asleep like I used to, instantaneously. One day I will start breathing again.

One day I will send your shirt to the washer so that it doesn’t smell of you anymore. One day it will stop smelling of you. One day I will be able to pass by the sink where your ring sits, and not feel something stabbing at my heart. I will stop avoiding silences. One day I will sleep without dreams of falling. Or not be reminded of you when I see people in love, when I see something that reminds me of you. One day I will not wince when a song we used to love comes on, and I will not have to change it. One day I will stop trying to look for other things to think about, one day I will learn that you are gone, I let you down, and that is that. One day it will strike me like lightning that this is the end of it, that life goes on, that moving on is the only thing to do.

One day I will be able to be as strong as I was when I was with you. One day I will be able to fight for what I want, live the life that I want – one day I will learn what you have taught me, that sometimes you need to tell people to go away, that sometimes you need to be a little selfish, that sometimes you need to think about yourself and sometimes you have to stop letting expectations rule your life. One day I will look back and think about us and smile, because it happened.

One day we will be able to be friends, to talk like we used to before this all started, when I was the most talkative and elderly-sounding girl in the whole wide world, when I was the one who could see the hope after every hardship, the rainbow after every bout of rain. One day I will be the positive one again, who will tell you that it will all be okay and truly believe it when I say that. One day I will stop thinking about your arms around me, your whispers in my ear, the warmth of your hands as you brushed away my tears, the way you look at me like you never want to look at anybody else. One day I will forget all the details of your face, your brown eyes and the way your hair smells, the way its soft to the touch, one day I will forget the way you kiss, the way you love me unconditionally, willingly, more than you love yourself.

One day you will find someone else who is better than me in every way, you will love her with all your heart like you loved me. One day I will find someone else whom I will love as much as I love you. One day we will look back at all this agony and look at it as some kind of a mistake, a joke, an experience. Maybe we will. One day I will be able to find the me that used to be before you left; I will be able to finally learn how to suck in all the hurt and smile the way I used to, live the way I used to, with meaning and love and richness. One day I will stop watching my heart fall apart and sit by, with arms limp on the side, doing not one thing about it.

But right now, these are all just thoughts. Today is not the day.

Numb

Looped our songs and blared them in my ears so much, but somehow I’m still not numb.

I’d Come For You – Nickelback
Time to be honest, this time I’m pleading, please don’t dwell on it, cause I didn’t mean it.
I can’t believe I said I’d lay our love on the ground. But it doesn’t matter cause I made it up, forgive me now. Everyday I spend away my soul’s inside out.

By now you know that, I’d come for you, no one but you.