It’s this thing I have. I’m sorry if it scared you. I feel other people’s feelings. I imagine crumbling insides and splitting hearts, goodbyes that hang in the air before they break into tiny pieces. I hear words that aren’t said, the echoes of lonely hallways and hollow footsteps. I hear sobs that soak pillowcases when all the lights are out and the world is sleeping. I carry this inside of me, all of it. I knew you paced the floor at night, trying to walk over all the things you didn’t want me to know. But I felt every wound you ever endured when I rested against you. I felt the ache that I have, deep inside of me, on your lips. Every time we kissed, I tasted a lifetime of tangled paths and bumpy roads woven with joined hands. Love isn’t blind, you see. I felt everything you were and could be if only you stopped hiding in the same darkness you sheltered me from. I knew who you could become if someone loved you just right.
I’m sorry if that scared you.
Just in case you were wondering, I still love you and I’ll keep the lights dim.
Come home.
© jacqueline simon gunn
Welcome to the second nostalgia column, a place for all of those words we never got to say. The inspiration for this column came from the plot of one of current WIP’s, called The Crooked Path, which is currently with my beta-readers. My next book is called, Where You’ll Land, and is scheduled for release in January. It’s a romantic psychological fiction. I will be posting the synopsis shortly.
If you want to read a little more about the inspiration behind the nostalgia column, please see the previous post for details. Nostalgia is something we all experience. We remember things as we are in the present and therefore, the past is constantly changing. I hope this provides a place for people to write in what they only understood they wanted to say in retrospect and that readers will find pieces that resonate.
*Thank you to all of the wonderful writers who contributed to this edition of I Just Wanted You to Know. If you would like to contribute a piece for the next blog, please message me through the website or through Facebook or Instagram. Thank you all for reading.
In retrospect, I find that in my search for love. it is that very search that destroyed me. My self-destruction has become exhausting. The warmth of another no longer keeps me safe or calm, but rather, shakes me to my very core. I, and only I, have made myself fear what should be one of the most cherished feelings in this world. What is a beacon of hope for others now drives me to a catatonic and catathymic state that while I wish didn't exist, I hope to never awaken from.
The issue with burning bridges is not the lost connection or solitude, for those are easily surmountable. It is the fact that sooner or later, you are not only burned, but you are engulfed in the flames. The ensuing somnambulism is a fate worse than death, because in my most subconscious of thoughts, I will forever be seeking a treatment for wounds that can never be healed.
So this is how it ends. I can still smell the metaphorical burning flesh of the anthropomorphic conceptualization of our love. A plane ride to a distant land where the search begins again, when I already found that love here. In my heart of hearts, at least what is left of the one I destroyed myself, knows that everything I needed was in some southern sandbox, in a sunburned country, in the foothills of what is now a personal hell ablaze with hatred. The worst kind of pain, what cuts the deepest and twists its serrated blade in the cavity where the remnants of a functional heart used to be, is the pain one has inflicted upon themselves. The self destruction due to a contrived messiah complex, where the dichotomy dictates that I was the villain. I am fueled by my disdain for myself, and it has given birth to a sick form of a hopeful misanthrope. For the first time, I feel alive- but you're not here. For the rest of my days, I will sit here by my wishing well, throwing in my coins, hearing the hollow "plonk" as they hit the water as your return, my last wish, is never to be fulfilled.
© Philip Raus @theory.of.sisyphus
Part of me wishes we could go back. Wishes we could go back to those two people who didn't know any different. Who only had eyes for each other and nothing else seemed to matter. I wish we could go back to your bed, lock the door, and throw away the key. But life doesn't happen behind doorways in the bedroom—its everything on the outside, the living room, the kitchen, the front of the house where strangers pass us by. Life is in the moments we can't take back. It's the line drawn in the sand and everything on one side as after the fact and everything on the other as before. There is no going back, only forward.
~ Naomi Boshari, @naomiboshari
an evanescent memory skitters across my mental screen
of a day that still tints my cheeks blush pink
the sky had peeled of all its blues that day
adorned in an ombre of spun sugar, honey and molasses
kindling a yearning to meld together as one ,
as a breeze scented with aphrodisia
incited our senses into a fervor of emotions
the sun caressing me warm on bare gold shoulders
the sand crisp and crunchy beneath my soles
sending frissons of anticipation up each nerve ending
our intense unbroken gaze locked across the crowd
a red velvet ribbon of passion connecting my heart to yours
as languid waves of desire danced between us, both by design and default
and you slowly reeled me in closer, closer, closer, closer .....
Luckey
@myriadmadmusings
wading through my father's phone book
as I help him sort his contacts...
a random name whisks my breath away,
and my heart decides to abandon my chest,
a hollow ache resurging from deep within,
an ache I haven't been able to numb,
in a quarter of a century.....
and in all probability will never be able to...
this name reminds me of a soul that felt like home,
a love that bloomed though for one tenth of a season..
but its fragrance nourishes my breath for the rest of my life..
The chrysalis of words never fully dispelled from the the tips of our tongues, swirled, swallowed and sometimes ingested whole to cocoon a love we never gave a fair chance to.
The crippling fear of failure impeding our optimistic stance.
The ugly truth of our ineludible aloneness
sugarcoated with enchanting lies,
we indulge in a fantasy compromised.
Each day henceforth, poised on a fulcrum of infinite possibility, we evade being impaled by the trenchant hands of hounding inevitability, braced with mouths agape concealing our only route of escape.
Luckey
@myriadmadmusings
&
Ambica Gossain
@tryst_with_fiction
I miss this human, he was taken from me too soon. He was an amazing man, one of the best men who has ever walked this planet, and he was mine, then.
My soul bleeds at times, the pain is so bad I can't run away from it; it lays on me like a blanket of steel. Only darkness can fill the space between the sky and me, it hurts.
I try and breathe in the light, for now. I try and put it away, for now. I go on with life without you, for now. I will keep you tight inside my bleeding soul because for now, I'm here and you’re there. Until I lay in your loving warm strong arms again, I'll stay here, but, just for now. I love you then, now and always, but it hurts.
© denise demartine
Thank you again for reading.