One-way ticket to Boston, two heavy-hearted faces, and three words never pronounced. Four days away from a newborn chapter not yet ready to be written. Outside, the sun radiates after months of bareness and gray in the sky, but we still suffer from the inherent whiteout in each of our mind.
I grab a book of poetry, make my way to your room, twenty seconds away from my studio. You’re unwinding still on your sofa with your headphones on, mumbling tones and lyrics I’m very much familiar with. Owl-patterned sweater overwhelms your skinny posture, matching my assorted bird-patterned midi skirt. A cup of dark cocoa I could smell, fusing with a hint of lavender-vanilla scent from your air freshener in the background. I then lay my back on the cushions upon your usual crumpled bed, begin to swim in a sea of spilled ink that comprises a universe I build privately for myself.
You’re still in your own universe as well, as I watch you from afar, afloat among tunes that I very much fancy too. I’d like to sing with you just like the usual days, I really would love to, but time almost ceases—at least for us. All I could do is joining you here, saving you from the comfort of your own company, deliberately adding more burden to our shoulders as we countdown to the expiration of our period of coexisting together. Boston and Stockholm—3,741 miles of separation. Unknown time limit.
You grab your book on dystopia tangled with philosophical questions—the kind of stories I would never apprehend no matter how frantic you’ve always become every time you narrate me the whole synopsis. You lay next to me, quitting from the universe you’re in before, moving to the next stop of your galaxy. I’m still drowning in sentimental proses you barely appreciate.
And there, just like that, I burst into tears. Questions overflowing inside my brain are just too unbearably massive to withstand. You hug me carefully.
In anything but awkwardness, we survive twenty-three minutes of my weep, the only voices we could hear is my overdue grief, and your mind begins to be swollen from uneasiness. You tell me things are going to be where they deserve to be. Well, I don’t want them to. I want to make mistakes for once in my life, I want to be mistaken, I want you to be a part of the greatest mistake I could have ever done, and I want to sound cheesy and full of cliché for once in my life.
My mind is already cheating all this time. My heart has undergone even so much worse of stages. My imagination and urge altogether have gone unforgiveable. Continents away from me, a clueless soul bounded with me by pledges and vows, thinking I am doing perfectly fine and all right and trusted. I am not.
But there you are all this time; taking care of my honesty, keeping my grace together. Not even trying to persuade me to quit behaving. Leaving me physically untouched. Although you leave the other parts—heart and mind—mishandled and disarrayed.
This particular room—a witness of many beautiful individuals whom you have been inside whom for the past half year, while never will I ever become anything resembling them. Yet still, I own the very space for you to constantly come back and be home. And you always do, and my acceptance is always given at zero price.
I fall asleep counting memories instead of sheeps, the lamp is turned on still. Shelves in countless bookstores, narrow streets in unknown cities and towns, world’s most well-known lakes and mountain, obscure musicians on underground stages, homemade signature dishes of yours, cheap cutleries that we share, collection of dusty DVDs of documentary movies, and so forth. All that makes the loudest year in my constantly tranquil life. All that comes to presence because of you and your indescribable pull towards me.
00:01 AM, and another remaining day is elapsed. I am awake and staring at such perfection contained within a single individual slumbering restfully next to me, sharing a crumpled single bed once again, who doesn’t even let himself to touch me just because. With his ivory skin contrasting his ebony hair, mental fatigue disguised inside his beautiful hollow-cheeked face, and burdens of detachment placed upon his stiff shoulders. His pale-shaded lips were incapable of conveying the purest truth.
And all that he knows, all that he’s very much talented at, all kinds of traits that tease me in the first place. All that he is.
All the haunting things I cannot separate myself from.
Not in three days.