This isn’t what I planned to write or think about, so forgive me if this is more a spontaneous ramble than whatever it is you might expect. February means something to me, but not the fourteenth. There’s nothing personal about the date, other than that I feel the warmth whenever I see all kinds of people celebrate their love for someone all at once. Earlier, while running, I overheard a daughter naming seven things to her mother. I don’t know what it was all about but I heard her say, “Love, heart, kindness, Valentine…” They saw me listening and both of them smiled, the little girl a little shy. I didn’t hear the rest of it, but it was so good to hear those words from a kid. It reminds me of the kind of love I wrote here almost two years ago. The universal kind—the kind we tend to take for granted but has always been readily available and present.

Sometimes I think it’s so natural to love. So easy, so accessible. So simple that we should all expect ourselves to be good at giving it. But really, it takes strength. Because love isn’t selfish and not being selfish takes strength. It takes courage. Because love often comes with pain and it takes courage to still love despite it.

So, let me share a poem and other scraps written with love and sadness and longing. Just like this short introduction, these were written on a whim, not following any timeline, throughout the pandemic years.

The poem

After almost three years of keeping this safely tucked, I’m finally letting this poem go, and all the beauty, and pain, and love that comes with it. Now feels like the right time.

What if?

What if we feel estranged in changing?
What if I say the wrong thing?
What if I’m no longer good at
understanding how you feel?
What if we lose alignment?
What if we disconnect?
What if all there is to say
is taken from our breath?
What if there’s no more magic?
What if we learned the trick?
What if we’ve gone far too withdrawn
from all the reasons that we clicked?
What if you’re meant to drift away?
What if I always meant to stay?
What if we’ve lost our only chance
for the risk we’re scared to take?
What if the gap cannot be filled?
What if our fate’s already sealed?
What if we can’t be anything more
than a what if unrevealed?

The whatnots

Nobody woke me up when September ended because I didn’t sleep in it. I was very much awake with my heart stinging for past aches. No, there isn’t much in the present but the past, clawing its way through, and I let myself be pulled thin in this time-space continuum.

—

Can I feel deeply and still feel happy?

—

Scraps of the day (things I wrote on a torn piece of paper):

• What’s wrong with hoping? I love hoping for other people. I think it sends light on their path, even though sometimes I don’t see it myself.

• What did we say about violence? That it is vile and yet we wanted it.

• A fictional line: I don’t want you widowed by the age of 36.

• Dedication: Bringers of light. The one who sparked a fire. The hand that kept the flame from going out. The one who turned the flame into a soulful conflagration.

• A fictional journal entry: I want to talk to you, but what would I say? It seems no words can diminish this heaviness. But I want to talk to you, not for it but to hear you say anything. To ask, how are you? Are you okay?

—

The sky is turning pretty dramatic right now, casting a golden hue against a somewhat blue-tainted street. Fiery are the clouds—the sun made them, while the pale blue sky remains untouched. I’m looking at my screen but my mind is adrift—something away from here and near to where you are. The fiery clouds are a dying flame now, blending with the sky like blotches in a palette. It will be dark soon. I must close the windows.

—

You’re like a sudden gust of fresh air when I’ve forgotten how to breathe.

—

I had a beautiful dream. But that’s all it was—a dream. It was heartbreaking at first; I almost didn’t want to wake up. I thought it was real… but the hurt was mine alone, and mine to bear alone. You had nothing to do with it. Yet I didn’t know what to do, nor how to bear it. It felt like losing someone a thousand times over. Perhaps it was so unendurable that I wanted it to be a dream—so much so that my brain figured out it was indeed. Then it led me to another dream—one where you arrived, standing at the front door of our house. We stared at each other for a while, and for no reason at all, we laughed. I missed hearing you laugh. I missed making you laugh. I wasn’t crying, but I could have. And for a moment, all was right in the world. In my world.

In my dream.

—

One evening, a flash of impossibility sprang to mind—a yearning I had tried so desperately to bury rushed through me like rising magma. For an entirely monotonous day, one that found no delight in the sunny skies, it was the first time I had felt something real again. But I splashed water on my face and felt as if I had washed it away—almost like it had never been mine to feel, almost as if the yearning belonged to someone else."

—

I need to figure out how to not get trapped by what is trapped inside of me.

—

But then I think about a lot of other things too. I think about the changes we’re going through, the changes we’re scared to talk about, and why we’re scared. I think about the questions I still want to ask—and why I can’t bring myself to.

—

We were free to be whatever we wanted to be and we were it until we weren’t. The dream came true, after all.

—

If I could, I would rather cling to all the denials. Like I did, for the longest time. For once, I would rather not have faced the truth. But I did—and I’m sorry."

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And because I had so much love with my girls when we went to a gig last week, here’s a little playlist.

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