exile

in this world, wretched and unforgiving, i hold on to the idea… the haunting idea that to leave may be a survival instinct, a weapon against the inevitable sting of abandonment. because the vulnerability of remaining and letting my roots root deeply couldn’t stop the echoes of uncertainty of being left behind… there’s also this persistent fear of the wounds that others might inflict upon me. and i’m afraid that i’ll never find forgiveness, and i’ll find peace in casting blame upon them until my final exhale.

so, the ties once deemed tight and unbreakable unravel at my fingers. i mercilessly burned houses i thought i’ll live forever. and the ring in my finger that bears the weight of a life intended for happiness and peace, now marked by the barbed edges of self-inflicted pain--- a tight knot reminding me of my stupidity, fears, and vices.

so, i become the architect of my own wounds.. i created the potential pain that others could inflict upon me. because it is my desperate idea of control in a world where certainty is not certain… it is my twisted idea of power, that i, alone, hold the brush that paints my scars. the marks on me are inscribed by my hand alone, and the blood that stains is caused by me. no one else can do that.

it's a wretched idea, i know, and i don’t even plan on forgiving myself.

and so, i walk the path into the woods, with no one to blame but me. i walk the path to a solitary pilgrimage… to a self-imposed exile.

here i find myself again, clinging to portions of a simpler past. in the damp earth, we were once barefooted children, whimsical and untethered by the vigor of the punishing world. we used to feast in the taste of ordinary things--we never once hungered for a more glorious life.

yet time flies and flies, and it never shows us any mercy, not even when we kneel and beg for the end of its passing. we have long outgrowned the sleeves of childhood; we are strangers before the weathered walls of our old bedroom, a collection of limbs uprooted from yesterday's soil.

i can bury this childlike fondness but it always resurrects into a form of ceaseless longing. i mourn in secrecy for the little joys that were once carved within the sinews of my bones; i become prey to my own fallible gods.

i do not yearn to leave again for fear that i might come back different. please let me be the same child once more.

My lips carry the weight of your name, and the sweetness of it lingers on the roof of my tongue. I have never known how to separate devotion from religion, but you are everything I believe in. I speak of you in eulogies as though you have once been mine for the taking; I mourn you in ways that can never be. My soul glistens at the sight of you; everything sings with the melody of your breath. The trees dance when you laugh; even the sun sits on your shoulder, and everything you touch becomes golden. I stick you into the crevices no one can see, but the enormity of your beauty isn't one sculpted for hiding. You leak from me like splinters of sunlight from a forest of leaves, like a ballad on the tip of my tongue. You become the point of my existence; you burn alive in everything I see. You are reason beyond comprehension, an endless wonder, a tapestry I would not tire of stitching.

Dearest, how much longer will I bear the weight of pretense when my mouth speaks of your name like a prayer?

the sky cries power and the soil catches it like a slave, ever silent but unforgiving. the leash may no longer dangle but are you ever truly freed? the blood dries and the hands may cradle the apology, but the flesh never forgets the sharpness of the knife that has touched it.

anger lodges itself between my teeth

like copper coins rusting --

odious and burning, like drugs seeping into veins.

the taste lingers so i swallow my prayers.

i rinse my sinful mouth with water,

knowing i will never wipe it clean.

silver-tongued woman staring at the bathroom floor,

do you dare look at yourself in the mirror?

you have your father's skin and his temper too,

your mother's frown and your eyes glazed blue.

lonesome woman, what is it that you bear?

you spill out apologies like a clawed animal

revolting to leave its lair.

tell me, woman, why do you keep bowing down?

you allow regret to eat you from the inside out.

i love being friends with bitches who won’t shut up. i never know what to talk about. please tell me your whole life story and then infodump to me about warrior cats or greek history

perhaps the sunset deceives us into believing that leaving can be graceful, but it bleeds in red and orange hues while fiercely battling for its place in the playground of the gods. the poets often speak to me of the glory of endings, yet those who've lived to tell the tale speak not of their beauty but of the terrors of flowing crimson. in that crimson reside both pain and love, for not all endings lead to the gates of Elysium. we are mere mortals abandoned by the sun as the moon unties its robe, cloaking us like prisoners in its own wrath. gazing at the sunset, we find delight in its leaving, for we are humans, and we are often bad at saying our goodbyes.

your tongue stabs like a knife into my very flesh, and your eyes, clear and kind, suddenly turn gray like those of an eye of the tempest. i loathe the way you radiate comfort but then you impose fear. i look at you, and i find it hard to weigh love and resentment at the same time. i loathe the harshness of your words as i carry them into slumber. i loathe the way you befriend your anger, and i loathe the way i fear i am becoming who you are. but then i remember the nights you tucked me to sleep, the stories you made up to make me chuckle, the way you made sure i had the bigger piece of food, the movie discs you bought to make sure i never missed a single part of a series, and how you told me at 6 years old that you look up at the stars at the dead of night, and that on some occasions, they would even look like little rosary beads with the faint moon serving as its cross.

you make the house feel like it’s on fire, but i look at you and see a part of me, and i know i would burn myself with you. i know the love we have might be painful, and perhaps to be human is to be a fool, but at dawn the stars still appear, and you are still my father. you offered no apologies, but my forgiveness is yours to keep. perhaps this is what it means to be foolishly merciful.

i know there will come a time when the sun will swallow us whole in the belly of oblivion, and all that's left of the earth will be remnants of dust. if, by chance, the universe spits us back in order to be reborn, we might possibly no longer exist as two-legged creatures, and the senses we now possess might vanish only to be replaced by some other form that is beyond our human capacity to fathom. perhaps i would be a formless extension of the void, and you would be an exploding star that lies in blinking wonder for the entirety of your stellar life. the vastness shall be my comfort and my sorrow, for i cannot reach you, yet i rejoice in knowing that we are made from the same celestial components that create the specks that illuminate the blackened graveyard up above.

phoenix rising from the ashes, make of yourself an apparition. they have fueled your pyre and watched you burn, drinking the wines of victory upon the defeat of your name. fret not and revel in the dancing of the flames, for you are the daughter of helios. you are a child of the sun and you live when you are burning. be free like a witch in the gardens of exile, and the monstrosities of the wild shall be your foes. let them drink the wickedness that is stapled on the roof of their mouths and let it escort them to the dwelling of Hades.

i found myself grieving over the remains of childhood like a traveler returning to the ruins of his homeland. the soil that has nourished me and bore witness to the cacophony of my laughter and cries has now been painted with blood until it became a wasteland that dried with the passage of time.

good child, you have been plucked from your mother’s womb, shaped from river clay in the same garden that has birthed the first sin of mankind, where temptation squeezed the saccharine taste of the sinful apple. they will proclaim your birth a sacred gift of divinity while their calloused fingertips carve you an image of blasphemy. the descendants of eve with their honey-eyed tongues will sing songs of exaltation, preaching the beauty of paradise and the fury of hellfire. and you, a young child, will get intoxicated by the dichotomy of salvation and suffering, trying to carve out the lines between heaven and hell in the hopes of being redeemed.

adam's child, you were born a sinner, and you will spend the rest of your life repenting.

a daughter is an old garnished clock

every tick of that old wooden clock is synonymous to the aching cries of my mother's mouth- unyielding, forever in tune with the rhythmic hymn of this familial wrath. the clock strikes 12, the midnight sirens fall into slumber but the echoes remain within the thin walls and are devotedly consumed by me — a silver-tongued apparition, a faithless devotee.

perhaps time is not stuck in that old garnished clock if i shred the script of this forsaken prophecy. but time in its nature, is a pattern reforming again and again into the haunting road of eternity:

a father's words,

a mother's melancholy,

a daughter repeating both:

a haunting tale of agony

dear heavens, if divinity did exist, i hope mercy would be the last mouthpiece. i hope it would be granted unto me- a lone wretch of a daughter, an absentee of a friend, a strange anomaly to my own kind. i am certain my bleeding knees would not pardon me for the sins i committed out of misery, for the blood pouring out of my skin, for the echoes they made me believe in.

but dear heavens, if death could no longer wait for me, i hope i am forgiven. i hope the gates would be opened unto me. i am my mother's child but i am my father's daughter. an old garnished clock, a vessel where the cycle continues, ticking and ticking, waiting forever to stop.

I used to be friends with God and laugh with Him in the evening. I'd spend my day in the field and by nighttime he'd count all of my sins. Apology was the sincerest offering I gave to God but the greatest deceit I made myself believe in. There is nothing without God, my mother had told me. He is everything in between; the rain, the mist, the mud, the heat. He is the bellowing laughter at the dinner table yet He is also the cries of the hungry. I read somewhere that suffering feels religious if you do it right and what can be more religious than devoting your faith into pain so magnanimously in order to be forgiven? If God had loved me, why did He turn a blind eye to my bruising knees? Was pain such a requirement for the rewards of a love such as this?

to the girls who live in the likeness of me, may the cruel world be tired of its own foolishness, may it allow us to explore its corners without bowing our heads in shame. may we learn to speak like our tongues are swords, ready to cut through the poor rebuttals of men. we have had knives pushed against our throats for too long that we have forgotten how to form our words without mumbling them. may we march upon the roads long named after men and may we proclaim our rightful passage. we are the witches they have failed to burn, and witches do not give up. they shall always return. 

perhaps god knew i would be too much of a sinner to go into heaven and so he created my mother's laugh and the rain falling softly on my roof, to pardon me a little moment to have known what it's like to witness something divine.