The mantelpiece clock let out a low mechanical sigh,
Then plunged at full speed into its twelve wailing chimes,
The silence was disrupted by the ripple of sound waves,
Like falling stones into calm waters.
Each chime vibrated through the walls,
Through the floorboards,
Through every atom that made me.
Another full cycle as midnight announced itself as not a whisper,
But as a reckoning.
As the final echoes came to their end and the room returned ghostly as ever,
There was a sudden shift in me,
As though the lavender haze I was wrapped in completely faded,
As I was forced to face the wilted remnant of what was left of us.
There were no reckless voices,
No dorm-room noise to pull me from the dark corners of my mind where I desperately kept my fiends buried.
It came to me as a colour first,
Deep and dark and unmistakable red,
Not bright, nor romantic,
But a colour that could drown me in melancholia,
Maroon.
The shade of dried wine on old fabric.
The bruise on my collarbone that never quite faded.
The rust that grew between telephones.
I used to believe time would dilute it and eventually the colour would fade.
It did not.
In fact, it soaked deeper.
Then came the 13th hour,
There was no denying it now,
No amount of deflection or counting sheep was going to wash it away this time.
The memories flooded back in fragments.
Hands stained with cheap screw-top rosé,
Laughters echoing through the whole apartment,
Words thrown like matches into dry air.
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Midnights had never been merciful with me,
I started tracing fault lines with ruthless precision,
Yet every end credits rolled me back to the same film.
I knew my patterns all too well to name them now,
How I traced for the fib in every sincere song,
How I marred every pure intention,
How I learned to leave before I got left.
Sometimes, I wore self-awareness like a shield,
Acting as if naming my flaws excused me of them,
But as I failed to outrun my thoughts in this marathon,
I realize they had not come to destroy me,
But demand I finally listen.
I was never unlucky in love. I was afraid of it.
I was rooting for the Anti-Hero.
I built my walls so high,
Walls disguised as thick obsidian barriers,
Impossible to cut through even with the finest blade,
Only for it to be made of paper.
I lay restless between those four thin walls overflowing with desolation,
Longing for my twin flame’s volition to reach me.
My desire to be yearned without performing,
Heard without screaming,
Loved without begging,
Would ultimately break my own heart, or so I thought.
Perhaps love was never meant to roar,
Never meant to arrive in ruptures of light,
Nor depart in the wreckage it left behind.
Perhaps I had been mistaking chaos for depth,
Confusing the ache for evidence,
Survival for devotion.
I treated love like a battlefield,
Entered The Great War already wounded,
Armor rusted,
Knuckles bruised like violets,
Convinced that only those who bled were permitted to remain.
I rehearsed wars before they were declared,
Sat through memorials before there were any bodies,
All in the name of ‘realism’,
But beneath every strategy, there was ‘fear’.
I had gone through adulthood believing loving less would cost me less,
Only to learn that withholding my heart was the most expensive choice I ever made.
Love was not the performance I learned to survive,
Not the proving,
The bargaining,
The desperate volume of wanting to be chosen.
Love inhabited the margins,
The pauses in between words,
The sweet nothings that required no witnesses,
No applause, no aftermath.
The kind of quiet I never trusted,
The kind of love I mistook for absence,
And tried to replace with something that could bleed.
Roses I so meticulously planted,
Wilted and were left with nothing but thorns,
Thorns so sharp I couldn’t help but pierce my skin deep into,
Hoping for a different fruition after every impalation;
Only to leave a myriad of scars.
A soul so intricate with a labyrinth of layers,
Who could ever articulate the poems etched in my scars?
A twin-flame that traces my echoes I keep hidden,
Who is fluent in the language my shadows speak,
He who is dauntless to bloom with no thorns;
And maps my scars into a cartography of constellations.
And for once,
I let the clock keep ticking without a fight.
Written by: Ash
