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it’s a new year in the whiff of anxiety and salty air, yet all there is is yesterday’s volcanic rocks, tomorrow’s swaying waves, and the red suit i step into. then moments later i’m there aloft and floating in the salty air.
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maybe it was the distance, the time difference and many miles that created so many knots, spoken and unspoken that led you to it, the betrayal i would never understand that pointed out all the distance between us that already existed even when you stood in front of me.
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the ceiling is white. i look at it into the night too long enveloped in unfamiliar spaces and a promise of new beginnings and change, the kind i’d always wished for. but tonight i curl up in the white silence of emptiness and let myself hold the loneliness in alone.
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friends like no other fried chicken and walks and funny facetimes. that one snowfall where we left our hands imprints i thought could last forever then the last hurrah we didn’t realize would be the last. so i talked and talked and showed you my tears by surprise. as much as i wanted us to last, i guess we all knew this good thing would come to an end.
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two hundred words, no more of colors and compositions but more so of sacrifice. of opportunities created for us and postponed for her, evident from how the roles have reversed and where we left, she picked up. two hundred words, in broken english and love in things unsaid, better left written only now, for an assignment. i read it again and again.
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i stood in front of that rowdy room to summarize what i couldn’t possibly summarize. we were forks down, bellies full, countless cups in, and it seemed necessary to tell them how much it meant for us to be there together that night for hours of working together many nights for you who helped me grow a together for together to not have existed two years ago and for together to be something many years later.
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it was gray and blue from the rain drip dropping on the gloomy day. we were quiet under the umbrella but i heard: my heart and the steady knocking, the rustle of his jacket careful to leave space in the electric air between his and mine, and his words before they came.
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i walked across the stage. a pivotal moment they say, but it didn’t feel that pivotal in the moment because i was too busy living in the moment and so it passed like a blur. i counted weeks as a single long continued giggle, and the one-two-three, one-two-three of the soundtrack we sang together that night. keyboard on the floor, surreal but grounded, waltzing away an impending bittersweetness.
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how strange it is to observe the world from this angle with the oceans above, the daisies beneath, and you by my side on this land we are both visitors of. and there were monuments, museums, things we should be seeing but we chose to lay there with the clouds and everything else good on earth. perhaps there we stayed, forever.
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they say it lightly and i thought i wasn’t bothered but “why are you guys so mean to her” is all it took, a defense from my sister, and the next thing i know big fat droplets are collecting, then flowing from my eyes in the middle of dinner in the middle of the restaurant. how could they shut down something i so clearly loved as a kid? i wanted to blame for how long it took me to know i loved it. yet i was grateful because i grew, and the tears were dramatic even for me. so then i had to laugh, so then i sat there laugh crying at how it was not the intention to stop me from loving just like how it was not the intention to lose it in a restaurant. but that time of the month just be like that sometimes, you know?
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it was curiosity. no, it was more than that. it was affection and annoyance, at how it didn’t make sense to wonder so much about you, or to believe in fate yet be unwilling to let this slip away even though i knew it wouldn’t make sense how even though nothing was different somehow everything had changed. drumming inside me, so loud that i sit on the subway and wonder if the girls across or the man two seats down, i wonder if they can hear it too?
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pink-tinted and twitchy, i felt many eyes, sharp and stretchy like a plastic band. belly heavy stones weighing us down, but tingly is the word! and pocky is pokey hahha. i did a crunch crunch which was funny and dry. i heard airplanes and air conditioned hallways neon blue glows, warm-toned, and the twitchiness which was taking over the spirals that were spiraling so twirly and twirling i had another pretzel to the rhythm and the right i tilted.
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a million ounces of butter cookies shaped and baked late into the night, of steel strings on fingertips finally placed just right, of feelings felt long after the fact, of smooth wide roads and childhood photos, home at last.
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