shortnswit

[shortnswit]

There is no line of time that we walk straight.

To be truly alive, we must lose. The haunting truth of living is realizing that we will continuously lose, and we can’t do anything about it. It will strike us down, loss—and we won’t rise from it. We are frozen in it until there comes a moment when it melts and becomes something we can carry, even though it’s heavy. It will eventually become lighter when the sun shines and we don’t immediately find ourselves hiding under a shade, but it will stay heavy in the nights that even the moon can’t brighten.

There is no timeline for how long we sit in our grief. We spend so much time with someone without knowing it’ll be the last, and the least we could do is allow ourselves to keep lingering in the aftermath of their absence. We can’t help how our mind will continue to seek the one who understood it. Our hearts will never not ache after the loss of what made it race, flutter, and swell by the nurture of love. And the soul—it isn’t as complete as before, not without the ones who made it full, but it keeps us alive.

We change, and there’s constantly new things that we learn, we try, we enjoy… It’s what propels us forward. But for every new thing comes the remembering of the old. How there’s always a phantom of the person you would’ve loved to be beside you when trying out things with you. When there is happiness inside a crowded room, there are graves only we can see of the people who we once inhabited rooms with, and carried the same joy we’re experiencing, if not happier. Sometimes achievements are pyrrhic, somehow a victorious win that we didn’t know we’d be able to complete, and at the same time, there is a reminder of the lack of who we had once shared the path with.

It’s crazy how we once easily ask “how are you?” with a smile to someone we love, and now we can only smile hesitantly and ask a friend of that person, “how are they..?” We are never alerted to when someone’s time is up with us. The hardest part of meeting a stranger is the unforeseen turn of them becoming a stranger again, after all the time we spent with them becoming a friend or a lover.

The thing about exits is that they’re not always labeled as one, and people don’t announce it the way they would an entrance. We love someone and they leave, and sometimes they don’t even say why, and we can’t force answers because love means not asking for anything they don’t want, even if it’s something we want. We are left behind and left to stew in the many unanswered whys and consumed by the what ifs and it drives us to frustration—one that becomes a sense of resentment towards them. But the truth is it’s not real frustration towards them, it’s to the situation and the fact that we still love people we can’t have. We can never get away from love, even when it wears a cloak named grief.

[shortnswit]

It's never over.

Sometimes the act of holding on isn't about not being able to move forward. It's about holding on to what is left of what once held us back, because even as time passes—it doesn't heal.

No matter what most people say, it doesn't. When a scar hits you, it scars you permanently. May it be a visible mark or one unseen, it cuts deep. The unseen wounds remain the gaping ones, because no one can see it but us and it's much harder to fix something by yourself.

The worst part of hidden pains are the old wounds that only you can stitch yourself and yet opting to leave it open, letting the air of remembrance sting it over and over.

I'd say the biggest injury I've ever gotten was a heartbreak. Isn't it funny how one of the most important organs that keeps us alive can die even as it continues to beat? The thing about death is it isn't just about losing your breathing, as being alive doesn't only equate to breathing. Breathing is simply a form of survival.

No matter how many times you experience something, there's just no getting used to it. That's how cruel pain is—it's a cut that always bleeds and cannot be controlled, either if it's a place untouched by harm, or especially when it's a tear that hasn't begun to heal yet continues to get bruised.

Healing is a terrible, terrible feeling, which is ironic because it's meant to be healthy. But the thing is, healing doesn't just mean putting salve over the wounds. It means acknowledging the pain from the lesion and how much it made you suffer. And despite all the trauma, when you close that scar to heal, you're subjecting yourself to being open for it to get hurt again.

That's why holding on isn't always bad. Sometimes it's the protection that keeps us safe from more heartache. There's a security in clinging on to what we're used to. We persist in reliving bygones because before there were scars, there were stars. Stars from the laughter, the light they shone, the brilliance of their presence.

Scars aren't just in our bodies. Most of the time, they're in the heart and in the mind, something mere medicine won't cure.

There is no cure for the terminal illness of attachment because even if you open underneath the surface of the skin, you can't remove its grasp on the heart and the clutch it has on our souls. It burns us yet we pretend it's still warm, the kind of heat that warms the chill of loneliness.

Longing scratches over the bandage of perseverance we've masked the scars with because even when there is no itch we claw at the wounds because we have the constant need to look back and reminisce about how there was once a flesh untouched by nostalgia.

[shortnswit]

Years of Yearning

If the walls could speak, they would talk through my mouth. If the walls could come alive, they would be me. Walls develop cracks, scratches, and their wallpapers tear off as years go by, but they will remain walls—sturdy, stagnant, remembering everyone who entered the space they enveloped. And as someone who can’t be moved, I have never understood walls more than anyone ever has.

To be attached is to be a temple of everyone you’ve ever met. A shrine no one remembers now but has once visited daily. There was once a time people told you the secrets they were afraid to tell someone else but felt comfortable enough sharing to you. People once held you like this precious gem they couldn’t ruin and so they never fully held you. A moment that love touched your heart so deeply that no number of years will ever erase its mark.

Living in the past is traveling without moving. Except, I’m fully aware that I’m in the present, I simply choose to look back at the past because I never would have reached the present without it.

If I was a place, I would be the souvenir shop. Everyone who has ever met me will likely take something from me and I will stay this little trinket of a place they once happily visited.

Unfortunately for me, I am the refrigerator full of magnets and photographs of everyone who has shown me kindness and attention because everything matters to me, even the smallest acts of hello and brief smiles are imprinted upon me and my heart.

Every memory was a moment we once lived. And even as life goes on, there is a continuous stream of longing that we have for those lives. Change is inevitable and so are the chairs we once sat in.

When you live long, you love longer.

The most difficult part of life is when love transforms into grief—it’s still love but it’s the kind of love we can’t really attain anymore. We can long for it as much as we want to, but it’ll be a love that we won’t have, not in the way we want to.

We grow to learn that loss isn’t fundamentally about someone. Sometimes, we lose ourselves. The kid you once were lives in you, but you don’t live as them anymore. There are no warnings, simply this slow feeling of childhood waning.

I am a foundation built of memories of people who have lived and left. They continue to live in a room somewhere in the empty house that only I know about, because time has passed long ago and they haven’t so much as looked at this place but I continue to build more floors as sometimes—people do enter. They simply don’t stay, not physically, but forever in memory.

[shortnswit]

we find solace in the things that aren’t real because it will remain untouched by the tragedy of being true. we seek refuge in a place that doesn’t exist. when something is intangible, it cannot be broken. and no matter how much time passes, it will stay the same. there is a comfort in stability. that even if we ourselves have changed, our favorite fantasy remains a fantasy.

books hold worlds we can’t enter physically but step into mentally. it isn’t because we’re discontent with the world we’re in, there’s simply a feeling of euphoria, of hope in a world we don’t belong in. no one knows who we are. we are able to make this version of ourselves that can breathe fire, can climb mountains so high, and can travel without using any vehicles.

films bring to life the words that are unsaid. it also creates ones that say the obvious and make us understand. we watch what we are unable to live. we see what life we can live. shows that run for a long time feel like a friend that won’t leave you. you grow up with it. and even when it ends and nothing feels the same, there’s always the option to start over again. to gladly relive the familiar happiness, frustration, and sadness because it reminds us of a time long gone.

the permanence of it all makes it a foundation of nostalgia. humans are inherently nostalgic—why ever else will we look back at the past and remember what was long over? there is also the fact that the past holds lessons ahead of its time, as well as knowledge that we don’t hold now. it’s the same thing, watching and reading literature that wasn’t created in the modern times. we get to see a society that is starkly different from the ones in the present. we listen to stories that we can only hear from going back. we read poems that resonate with us even today. we go back so we can move forward.

we find the worth of life in the things that aren’t alive. films and books intrigue the mind and teach it. we use our imagination because there is safety in concepts. the beauty of things untouchable is that it won’t be ruined and it will remain guarded by its nonexistence.

[shortnswit]

Courage is a testament of love.

The gut-wrenching part of loss is how love will always be there but it will never be the same. It will continue to flow yet the love will fall onto a void unending with no one to receive it. The loss of a loved one doesn't indicate the loss of love for them. We simply have to be brave enough to keep the love for them alive, even though they aren't. Love is to do things for the sake of love, no matter if it doesn't make sense. Love is hardly logical.

Love is knowing that there will be an inevitable grief that comes with it and not stopping the feeling because even though we will mourn, we will mourn with love.

Love is only for the brave.

It is for those who have the courage to show it unabashedly. It is for those who receive and give love even through many instances where love seems to fail them.

To love is to be brave. It is to fight countless battles, to make the toughest decisions, to live in rough times. It is to forgive the biggest mistakes. It is to continuously understand and accept.

It is to have hope in the unknown.

To be brave means to be loved. It is to put yourself out there, even with the risk of it all. It is to be aware of the possibilities that it may not end up well at all, and still taking the path.

Love is to speak up. In the absence of people, and even louder with the presence of many. It is to be a voice that knows when to shout and when to whisper—it will be heard no matter what.

It will hesitate, but it will not be deterred.

Love is only for the brave, for those who are terribly scared yet they turn that fear into power, changing it to be the opposite of what it used to be.

Love is living, it is to face the sun everyday even if it will burn. It is to soak yourself in the drops of rain, in spite of the cold and wetness it will bring, a good exchange for the inexplicable giddiness it covers you with.

It's a part of humanity to be capable of destruction as much as love. We have to be brave enough to hold love regardless of the fact that we may encounter damage.

Love is for those who dare, those who will not give up that easily even when it seems hopeless. And those who dare are the ones who share love to those who can’t. That’s what love is about, anyway, connecting people—even those who don’t seem to get along. It brings people closer and intertwines lives together.

Nothing else feels like love, but everything else is felt in love. There is a unique sense of peace in love, a belonging that you wouldn’t feel elsewhere, and a warmth that never leaves even in your coldest moments.

[shortnswit]

Sometimes, I can’t believe you happened.

The awful thing about moving on is how the present becomes the past, and in the present we’re stuck in the past. How did time pass just like that? One moment you are, now you were.

Before, it was all we will, we are, and now I cannot even begin to say we had, but it would be wrong not to say it that way. Funny isn’t it, how the past feels wrong even though it’s not. It’s simply the ugly fact of time passing.

They say you should leave before you get left, but the thing is I would choose to be the one left behind, over and over. It’s not like I’ve ever gotten over anything. Even when I’m in the present I go back, and I don’t get tired of doing so. I’ll stay, even when everyone is long gone, because I’d rather spend time with the remnants of them than the emptiness without them.

Everyone and everything I loved is in the past.

Strange that despite me alone going back, I can still hear the laughter, the chatter, all the better.

The most painful thing about having to move on is that you have to acknowledge that the past exists, and it only exists there. No matter how much it haunts us, we have to carry on with the ghost of it.

It hurts to lose the youth of it all.

We grow and new roots are planted, and alongside those are the gravestones of everything we ever lost. We die a hundred deaths even when we continue breathing.

Grief is the love that can’t be returned. It is the love that keeps on flowing even if there’s no string on the other side that’s pulling. Life is about grieving every year, as time passes and we can’t do anything about it and sorrow continues to loom over us while rocks fall and we can’t dodge.

Maybe I’d never be able to look forward, to move on without looking back, and perhaps that’s just the way my life will go.

It is hard to let go of love even when the person who gave it is gone. Love is a feeling that fills the heart and the heart opens to receive all the time. You cannot pour out what wasn’t yours in the first place.

Perhaps moving on is finally using words in a past tense, knowing that is how the story will always be.

It is to miss who is still living and understand that our place is from afar, to hope and pray that their lives are going well even if we wonder how our lives would be well with them.

[shortnswit]

what is love, if not nostalgia?

nostalgia, the worst sickness a person could never cure. it’s the smell of the bread from the bakery that you pass by while walking through your house’s street. it’s a fleeting feeling. it’s old, it’s new, it hasn’t even happened. nostalgia is embedded in humanity. what is reminiscing, if not humanizing? time is a tricky concept. it moves as if on a countdown. or it doesn’t move at all...nostalgia, that’s what it’s called. forever may physically be untrue, but where there are hearts there is always a mark. a mark is permanent, yet it isn’t always solid. spiritually, there is the mark of the soul that forms life. physically, there is a mark of a scar. mentally, the mark is called a memory. if an office has files, an author has books, a director has films, then a human has memories. nostalgia is born from memories. it’s unforgettable, in the way that it is happy, sad, or surprising. it’s the moment in time that has passed, yet one keeps loving, longing, and losing. with nostalgia the heart aches, the mind yearns, and the body breaks. life is nostalgic. years go by like the wind flies. nostalgia is love grounding, cementing, and planting remembrance that there had been a life lived.