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by kevin.ksp5

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♡ ᵕ‿‿ᵕ •̩̩͙ ✿ slow dancing.

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sleep like a winter bear.

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how is dis my life rn…..?!

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i miss the sound of the rain when you’re driving

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Louise Glück, from A Travel Diary; Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems, 2021

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Coming back here feels like I never left in the first place.

I walk down the same streets and see the same Chinese store owners. I pass by my old house. Everything looks the same, yet I can’t grasp it anymore. It doesn’t belong to me now. This life doesn’t belong to me anymore.

I walk past the same shops I once promised myself I’d visit. “I’ll have time,” I said. But sometimes, we take time for granted. It passes, and then it no longer belongs to us either.

I hate opening my maps and seeing all the places I marked but never visited. So many places, how could someone even do it all? And now it feels bittersweet. I could have done it (but not anymore). I don’t belong here now. And in some days, neither will the people I love.

Or can we still belong, even if only through the memories that live on?

Maybe parts of our souls, after experiencing it all, choose to leave pieces of us behind and they still live here. Quietly. Reliving everything again. Maybe, just a few blocks away, there’s a version of me on the balcony of my old building, amazed by the stars despite being scared of heights. Maybe another version is knocking on Kiki’s door. Sometimes, it’s just the feeling that when you wake up, you’ll hear familiar voices in the kitchen, you’ll join them, live that moment, and hold onto it forever.

So why does it have to end?

Can’t we have it all?

I hold onto a place where I felt healed, even if only for a fleeting second, a place where I felt loved. But now, I have to go. I don’t know when I’ll return. And when I do, I won’t have my girls with me. I won’t have the same apartment. I won’t be the same.

Everything it was. It’s done.

It’s grief.

Somehow.

And yet, my only wish — my dearest wish — is that I could live it all again. And this time, I wouldn’t leave. They wouldn’t leave. We’d live here, explore every place I marked during a breakdown, saying “I need to see everything.” We’d visit each other’s apartments. We’d return to the places we once went. Sometimes, we’d recreate the same pictures, the same memories.

This time, they wouldn’t have to leave me.

And I wouldn’t leave either.

I would never do.

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I AM NOT INTERESTED IN LIVING A LIFE WHERE I COWER AWAY FROM BEAUTY OR GOODNESS BECAUSE OF THE POTENTIAL TO BE HURT. I AM BARRELING TOWARD IT. LIFE IS GOING TO CRACK ME OPEN LIKE A PIÑATA AND I AM GOING TO LET IT.

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