I am not a bauble
to be possessed and discarded
I am not a hand me down,
not property to
be passed around
to be trapped within the
walls you back me into
to be framed prettily,
quietly

I do not exist so
my voice, my self
my whole
loud, offensive, reckless
existence could be hidden away,
underneath what you call
"propriety,"
because I call it death
I call it asphyxiation.

I am not tainted
or dirty
or loose or fast or
an infringement on your
proclaimed morality,
on your alpha male ego
that is so easily bruised,
so easily convinced that
i belong only
as long as my body does

There is more
than what exists between
my legs,
your petty battles,
your constant altercations
with the idea of me being
anything but saintly,
your belittling of me-

it leaves me betrayed.

I made you up inside my head.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sometimes I sit with a cup of tea in front of me, and stare. I stare into space, my eyes drifting away from the pages I'm trying to desperately to concentrate on. I hide myself away in fiction, more engrossing, more appealing than political theory. More personal. I find myself wanting to drown in other people's stories, because I am tired of thinking about my own, and I am tired of these circles of regret/grief/anguish chasing each other around until there is no more silence in my head. I am tired of my thoughts.
If I give myself the opportunity of solitude, it taunts me, and again my attempts to silence the onslaught of my thoughts fail until I give in.
I lie in bed staring into the darkness. Sometimes I get up and hug my knees to my chest, sometimes I curl up, and sometimes I just lie there waiting for sleep to come. Waiting and wishing I could stop thinking.
It isn't you I think about, but the idea of you that I had. Because you, and my image of you, are two different things as I've come to realize mostly through pain. So it isn't you I'm thinking about, just the idea of you.
The realization that I did, in fact, lift you out of your absolute ordinariness, out of your selfishness, out of the petulant child you are, into something quite different. I put you on a pedestal that you didn't deserve.
 I don't think of you, but I think instead of my own loss because I am also selfish. I think of my own stupidity, I think of how terrified I was of losing you. I think of promises and everything else you told me.
I think of love being pulled from right under me, so brutally that I didn't even have time to protest.
Everyone tells me I deserve better, so much better than you. And I know it, and I do not want you, or think of you. I do not want to belong to you.
 But that idea of you, that idea I held on to so desperately, because losing it was my worst fear. And then I did, and it made me understand I could go on, but it has also broken me in a way that I do not know how to fix. I find this hard to explain, this conundrum of  not wanting you, and yet not being able to explain myself in a way that will have nothing to do with you.
Some days my strength crumbles, and the resolve floats away. I do not want to reach out to you, and I don't. But I wish you had been real.

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

On language and its acquisition

I wonder often if:

the space I occupy and

the words I speak are

truly my own.

When I speak in a language

Mama cannot comfortably maneuver -

but I am uncomfortable with anything

that isn’t this.

When I am startled,

shocked even,

at how quickly the thoughts

tumble through my mouth.

Shocked,

at the point of pride that

was my prowess with these words

that were never mine-

especially because

they were never mine.

When I think back 

to days of Catholic school classrooms,

where we were told to think

in a language that didn’t belong to us,

to abandon pride in our past,

and that rush of complacency

because I did it without being told,

because I laughed when others could not,

And because, it set me on a pedestal.

It made me better.

I remember

the carefully cultivated sense of shame

nurtured by adolescent cruelty-

my face burning at Mama’s hesitance with

words that came so naturally to me,

my disregard of sacrifices,

of her embarrassment

of my privilege.

And now,

“When did you learn?” they ask.

And often, so often

I am tempted.

I am tempted to ask how,

how they learned to think,

to live,

to say.

And when they answer,

to reply

“Well, I learnt in quite the same way.”

But these words,

They are not mine

And I have no claim over them. 

or, for that matter,

over those that

were meant to be my own.

barely.

Your birthday drifted by

While my thoughts,

Occupied by you, forever you,

Wondered and wandered over

What you might be doing

(or Who)

I remember days when

Promises seemed to be forever

When love was living on purely being

Itself, and nothing more

Or less

But now it’s less, forever less.

And I am caught in a forever without you,

I too am foreverless-

 A pun of my own creation,

Staring

            S t a r i n g

 Staring

At my phone, waiting.

That I might evoke pity, love,

Even anger-

That I might evoke need in you

To reach out and ask

If I still live-

So that, my love,

I can tell you: barely.

And not enough,

That facades are tiresome,

And I am keeping them,

But,

Barely.

the end of love

What comes after
the end of love?
After you have resorted to
the superstitious and the superfluous
after you have compared
the alignments of stars
after you have looked at numbers
over and over,
until compatibilities swim
in front of your eyes

When you begin to wonder
what if, but if, and if
when you let the questions
swallow your thoughts
and
cloud your mind with
unnecessary conjectures
with remorse and
incomprehension and when
you think there should be a law

that there should be a law against
pain,
that you should sue for a broken heart,
that one heart should not, would not
turn away
when the other is still hanging on,
when it seems that 'half-hearted'
is a term coined
for the benefit of this place you are in.

What comes after
the end of love?

In less than a year I will no longer be able to list the same mailing address as I do now, a comfortable box number in Blanchard which I have taken for granted. It will soon belong to someone else, and knowing that feels very strange because I can't imagine that number written under anyone else's name but mine. There's a calendar on my wall that's been on November 2012 since November, and I haven't bothered to take it down. Thinking about time, how it's running out, how there is never enough, how there are so many things to squeeze into so little of it- that's bad enough on its own without having a calendar kindly letting me know how fast the days are running out. It started last semester. I didn't say I couldn't wait for the semester to end, my silence an acknowledgment of the limited time I have left here. What happens once the semester ends? There's two left. Then just one. Then it's over, but it feels like yesterday when I stepped off the shuttle that brought me here from Hartford Bradley International Airport. I remember feeling the awe, feeling intimidated, trying to take in my new surroundings. I remember before that, how I used to obsessively look for any pictures of campus, look at them for many minutes at a time trying to imagine what it would be like, anticipating living with my roommate, becoming best friends. We don't talk anymore, except for an uncomfortable nod when we acknowledge each other's presence in situations where the other person can't be avoided- but I always marvel at how things turn out.
Sometimes I wonder if people collect possessions because the things they own make them feel rooted, somehow more permanent. That's definitely true for me, except that no matter how many things I own, my suitcases are right there, reminding me that there is only limited space and I will have to give a lot away. I don't have a plan, because this was as far as my imagination had gotten me (even when I use the word gotten now, I realize how being here has liberated me from the stuffiness of my Convent school education, where it wasn't considered a word. A relic left behind by colonizers in the form of anglophiles.), I had just imagined going to college. I couldn't even think of anything beyond that. And now that beyond is fast approaching.

Eff I'm nearly 22.

Isn't it weird and amazing that ...there are too many things that are weird and amazing. As a kid you don't really understand being human. You can't quite grasp the idea of just existing. And then as you grow up, you want to be someone because being just anyone is mediocre and terribly humiliating to your sense of self. As if the bottomless pit that is your lack of self-esteem isn't enough. Growing up, you need some ray of hope to make you believe you aren't just going to be lost in all of this, whatever this is.
Then one day it dawns on you that the getting lost part is a little bit inevitable. As inevitable as your 4 year old self tripping and falling flat your face because you didn't listen to your mother and ran away when she tried to tie your shoelaces. You start becoming used to the idea, even a little comfortable.
Hiding under a proverbial rock doesn't seem so bad anymore. They tell you to take charge of your own life and you realize that you're too scared to even try. Where to from here?
It's not like real life is some wonderful romantic comedy or even close to being a mildly entertaining sitcom (unless you're just observing, in which case, it's a total scream sometimes). Everyone keeps talking about this thing called "the grind" which sounds a little like a huge monster with really big molars waiting to chew any and everything to sawdust- and suddenly, real life seems even less appealing. The questions you ask yourself aren't about what your next move is going to be, but more about what you're going to settle for and whether doing what you love is going to be able to give you the life that you want. After all, if I'm going to be stuck in a rut, I might as well try to make it a pleasant one to live in, no?