If you forget me
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
Pablo Neruda
My insomniac nights have never been as calm as last night. The ticking of the clock was not oppressive. The silence was a soothing lull. A perfect time to think about you. And so I did, but I never got that far.
What is this that we have gotten ourselves into? I have always been the rational one. But what are reasons for when things have just snapped into place in front of you, when you have woken up in the middle of everything, when it looks like life or fate or what have you has taken your will and chosen your path? You know what all this feels to me? A blindfolded ride, but one that I’m willing to take because I trust The One who chose the course for me.
I don’t have questions for you. What I have is a wish that we both learn how to love best: without hurry or excess.
Mnemosyne is the personification of memory and the inventress of words. She was a Titaness, the daughter of Uranus and Gaia. Zeus coupled with her in Pieria for nine consecutive nights, and she later gave birth to the Nine Muses.
There was a spring dedicated to Mnemosyne before the Oracle of Trophonius at Lebadea. The mortals who came to consult the Oracle had a choice afterwards to either keep their Memory and drink from the Spring of Mnemosyne or to forget their past and drink from the Spring of Lethe.
The children of Mnemosyne, the Muses, were not only divine singers, whose music delighted Zeus and other gods; they also presided over thought in all its forms: eloquence, persuasion, knowledge, history, mathematics and astronomy. The oldest song of the Muses is the one sung after the victory of the Olympians over the Titans to celebrate the birth of a new order. They were often referred to as the Pierides in Poetry. The Muses took part as singers in all the great celebrations held by the gods.
Already, you are mine. Rest with your dream inside my dream.
Love, grief, labour, must sleep now.
Night revolves on invisible wheels
and joined to me you are pure as sleeping amber.
No one else will sleep with my dream, love.
You will go, we will go joined by the waters of time.
No other one will travel the shadows with me,
only you, eternal nature, eternal sun, eternal moon.
Already your hands have opened their delicate fists
and let fall, without direction, their gentle signs,
your eyes enclosing themselves like two gray wings,
while I follow the waters you bring that take me onwards:
night, Earth, winds weave their fate, and already,
not only am I not without you, I alone am your dream.
Pablo Neruda
This is not going to be easy. Two tiny hearts on my ring finger weigh as heavy as its giver’s scent on my hair. How many seas and sunsets have we seen? And how many more did we dream of waking up to? But it’s not meant to be. You and I shall face the morning after alone—that much was clear to me when my door closed with a final thud on midnight. The sound of a period. So final. So definite. It’s not going to be easy. My pillows have stopped giving me comfort. Even my blanket has gone terribly cold. Just when my mind starts to retire, it drizzles. Then the drizzling turns into rain rapping on my windowpane, shaking me awake again from my half-slumber. It’s not going to be easy, I think as I watch the window endure the incessant rapping of the rain . . . the pain. As the moon disappears, so does my hope of a bright morning.
I call it synchronicity. The fascinating way fate works to bring kindred spirits together. I toss the big-sounding word over and over in my mind as I walk to our unlikely rendesvouz—that busy but unassuming street corner. I strain my eyes to catch my first glimpse of you in several days, and feel instantly refreshed as I see you standing there—so calm, a world apart from the relentless street, the incessant stoplight, and the noise that would have otherwise been oppressive.
Have you ever noticed how the rest of the world sort of shrinks back when we’re together—as though everybody collectively decides to leave us be? It happens all the time—in the movie, in a restaurant, the coffee shop—which, I think, is the reason why we always end up forgetting the time.
In a few moments, I imagine, space will fold up and time will fly. I hold back a smile.
Truth to tell, I have been smiling a lot these days, especially when the world leaves me alone with my thoughts of you. It’s a dangerous sign, I know. In fact, experience tells me the plunge is about to come. I can feel the inevitable fall coming—the fall of which I have so far successfully steered clear.
Until now.
What are you thinking? I used to be good at reading minds. Maybe I still am. Maybe you’re just better at sending cryptic signals that get me off track. Then again, maybe there is nothing more to all this, and nothing more will ever be. No code to break. No clues to decipher. No synchronicity. It’s as good as it gets.
“I wrote you a haiku,” I say to you, while I blow off the steam billowing from my cup of caramel macchiato. I see you arch your thick eyebrows until there’s a hill of lines between them, your mouth opening to the shape of bafflement. Unrestrainedly, you say: “What?”
I knew you wouldn’t instantly get it. After all, I’m a writer and you’re an engineer. We are on different planes of existence. And there’s an entire universe between the languages that we speak.
So I repeat what I just said. “A haiku. That’s two five-syllable lines (in the beginning and in the end) and a line of seven syllables in the middle.”
You nod, a lightbulb probably goes on in your head, as you try to recall the literary genres that you breezed through back in high school.
At this instant, I am reminded of Milan Kundera and what he calls the “lightbulb moment”—that instant when some great, unique idea flashes in your head, throwing you off course for a few seconds until the idea gets the amount of attention it thinks it deserves, or until you can push it back to make way for more pressing concerns.
At this point, I think, my haiku—the three-liner that I wrote especially for you—is my more pressing oncern. So I push back Kundera and switch off the lightbulb in my mind so I can pan the focus back to you, to us, and to my haiku.
“Oh, I see. A haiku,” you say finally. It’s a cue that tells me I can now continue because you’re now on the same plane that I’m on. We’re now speaking the same language. The universe between us has condensed into the few inches that lie between my steaming caramel macchiato and your sweating frapuccino.
I pause—the type that they call a “pregnant pause”—as I think about this strange talent that we’ve both developed. How often have we surprised each other by speaking the other’s language in unguarded moments?
“Hello?” you say, knocking me back to reality, and back to my pressing concern. “Oh!” I say. "It goes like this:
I am a River
Meandering to Destiny.
You are Sea to me."
"I am a River
Meandering to Destiny
You are Sea to me."
You say after me, drinking in the words, making pregnant pauses after each line, and relishing the myriad meanings—laced with years of friendship, pains, intimacy and struggles—that the three lines contain.You force a half-smile, but I see that your eyes are drooping sadly, the way they always do when there’s something that you want to tell me but you don’t know where to begin. Or when there’s something that you want to tell me but can’t, because we are no longer together and people who are no longer together can’t just tell each other stuff that they used to tell each other when they were still together.
“What?” I prod. I’ve always been notorious for pushing my limits. How many times have I broken your heart by testing how fast and how well it has healed? “Don’t you find it beautiful?” I ask.
You flash your half-smile again. This time, though, tears begin to well up in your eyes. I know you are trying to hold them back. (We both know the deluge that comes after the breaking of a dam.) But you fail—again—and I see globules of grief rolling down your cheeks.
I look into your eyes and feel the urge to kiss them, like I used to do whenever I would wipe away your tears or coax you out of the blues. But I hold back the urge. I remind myself that we’re no longer together and people who are no longer together can’t just do certain things that they used to do when they were still together.
The urge holds my heart in a tight grip—as tight, perhaps, as the grip of my haiku on your heart. I shake it off but it won’t let go. Its grip tightens ever more until my heart bleeds, until my eyes well up with tears that I, too, am powerless to hold back. So there. In a brightly-lit corner of some coffeeshop, we sit opposite each other, separated only by my hot coffee and your cold coffee on the coffeetable for two, but joined—for some fleeting moments—by three pregnant lines. We are both reduced to silent tears of resignation, frustration, regret, and the faint flicker of hope.
I am a River
Meandering to Destiny.
You are Sea to me.
I want to tell you how much I wish I could just flow straight back to you and not have to hit those rocks and boulders that stood on my path. I want to tell you how difficult all this meandering has been for me, and how tired I am of painful detours. I want to show you my bruises, my cuts—the battlewounds that I sustained when I fought so hard for a love that I ended up losing anyway.
There was a time when I thought I had completely lost my way, that I was on a course that was leading me farther and farther away from my Sea—You. But after the roughest patch, I saw you on the bend again, with bruises of your own, singing your own songs of frustration.
I want to tell you everything I’ve been through, but I know this will only hurt you so much—maybe as much as news of your own meandering has crippled my heart. At this moment, a lightbulb goes on in my mind. If I suggest that we stop all this foolishness and just get back together, pick up the pieces, so to speak, and start again, not necessarily where we left off, would you be keen on the idea?
But I shrug the thought off. I remind myself of the promise that I made once. I shall give you all the space that you need until your world becomes a vast expanse of emptiness, until the loneliness eats you up and you seek me out yourself, until you come to me and tell me your life has been incomplete without me. Or until you acknowledge the stark reality that I am the only River destined to flow to you, my Sea—and fate won’t have it any other way.
“It’s lovely,” you say, nodding your head as Cynthia Alexander’s “Intertwyne” plays in the backgroud. Two words that snap me back to reality. That agonizing reality that your hand lies so close to mine but I can’t even touch it because people who are no longer together cannot just hold each other’s hands the way they did when they were still together.
“You be good,” you tell me while holding my gaze.
“Why do you tell me that?”
“Because you’re my baby. You are precious to me. So precious that I can’t rest until I’m sure that my angel is in good hands,” you say.
It’s a cue that tells me I’m not flowing any further tonight. So I sip the rest of my coffee and dream of the day when I will finally reach my Sea.
The ties that bind us
Snap like whips; you lash at me,
Writing words with wounds.
How can something that felt so right in the beginning turn into something so revolting? For the longest time, I have avoided answering this question, skirting around it like the edge of a cliff. Now I think hard on the answers and realize I have lost my grip. I hardly remember the details of our last fight; neither do I recall how we ever got to exchange our nasty goodbyes. When I plumb my feelings, I find that all that’s clear to me is the pain that you gave me so generously. I will never understand what you found so delighting in the sight of me in pain. So I guess I ought to stop trying to understand, too, why I still feel anger when I look at you.
So why can’t we ever be friends again? Because I think I will forever be angry with you for the many things that you did, and the few you didn’t do. I wish you had told me earlier you were drifting away alone. I wish your take-off were gentler, too.
The bridges are burned. We are beyond apologies. The one that got away: that’s what you see now when you look at me.
