Wells

And another try.

Some things fall into place, some things don't. Yet as I was recently reminded, this is not the girl who would fall in love easily and get back up, have a heart broken, dust herself down and go after the real thing again.

This is the girl who grew up. Who walked out of something good, and is so haunted by it, that nothing seems to fit like it did before.

I keep my guard up, he said. The first time someone's ever said that to me! Me, I have no guard, I have no walls, what I feel shows in my eyes. They harden, they soften, they tear up and they giggle. All without agenda.

Or so I thought. Things are different now, then. The eyes are veiled, wells of secrets.

Will he look into them, and if he does, what will he see?

The Strain(s) Of A Song

It's a sweet tune, but a sad tune. It's a tune of love, but it has strains of hurt and it's just so sad and yet so lovely and happy at once.

When I listen to it, I think of being in a fairytale. It's that feeling you get when you watch a good movie, or read a good book. When the fairytale ends and you're brought back to reality. That bittersweet feeling, of losing something you love, but know is fiction. Of losing something you know can only be a dream.

The song is a dream. I watched the movie because I couldn't bare to not know how the dream ended. It was lovely. They were lovely. They had a happy ending. But the strains of the song haunt me. I can hear the violin when I sleep and the tune causes me to lose focus and drift off into a place I don't know how to return from.

The song is hope, and love and ecstasy, but also disappointment and hurt at once. Some days I can't stand the hollow the song brings, the sheer emptiness. And yet it's there, waiting, eating into me, filling me up, seeping into my skin, sinking into my blood, haunting every thought.

I'm in a different place when I hear its melancholy strains. It's a place I used to be in, but I can't put a finger on it. The feeling is familiar but it's almost painful to hear it. And yet it's like a drug. I need to listen to it. To the point where I can't stand it anymore and I know the dream has to end.

Sometimes music has a way of making you feel what you don't want to feel, what you don't know you're feeling, reminding you of what you want to feel. Many songs have put me under a spell, but this is different. This song is an emotion. This song is a feeling. And I don't know how to listent to it anymore.



I've been listening to a song that is under my skin now and I can't sleep or wake up without listening to it. It's from a movie from three years ago. And I stumbled across it after a long time and I was taken to another place.

I'm under a spell. I'm so completely taken by this tune, I wonder if it will ever get old. It's completely riveting. It's so beautiful, it actually hurts on on some level. I close my eyes and I honestly feel the song. I am in it and it's in me. It haunts me and I can't seem to find a way to break the spell.

The Reflection

They're all pretty. They all have the perfect bodies. Their hair is mussed and their scarves are awry but they look perfect all the time. I catch my own reflection in the mirror and grimace.The girl sitting next to me at uni is just so pretty, I'm feeling lecherous.

I've always had a problem with how I look. I don't consciously think of it every single waking moment, but I wonder sometimes what it must be like to make heads turn. To be beautiful, pretty even. To be able to mesmerise with just the way you wear your hair or do your makeup.

I can't even stand myself without what K used to call 'black shit'. I don't even recognise myself without it.

The gym is every guy's dream. Women stripping naked and heading for the shower. And everybody's perfect. Sometimes I wonder if I'm in some weird little Stepford Wives-esque place. It's not helping my self-esteem.

It takes me so long to feel comfortable being naked with someone. It's just so painful to have to admit to another human being that you have flab. Even if I lose weight, my body structure is just made to make me look like a walking elephant. Nothing helps. I'm getting more annoyed at the gym.

I've learned, made a conscious attempt to like myself and I'm getting there. I have respect for me, and I like me, but some days I wish I was pretty. That facial hair, flab and a big nose would be someone else's nightmare, not mine. Some days I wish I could walk into a bar and be the one the men wanted to talk to rather than the Asian girl with the hot White one.

Then I catch myself in the mirror again and I know it's not going to change and I'm getting used to it.

Again

It still hurts.

It isn't a painful stab. It's just a dull ache. A feeling I knew would come, but one that I could very well do without, so far away from home.

I will never forget the first kiss. The searing heat and the feeling of being completely engulfed by a flame that you couldn't trace. That comfort in hugs, the phonecalls, the laughter, the idea of being a unit; something I detested towards the end.

I have never felt that hollow after that. That need to be with somebody, to see or speak to or hold or be kissed by him so badly. I have never felt like I was on fire when I was kissed after that. There have been others, but no one holds a candle to the feeling or the man.

I hear Bruce Springsteen sing Secret Garden and I am lost again. In that world where two classmates who were strangers to each other sat on a bus and got so much more than they bargained for. In that world where two people found what they were looking for and one of them threw it away on a whim.

There must be justice in the world, though. Two years on, I'm still alone and he isn't. So I suppose things even out, one way or another.

Come up on different streets, they're both the streets of shame.
Both dirty, both mean, yes, in the dream it was just the same
And I dreamed your dream for you and now your dream is real.
How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?

Well you can fall for chains of silver,
You can fall for chains of gold,
You can fall for pretty strangers
And the promises they hold.
You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin, yeah!
Now you just say, Oh Romeo? Yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him.

And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be.
All I do is keep the beat... and bad company.
Now all I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme,
Juliet, I'd do the stars with you any time!

I can only hope I will feel it all again someday. I have hope, but there are days when I tire of being alone. Of being so lonely and so incomplete. I don't need a man to complete me, I need another soul to listen, to depend on, to be held by. Just someone to share me and mine with.

I have hope. But I'm tired of hoping.

One More

And another one bites the dust.

But with each failure, with each let-down and with every single disappointment, comes a heightened sense of hope. Of an anticipation so strong that the present cold, lonely dark spaces fade away, pale into the horizon.

There is somebody out there. There is somebody for me. To hold and love and give myself to. There is somebody. With every failure, that is a fact that is engraved deeper and deeper into my head. With every let-down, that is something I get surer about.

And so I continue holding out.

Melancholy Musings

Melancholy musings drift across a room, floating gently on the strains of a piano, wafting towards the open window. As they float into the night air, they shiver gently in the cold and spread out, warming his heart as he sits by his window.

And quietly, as the wind carries her sadness in a tune familiar to them both, they begin to hum together;he as he sits by the window and she as she lies in bed watching the shadows dance on the walls. The melancholy that was hers is now his.

They sing together, two strangers on a moonlit night, longing and loving an idea in the distance. So far, and yet so, so, close. They sing together.

Magical Weekend

So we meet people along the way and make little memories, snapshots in time that could fill a whole album in itself. Sometimes you know you won't see them again and once they leave, things will have changed in that one moment when you say goodbye. The magic is over. The fairytale is left incomplete.

I had one such weekend, filled with memories and snapshots made with newfound friends from what seems to me now is a different world altogether. Two warm, funny, genuine, intelligent and insanely witty boys who brought a little sunshine, a little hope and a lot of laughs into a weekend. Sunshine and laughs because it was a pleasure spending time with them. Hope, because they are, as one remarked, a dying breed-- gentlemen, and truly good, wonderful folk. Girls can usually tell.

And as I woke this morning, knowing they'd gone back to where they came from, where they belong, in spite of myself, I feel like I miss old friends. Sometimes you connect with people, you share a wavelength and you think that's all there is to it. Sure, it happens, perhaps more often than you think. But when they're gone you realise, that to do so even when you're from two entirely different parts of the world, from cultures that differ so vastly from one another, it's a much more beautiful thing.

And sometimes there's more magic in the fairytale than you bargained for. In a style true to myself, I embarrassed myself twice in the same evening, which most people will admit is a hard thing to do, even once. But maybe the slip (literally and figuratively) wasn't so bad. I got to kiss and hold and dance (albeit embarrassedly) with a boy who, within 24 hours proved to be a real gem of a person. In all my time in this country, I haven't met a single bloke who I could laugh with, talk to, and enjoy doing so without worrying whether I would be expected to go to bed with him.

This weekend was a fairytale. If I remember correctly, it started with me asking for the time at the concert. What followed was a magic and madness. Laughter and learning. Dancing, singing, handstands on grassy patches, and running after buses. Kissing a wonderful stranger and making new friends. In the end, the fairytale was, as all fairytales are- unexpected, beautiful, a wonderful story to share, an experience to speak of. This one has a bittersweet ending, but oh well, what fairytales do best is give you what you most need.

Hope.