An Explosion Of A Million Clichés*

Can you quantify love? Is there a proper yardstick to gauge its intensity? Can you impose on someone to love you back in the same breath and measure?

I just can’t help but ask because today, a lingering warmth from long ago followed me around hallways, climbed my desk and soaked my monitor like unwanted storms that bleed of maudlin dialogues from trashy paperbacks. They taunt me with imagined scenes, promised joys and infinite probabilities.

I don’t resent your intrusion, neither do i begrudge your disturbance of the easy solitude that has been my uncomplicated friend; you are a welcome distraction. You are not much different from a kind of fondness that declines explanations, definitions or justifications. You are a digression from my professional world along with its manic pace and idiosyncrasies. Your laughter makes me long for something—some unpredicted tenderness or perhaps an overdue rekindling with the warmth and glow of waking up next to another dreaming body that's lost in the slow raptures of deep sleep.

That feeling—it seemed like a vaguely-distant memory, nearly forgotten.

Thank you for coming along; for patiently leading me back into semi-forgotten sensations that I seem to have lost for sometime now. Thank you for reminding me: for that sudden flash of recognition when you cut through and saw past my detachments and wrapped my misgivings, flaws and apathy with the slow smoulders of your steady gaze. Thank you for gently making me recall the breed of elation that makes me feel like explosions of butterflies or an awkward verse riddled with a million clichés. Thank you for the tolerant times when you made me see the gaps and differences between reason and abandon. It’s startling; it's remarkable. I am instantly wide-eyed - ready to reclaim a long-displaced possession.

We bartered fears. Looked at each other from sheltered distances, calculating the risks of involvement, making furtive lists in our minds on why we shouldn’t fall into each other’s clutches. We tried to save each other from ourselves, yet we recognize the fire in each other's faces.

We traded hopes, ideals, dreams and at times, we floated with hilarious delusions. And, in doing so, opened ourselves into omnipresent possibilities of disappointments and afflictions. Aren’t we self-loathing that way?

We lingered for a while, like dreamers off to nowhere but the mellowness of the moment. You, ever burning; me, ever intangible. It’s somewhat strange: the way we manage to find a comfortable space between breathing and wishful thinking—a moment where everything dissolves.

Are we to be blamed? Are there excuses we haven’t exhausted yet?

Sometime ago, I have read somewhere that in order to master life and love you must know when to hold fast and when to let go. We don’t need this insight to coach us. We have been battered, shattered, hurt. Consciously or unwittingly we inflict the same things on other people, who, like us, are also chasing possibilities at happiness.

Our very existence are testaments of treading through life complete with all the raptures and the ills we harvested along the way. “There is no right or wrong way to fall in love,” I used to quote an uncelebrated philosopher. “You just feel it.” In thinking so lies the danger—the danger of us abandoning our respective selves in forked bends and crossroads in pursuit of that desirable fire.

I have tried retreating my steps in safe distances where even the blurred memory of your face wouldn’t linger. But your absence made everything clear: it is as if those empty spaces are the very playground of your hearty giggles to haunt me..

Have I mentioned the difficulty of finding the right substitutes for those three tired words to articulate how much I long for you to be the very definition of closure in my wanderings? How a familiar smile racing across the bows of your lips to be the very meaning of permanence in my life?

Have I said yet that you are luminous and vulnerable?

That you are beautiful?

That you are precious?



(* recycled and updated entry from an old blog)