Prena Poetry

i am half drunk and half in love as i look at you from across a bar window. you are out there in the street in your brand new jacket but every piece of you, it is desperately clinging on to last bit of life in your flesh. your parents skipped the good groceries to get this jacket for their son, you didn’t want it and still you wore it because it was their best form of love. as soon as your mother walks out of a store, you brightly pull up a smile and then walk with her to catch the next bus home. it’s your first day to work tomorrow, your father cracks a beer and offers you the first can, he tells he has never been more proud. your sister hugs you and hands you a sweater she knitted while you were away and couldn’t come to her wedding. the little dining room pervades with warmth, someone turns on the television and everyone is there so content in the moment. you think to yourself, you have never felt so homely, and there’s wamth in the crease of your palms. except, you have no idea what to do with the horrible sadness disseminating in the walls of your mind.

i remember, i first met you in a book club. we were seventeen, you believed in the worldly doctrines and i loved science. we spoke once, it lasted for 45 minutes, i kept the exact count till you said you had to leave to help your mother. you admired the brilliancy of the one time conversation we had, even when we were such individualized temperaments; never meant to blend into eachother’s entity. you believed in love, marriages, pursuit for happiness and much more things your father spoke to you about. you even said life must have been easier for me because i had the affluence and equally stable courage. i couldn’t tell you then, that just the night before i only wanted to die.

then we just exchanged smiles for the next six months until i abruptly dissappeared from everyone’s life and got to college abroad. somehow you found my email address i left in a type of book you wouldn’t read, i knew you looked for me. over the years we seldom exchanged mails upon random articles and talked about fewest things, time was always too brief and our lives were always heading in opposite directions. eventually, we lost touch.

i walk out the bar, half drunk and half dissolved in thoughts of you. it feels funny that i still remember your house address from the old library form. i know your dad built that house and your sister was born in one of those room, your whole life revolved around your parents suffering and them still being so happy as everyone sat together for dinner infront of the little tv. i know you once thought you could have control over who you were and who you would be. you believed in your morality when you first spoke to me. you believed you would fall in love and have a family, and perhaps share an epitaph with a lovely lady. but life wasn’t meant to be so lucid for a little middle class boy with dreams bigger than him. you grew, engraving into the enigma of manhood. you began to comprehend the sadness lurking behind your fathers soft advice. your mother’s suppressed trauma leaked into you along with her love, immersing you into the struggle of adulthood and the loneliness it brought you at the end of the day. you learned to love your sister more, and rest your head in your mother’s lap, knowing how much everyone appreciated you and you alone couldn’t do much to give them better. i know you looked for love too, from many different women in many different places. but they were all short lived pleasures, the girl you met after high-school probably broke your heart even if she were a woman so perfect—who loved and lived for the same things you did. you understood the compromises, and the ultimate sacrifices one had to make although it was going to ache till death.

the last time i met you was in a restaurant couple years ago. you were waiting tables in your semester vacation. you looked happy enough that day, we interchanged few words in a rush. i mistakenly stained your apron with coffee, we instead laughed it off and recommend eachother books and movies. however, i don’t remember saying goodbye to you.

and now, i only see sadness in you. the desperation to live so gravely reflects in those tired young eyes. when escaping the death only redeems like a plausible purpose to pay back the gratitude you owe to time. but then deep inside, you know, it isn’t going to be a life worth it. you are almost afraid, surviving will wear you off to a bare corpse working for retirement money and a pit in the dirt. and yet what more can you do, life ends young for people like us but living doesn’t. and it throbs to come to the ultimate fact that this is what people like us were born for, what we will live and finally die for.

now i am standing at a junction across your house. i don’t exactly know how far i parked my car or why i chose to come here. there’s alcohol in my breath and supernova inside my chest. how could i never tell you, all this time, i have adored miserable hearts; especially yours. i have got a life mapped infront of me, job that pays and praise. i have everything here, i am the woman i once told i would be. and yet, that day you first spoke to me, that one ordinary day which continues to replay in my somewhere in my subconscious state. you took away something from me in that 45 minutes and now nothing eases that empty space.

you politely excuse yourself after dinner and stroll in the front yard. you feel even hollow, like a form of art that cannot help itself but just continue to stay frozen in the frame. the trees looks smaller to you and that swing your father made is no longer there. don’t we always fear changes but as look back everything has changed so massively that we begin to lose ourselves in the ache of our insignificance.

it almost feels like a slow sad movie as our eyes interlock for the shortest moment, even so we can only offer eachother a soft smile and wave back. i don’t think there is any form of word that can pull up a sentence to describe this inherent force between the two of our subatomic particles. it almost feels like a poetry, when i amble away from the junction knowing how this moment will always live here even long after our deaths in somebody else’s arms.

i don’t think of you most of the time. my life ceaselessly heads in the direction so far away from the entanglement yours. you will go on to live half dead, i will go on find my charisma in the end of hennessy bottles and words i put together. nonetheless, as i will wake up in some stranger’s bed, you will be the first thing in my head. when i am half sober in tears some night, your shadow is what i will perceive. i know you are always going to be there in my subconsciousness, 30 years down the line i won’t even remember much about you but won’t forget either. I never knew how your laughter sounded like or the type of music you admired, never knew what you did in the mornings or what you even look like in different hair cuts. except i awlays like felt i knew your soul. i think, i did really love you, somewhere inbetween.