While (procrastinating before) doing research for an essay, I found this poem by Amber Tamblyn and it's just too good not to expose to the amateur world.
He Seemed Like a Nice Axe
You were adept in the art of slow recoil.
Not a freckle on your face ever cared to surrender.
I stopped counting the times
I couldn't count on you.
Started the habit of smoking to
forgive your mouth for giving up mine.
Whose lips did you kiss
that last time we did?
You went for them like a draw.
A double dog dare.
You just gazed at the bridge of my nose
while the dams around it broke.
My eyes shrunk to combusting plums,
sadder than a Christmas tree on December 26th.
I should have listened to all the New England fireflies
who told me not to.
My heart was a wave
that broke for you.
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Saturday, November 21
Mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cutouts
I wrote this entry about a week ago, and hesitated to post it because of how incredibly personal it turned out. But at this point, it doesn't matter anymore. There's nothing left for me to lose or worry about.
“I don’t want you anymore.” That’s what he said to me. That’s what he said on the sixty third day after I fell in love.
I suppose the Sunday morning church bells people are attempting to entertain the crowd by turning the monotonous dongs into a quirky melody, but that just adds another layer of sadness. And they stop, enwrapping the bleak dusty church windows into a silence, letting the car honks and the cart rattling and the wild November wind drown out any hint of a symphony.
Though they’re like a symphony of their own. The soundtrack to the [insert typical adjective here] New York City. If I had to describe the soundtrack in three words, I would say cold, restless, and lonely. It can be ninety degrees outside, and all you have to do is just listen to the city to see its coldness. There’s no time to stop on the sidewalk and read a poster because the crowd is permanently following a dogmatic unchanging rhythm. There’s no time to pause and think of where you’re going because they expect you to know that in advance. There’s no time for anything, including emotion.
Is it just more practical to resort to callousness in a city like this? Isn’t there a place for people with an emotional span of Europe who welcome walking down an avenue holding hands just for the hell of it or skipping around puddles without the scowl of a businessman? For people like me? Or do I actually have to become an emotional rock like him and close my heart to intimacy?
We think love is this concrete, significant state of being into which you fall and everything becomes rosy-colored. Truth is, it’s just a human emotion as transient as anger or shame. People fall in and out of love all the time. Where is the constant? Passion is always fleeting, constantly re-imposing itself on people and objects and places and more manmade concepts. If we can be angry with someone one day and then make up the next, what makes love different? The answer isn’t black and white, but it’s not all that complex. If we want to hold a grudge, we are only hurting ourselves; if we want to stay in love when it’s time to let go, well, there’s your answer.
They say you fall because you can’t help it. Personally, I think breaking up feels a lot more like falling. We try to deal through all the problems and approach them as rationally as possible, but in the end it turns out we’ve been slowly dying a little for a while and the breakup couldn’t be helped. So we fall down, down into a land of might-have-been’s and regrets, which is, from my experience, always a depressing place to be in. Then every time you see or hear evidence that your ex-significant other is doing well, it’s like a pang in the stomach when you’re already lying on the floor in defeat. Your eyes become murky and blurry. Insult to injury.
If they say love is irrational, how come people try so hard to rationalize through the reasons why someone doesn’t feel it? If it’s easy to accept that we can’t help who we “fall for,” why is it hard to understand that we can’t help waking up one day and not loving someone anymore? It’s gotta be the same going in and out. Logical or senseless. And if you ask me, since every other damn feeling out there – through rooted in logic – has no substantial reason other than impulse of thought, I’d go with the latter. Love is smooth, but it’s not logical and it sure as hell isn’t constant.
We raced through a fragile honey-colored plane of impossibilities. There were problems, but love is tricky like that because it makes you think it will conquer all. If any human emotion could conquer all, we’d be in trouble; the world spins round because we learn and grow and change our minds. And then I couldn’t take it anymore and threw a fit, and perhaps we rushed with the breakup. But he knew. He knew how I felt and he went on living the single life in front of my face. I remember one day, way back when we first started dating, I told him I’m worried because I feel like I’m falling too hard, and he smiled and kissed me and said our relationship just became serious. I should've known right there love was bullshit. But I wanted it so damn hard to be real, so I believed.
On the sixty third day, I told him everything. That I still loved him and was mad at myself for giving up so easily. He listened with a completely grave expression on his expressionless face, and after a few seconds of silence he buried his face in his hands and said “I don’t want you anymore.” His reply didn’t shock me – I knew what the verdict would be before going into the conversation – but I just wanted him to know, even though he already knew. I wanted him to hear it from my mouth in case there was an ounce of a chance that he still felt it. Because up until that moment, I believed love could be constant. And in the realm of my daydreams, I suppose it could have been; but in the real world, there is nothing permanent except change. His emotions were not hidden or even all that complicated. They were as transient as anger and indifference. You can look at a pretty box all you want, but eventually you’ll have to open it, and it will be empty.
So I’m going out on a Sunday evening. I will put on my new button-up overthrow and brown high-heeled boots, and I will go into a coffee shop and read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and flaunt my independence. And if some cute (or, more likely, creepy) guy flirts with me, so be it. Because life’s not about trying to hold on to one thing when the world is madly spinning around you; it’s about, for example, how the New York weather knows exactly how to appease your mood when all you want to do is listen to the never-ending car honks and watch the cold city lights change colors. It’s about the people who don’t know the worth of something until it’s gone forever.
Continue reading >>
“I don’t want you anymore.” That’s what he said to me. That’s what he said on the sixty third day after I fell in love.
I suppose the Sunday morning church bells people are attempting to entertain the crowd by turning the monotonous dongs into a quirky melody, but that just adds another layer of sadness. And they stop, enwrapping the bleak dusty church windows into a silence, letting the car honks and the cart rattling and the wild November wind drown out any hint of a symphony.
Though they’re like a symphony of their own. The soundtrack to the [insert typical adjective here] New York City. If I had to describe the soundtrack in three words, I would say cold, restless, and lonely. It can be ninety degrees outside, and all you have to do is just listen to the city to see its coldness. There’s no time to stop on the sidewalk and read a poster because the crowd is permanently following a dogmatic unchanging rhythm. There’s no time to pause and think of where you’re going because they expect you to know that in advance. There’s no time for anything, including emotion.
Is it just more practical to resort to callousness in a city like this? Isn’t there a place for people with an emotional span of Europe who welcome walking down an avenue holding hands just for the hell of it or skipping around puddles without the scowl of a businessman? For people like me? Or do I actually have to become an emotional rock like him and close my heart to intimacy?
We think love is this concrete, significant state of being into which you fall and everything becomes rosy-colored. Truth is, it’s just a human emotion as transient as anger or shame. People fall in and out of love all the time. Where is the constant? Passion is always fleeting, constantly re-imposing itself on people and objects and places and more manmade concepts. If we can be angry with someone one day and then make up the next, what makes love different? The answer isn’t black and white, but it’s not all that complex. If we want to hold a grudge, we are only hurting ourselves; if we want to stay in love when it’s time to let go, well, there’s your answer.
They say you fall because you can’t help it. Personally, I think breaking up feels a lot more like falling. We try to deal through all the problems and approach them as rationally as possible, but in the end it turns out we’ve been slowly dying a little for a while and the breakup couldn’t be helped. So we fall down, down into a land of might-have-been’s and regrets, which is, from my experience, always a depressing place to be in. Then every time you see or hear evidence that your ex-significant other is doing well, it’s like a pang in the stomach when you’re already lying on the floor in defeat. Your eyes become murky and blurry. Insult to injury.
If they say love is irrational, how come people try so hard to rationalize through the reasons why someone doesn’t feel it? If it’s easy to accept that we can’t help who we “fall for,” why is it hard to understand that we can’t help waking up one day and not loving someone anymore? It’s gotta be the same going in and out. Logical or senseless. And if you ask me, since every other damn feeling out there – through rooted in logic – has no substantial reason other than impulse of thought, I’d go with the latter. Love is smooth, but it’s not logical and it sure as hell isn’t constant.
We raced through a fragile honey-colored plane of impossibilities. There were problems, but love is tricky like that because it makes you think it will conquer all. If any human emotion could conquer all, we’d be in trouble; the world spins round because we learn and grow and change our minds. And then I couldn’t take it anymore and threw a fit, and perhaps we rushed with the breakup. But he knew. He knew how I felt and he went on living the single life in front of my face. I remember one day, way back when we first started dating, I told him I’m worried because I feel like I’m falling too hard, and he smiled and kissed me and said our relationship just became serious. I should've known right there love was bullshit. But I wanted it so damn hard to be real, so I believed.
On the sixty third day, I told him everything. That I still loved him and was mad at myself for giving up so easily. He listened with a completely grave expression on his expressionless face, and after a few seconds of silence he buried his face in his hands and said “I don’t want you anymore.” His reply didn’t shock me – I knew what the verdict would be before going into the conversation – but I just wanted him to know, even though he already knew. I wanted him to hear it from my mouth in case there was an ounce of a chance that he still felt it. Because up until that moment, I believed love could be constant. And in the realm of my daydreams, I suppose it could have been; but in the real world, there is nothing permanent except change. His emotions were not hidden or even all that complicated. They were as transient as anger and indifference. You can look at a pretty box all you want, but eventually you’ll have to open it, and it will be empty.
So I’m going out on a Sunday evening. I will put on my new button-up overthrow and brown high-heeled boots, and I will go into a coffee shop and read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and flaunt my independence. And if some cute (or, more likely, creepy) guy flirts with me, so be it. Because life’s not about trying to hold on to one thing when the world is madly spinning around you; it’s about, for example, how the New York weather knows exactly how to appease your mood when all you want to do is listen to the never-ending car honks and watch the cold city lights change colors. It’s about the people who don’t know the worth of something until it’s gone forever.
Continue reading >>
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