Still waters.

In the flurry of blog discussions about The One (or Not), I found myself in a rather disconcerting state the past week. It started as I gave my own take; beliefs held for some time; words that have already been written before; words still remembered. And then the tears started; unbidden; free flowing - too free; quietly; some silent gasps. The crying was unexpected, but not as disconcerting as the too familiar aches in my chest.

An old wound, re-opened and weeping again.

I do not cry for him that was. He has faded into the undifferentiated sepias of yesteryears. Even the recent encounter with a stranger and the uncanny resemblance in the eyes - totally unexpected for so many reasons - was a dispassionate observation. The waters are still.

Yet, the tears continued. I wondered why, but I did not have an answer. And I wish I knew why my eyes welled when I told W: "People make mistakes."

There's such a fooled heart
Beating so fast in search of new dreams
A love that will last within your heart
I'll place the moon within your heart
- As the World Falls Downs. David Bowie.

Pandora's Pain.

Slowly, a faint tapping at the back of my mind. That, and what the stranger with his eyes said about it being painful reading my words. Strange, I thought.

Perhaps, I have put too much of myself into those words from long ago. I remembered gripping so tightly onto my sanity, to keep the broken pieces from falling apart. And there was always SF hovering nearby, nervous, anticipating, ready to catch me when I started falling. Then, the deliberate bleeding - pain into words, sentences, paragraphs. Night after night. Like a maniac. I just wanted to get it all out of me. All of it. As quickly as I could. Before it drove me over the edge.

And there were his comments about how different we wrote and remembered our past. His, in staccatos of dreamscape. Poignant, nonetheless. (And so beautiful, I thought.) Mine, almost sequential, the broken pieces carefully picked up, and laid out in their original image - even as the sharp edges cut my fingers raw and bleeding, I would do it this way. Get it out. All of it. I could not bear the pain. Any of it.

He called them desperate attempts at rationalising, making sense of the devastation. How true.

Revisiting the scene of crime. Reconstructing the events. Studying each minute piece of evidence.

Perhaps, the pain is no longer in me. But they did not die with my words. They did not die after I sent them out into the blue space of the internet. To be read. For someone else to read, to feel my pain, to take it all away from me.

Scattered words that take form so effortlessly as I summon them into the present; too readily, almost as if they have been waiting, knowing.

I put too much of myself in these words.