Desire eats you up and leaves you starving.

They stumbled into her bed after a night out. Shoes kicked off, clothes tossed across the floor. He was so drunk she had to carry him into her bed and pull the sheets over him as she drank her cautionary four cups of water and two tablets of aspirin. They reeked of smoke and alcohol and the sweat of a hundred people raving to flashing lights and sounds. Her heart was still pounding and her ears were still ringing, and she had a smile plastered on her face because she could have sworn she had never felt so alive.

He lay half-naked between her sheets, breaking out into a vicious sweat as they waited for a midnight breeze to chill the room. She felt so sorry for him, obviously one drink too far gone, unable to keep his mouth closed or his head up. It was cute in a helpless puppy kind of way. He mumbled sweet nothings about loving her and wanting her to use his last name, but she laughed and dismissed them as drunken rambles. They say that a drunk mind speaks a sober heart, but sometimes a drunk mind can also be painfully obnoxious and daring, and terribly regretful in the morning.

She shushed him with a finger over his lips and stroked his hair until he kept quiet. She knew that he wasn't planning on staying here much longer- it was just a few weeks ago when he mentioned that there were bigger things out there, and his time in this city was ticking away at an uncertain speed. She was so sure that he was going to leave some day- leave his job, leave his friends, leave her. Yet he didn't seem to hold back with his heart at all. He loved as if they'd be together forever.

She looked at him, half-asleep, but still stuttering sweet nothings under his breath. She loved him so much it made her sad. How could life be so unfair? Delivering you the best person you've ever met, then slowly poisoning your brain with the idea of him leaving.

"If you know that you're going to end up leaving, why are you letting yourself fall in love?" she asked, an almost-inaudible whisper between tears she didn't mean to cry.
Her question was like a slap of cold water on his drunken face. He sat up, eyes clear. He reached for her hand and squeezed it just a little bit too hard. Obviously still a bit drunk.
"Why are you thinking about this?"
"Because you're going to leave eventually, and I'm going to stay here, and my hearts going to break but you'll be off enjoying the world and it won't be fair," she cried, knowing how selfish she sounded.
He pulled her closer into the nook of his body, and held her as she weeped, praying that it was simply the alcohol making her emotional.
"Why should I hold back on a love so great for something that might not even happen?" he asked her, kissing the bare skin of her nape and the goosebumps along her shoulder.
"You're always going to be a factor," he whispered.
"I don't want to be a factor. I just want to be selfish and keep you here with me."
She held back on telling him how terribly she wanted to go with him, wherever he went.

She knew that's how their story would end- he would leave to explore the world, and she would be left behind. They'd probably try to keep something going over emails and Skype but eventually they'd both grow weary- he'll tire of the responsibility and she'll tire of waiting. She wasn't ready to have her heart broken, but it was just so easy to love him. No matter how badly she wanted to protect herself, she wanted to love him more.

She swallowed her tears and wrapped herself in his arms, nodding in silent agreement with all his assuring words, falling back into the comfort of his kiss. She hated herself for loving so carelessly, but she could never put up her guard, and decided it was time to embrace the crazy love they had for one another without worry. At least at the end of it all, the broken heart will be worth it.

Headlights pointed at the dawn

You wake up to an intolerable summer heat, a thin layer of sweat filming your skin like dried up glue. A dusty ceiling fan lazily spins overhead, threatening to break down any second now. You don’t know what day it is, but you know it’s July. It’s the pinnacle of summer and you’ve spent the last three weeks driving cross-country in your car with the beautiful girl sleeping beside you.

It’s been a blur of old towns, cheap motels, bland dinners and cold beers, but it’s the most fun you’ve had in possibly your whole life. How did it start again? You drove to the end of your city, and decided that you were bored and didn’t want to turn back yet. And now you’re here, one hundred miles away, sweating and dizzy from the heat, but unbelievably happy.

Today will be the same as every other day, but completely different in itself. You will lay in bed until she decides she’s slept enough- sometimes you wake up to her all dressed up, itching to get out of the motel and go on adventures. On other days, she lies in bed until 4PM and needs to be dragged out from under the sheets. Once you’re in the car, you drive north until you reach another town, a new one. And you look around to see if you like it, and if you do, you stay there. If you don’t, you keep on driving. 

You’ve been to too many sleepy towns through dusty roads. You want beaches and she wants forests, but you never seem to reach them no matter how far you drive. That’s how it’s been for the past 3 weeks, and that’s how it’ll be for the rest of the journey. But what does it matter? You don't need salt air or warm winds to prove that you're having the time of your life when you have a girl who's willing to run away with you to explore the country. There are no conversations quite like those in a car, there's no sex quite like that in a motel, and there's no love quite like one in the summer. And this is it, definitely, this is happiness, and you will feel it even until you reach the end of the country and have no choice but to turn around and go back home.

You live by the train station.

You live by the train station, you told me in idle passing one gloomy afternoon. It was all I could think about as we sat on your bed, looking through photos of your childhood. The rumble of the mechanical snake that runs through the city shook your walls with each flip of the page, and obnoxiously bellowed out its arrival- disrupting your sad, reminiscent smile that asked for it all back.

I looked up in fear, half expecting aliens or bombs or rabid animals let loose throughout your house, but you must’ve grown so used to it, you didn’t even notice your bedroom trembling. As the glass bottles of sand rattled away among your travel collections of little volcanic elephants, you kept naming out each face in the old photographs, introducing me to people from your past, injecting short stories in between the pages. You were the eye of the storm- perfectly centered and oblivious to the chaos around you.

You’re all I can think of now, whenever I wait patiently in line for the train. I wonder if at that moment you are happily absorbed in your photographs of yesteryear, sprawled out on your bed, smiling sadly at all the faces that are no longer here. I wonder how I can time my departures, so you feel that it’s me bellowing past, making your walls shake, making your bedroom tremble. Do you think if you try hard enough, you could recognize me in the chaos?

3 Years

Three years have come and gone and I still don't really know how to feel. I think about your face and thank the gods that I still remember it. The pulsing, zigzagged vein on your left forehead, how you joked you were Harry Potter. The shaggy white hairs of your eyebrows and how they made you look like you were constantly in deep thought. The slightly purplish lips that were so thin, the simple shadow of your salt-coloured beard would conceal them. Every crease along your forehead, cheeks, and neck. And most of all, your eyes. Those piercing blue eyes I always wish you gave me. Sheltered behind the shine of your glasses, they were pools of the most tropical water. Gemstones found in the depths of African mines. The kind of sky you only find in the countryside.

It has been three years but I still choose to remember. Not you in your glory days- I keep few memories of those suits and office chairs. I choose to remember your simpler times. Your jerseys and jeans. Your never-ending urge to fiddle. Your habit of taking things apart just to put them back again. Your silhouette in the living room whilst you watched football in the dark. It was hard to wake up in the mornings, thinking that you'd be downstairs to greet me as I fetched a midnight snack. It was like being hit by a bus, or being awakened by a violent shake. I still see the chair at the head of the dining table, empty, with no placemat or arrangement of cutlery before it. Now, the table is set for two, and lonelier than ever.

I didn't always choose to remember. At first, I was forced. I would lock your face in a box, and pray to god that nobody would ask me about you, but it was inevitable to see you everywhere. I saw you in every white man. Every golf store. Every telescope. Every football match. Every red polo with a white and blue collar. Every glass of beer. Every Chili's restaurant. Every news network. And every single object of the night sky- the planets, the moon, and most especially, the stars. How could I ever run away?

It's been three years and the biggest thing I've learned about grief is that it is not a slow-healing wound. It is a permanent one that comes and goes as it pleases. Some days, you don't cross my mind. And others, it feels just like day one, and I forget that you are even gone.

As old as your omens

The sweet smell of coconut tanning oil and sight of brown legs sprawled sticky over the white sheets made them relish the mountainpeak of summer. The girls lay in a lazy heap, snoring softly, curtained by the white nets that hugged the windows and warded off the bees. Sunlight cut into the room like a zigzag bringing good news of the great outdoors- slivers of velvet palm trees peeked through the cracks and basked in the tropical sun. 

It was an Indian summer like no other, with days spent crashing into turquoise and emerald waves, sweat fogging up the bare skin of their backs, and striped bikinis blurring in the motion of their cartwheels on the beach. 

They spent their nights locked up in their bedroom, three bronze girls crowding into one bed, holding hands beneath the blankets, telling stories in the dark. Their freckles mapped islands scattered across the pacific ocean and their hair hung loosely, smelling of seafoam and salt. They were full of life, dancing to their father's records in the living room, and singing at the top of their lungs. They howled into the night to create a symphony of distraught dogs, breaking the peaceful reign of crickets and distant waves. 

They had their singing, they had their howls, but it was their laughter that filled every crevice in the room and shook the souls of lonely men.