sail the stars

“Even if no one would miss me, even if I left no blank space in anyone’s life, even if no one noticed, I couldn’t leave willingly. Loss was not a skill, not a measure of life. And yet I still felt like I had something to lose.”

— Haruki Murakami, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

It’s Sunday  I woke up invisible. My toothbrush motions, up, down, against unseen teeth, white foam dotting the air where the edges of my mouth were supposed to be. I pull up my favorite chinos on my invisible limbs, and comb my invisible hair. I’m used to it really; it’s like some days I’m not really there. I flip my calendar to today, and I recount how I’ve ticked off the last days of the century one by one, on these pages, huge blocks of numbers in black and red.  When I look at where a phantom hand is fingering the paper’s corner I think to myself, these new days to come may not be harbingers of change for the things destined to be the way they are. I’d shrug and make my way down the stairs, where my mother is cooking lunch (sun dried tomato pasta and sausage croquettes) and my father is trimming the spiral topiaries lining up the lawn. I’d call out, like I used to, that I’ll be going, and yeah, I’ll be home early.

I shout my order at a diner because the waitress doesn’t hear. The blue-haired hippie part-timer at the 7-11 barely looks up when I buy my cigarettes and  outside no one bothers to tell me off when I light up under restricted areas (because they only see the smoke, not fire). I walk down the streets and weave between people unnoticed, sneak inside trains and sit there until my ears are filled with nothing but screeches of metal and voices bored with announcing train stops and my eyes are filled with nothing but people going somewhere certain. I hop off and go over the metal bars and run and no one stops and no one laughs because no one sees me, there. The sun drops behind the horizon when I reach my avenue of trees balding in the winter and cold breezes, the park empty of children in the late afternoon, unpaved ground littered with black twigs. I kill time on the rusty swings, my feet dragging ridges on the soil until under me are evidences of me being there, being solid, and I dust my hands on my  pants and go straight ahead before I could second-guess myself. There’s this party I’m going to, and my friends are, too, and I wonder if they’d see me.

Inside the lights are dimmed and tables are set with greasy food. I slip in and take the one of the chairs on the edge of the room and take to acquainting myself with the alcohol, my ankles hooked over each other and my fingers cold from the shot glasses. It’s supposed to be awkward but it isn’t, because it’s all just me seeing, and everybody’s eyes are just sliding from the space on my left to the space on my right, never in between. Some strange comfort, being of this element, but I am worried, by the time I make my second trip to the bathroom to empty my stomach on the toilet seat, queasy with too much to drink. I’m so worried I take out my phone and dial a friend’s number. No answer, endless ringing of the other line as I press the receiver to my ear and my hand on the wall. I call another, and another and it’s the same static, no voice on the other end. I wonder if even my name is invisible. I stumble back into the party, heart hammering hands trembling mouth closed tight cold sweat breaking on my eyebrow stale vomit on my tongue. When I spot people I know I am rooted to the spot, the force of gravity anchoring me to the mauve carpet as the world around me spins. In my head I am shouting for someone to hear, to see, but I am nothing that registers in their senses, in their heads. It cleaves something in me in pieces but it is

the way things are. The new days are not harbingers of change for the things destined to be the way they are. It’s the alcohol, I think, or tiredness, that turns my eyelids hot and my vision blurry, and I struggle to see the faces I know from the distance (they’re all happy, I can tell, the angles of their smiles, the way they light up each other’s faces with stories they share). I once read somewhere, to not look back with bitterness at people who cannot love us, but at this moment it is a thought that is hard to swallow among the shots of  rum and amaretto on my sandpapered throat. Vaguely I wonder how people can find other people to call at 3 am in the morning when they’re choked up by their own sorrows and know that someone on the other line would rub the sleep off of their eyes and listen nonetheless. And that there are people who find other people who they share the darkest parts of themselves with, without feeling silly or apprehensive. And that there are people who find people who care enough to know when they are on the brink of some form of death and would catch them before they take the fall. And that, with this, whatever brightness I possess, is dimmed in comparison to the perfection of everyone else, carefree and effortless and not worrying if there was anyone who sees them for their value. I am dizzy, I think, and the heat is bubbling under my skin. When I get home I slip between bedcovers until I dissolve in the sheets into a world where tomorrows matter and where I am not flickering on an unsubstantial existence of being unseen, unheard.
 

Some days I want to fold myself into tiny pieces I can fit in the corners of books no one opens, or curl in my bed and forget to wake up.  I want to cut my vocal chords and never talk - it’s probably only me who finds it a chore to have a voice and not want to say anything. Even in talking I hide my meanings behind codes and I find I can’t stop burying the real things in graves no one will ever find. Some days I want to walk and walk until I’m ragged inside out, arriving at places that I never knew existed, with people who didn‘t care how I existed or why I do. I want to fall into the past and build a dynasty, pebble by pebble, for people who want to pull on Icarus’ wings and touch the things that would burn them one day.

Right now I can only dangle my legs from outside the large windows in my room, the view of rooftops and telephone cables blurred in the glare of the sun, ripe enough for a summer too bright for my eyes.  I had only wanted to jump and pirouette in the air, spin in circles and fall into an arch headfirst, but the mess afterwards isn’t for me to clean up, and so I stay suspended by the window sill, tethered between fear and gravity. Maybe someday I’d want to jump off too much to care about aftermaths, but I can only hope for the better days that may not come.

Some days I wonder why this is so but I’ve gotten tired of questioning who I was and wondering if I would have been better at being someone else, someone who didn’t tuck their sorrows into their back pockets to take out and open a few times during the day. I’ll leave the what-if’s to someone else and live quietly in the corners of books, between the prologues and the first paragraphs. That’s probably not enough to create sufficient introductions to be understood, but I’ve run out of time asking people for time to stop and dissect my breathing and my words and my shadows. Everyone else is too busy chasing after dreams that take them far, dreams that give them fancy titles and padded office chairs, dreams that come with fat paychecks and tired eyes. I was never like them to begin with. All I had wanted was to find some new secrets of old places, climb up lighthouses and dip my feet in rivers. They are all probably doing better than I am. I find that I can’t worry about the life that I can’t live.

I’d take to dreaming about the people who died and let them darken the days with loss. I would spend the mornings peeling the photographs from my walls and leave them bare, paint white washed over the years, peeling in layers like my skin in the in between seasons. Lunch would be an affair of filling in the empty spaces to the brim with various things like sugar-coated hope and rich, decadent musings. I’d swallow a little, then too much, and I’ll feel sick and I’ll flush them all out and wipe my mouth like nothing’s happened. The afternoon would bleed in and I would sweep away the paw prints of a dead cat on the floor of my room. It felt like erasing his existence, and the world converts its verticals into unfamiliar fractals, all like the repetitive measures of songs I hated playing on the piano. He used to stay by my feet and wait until I’ve burned up the hours staring out my window as I come to terms with the things I cannot change. I was getting a little better at it when he went, a little light extinguished by winds I couldn’t keep him from. The demons had come soon after and tore me away from the things I tried anchoring my hands into, leaving my fingers clawing at nothing but the air. I’ll collect the fur he left on my blankets and pillows, white pins tipped with brown and grey, and placed them in a tiny box.  When nightfall comes I’ll sink into my bed, weighing as heavy as the world, dipping the covers and disappearing when the sandman comes to perhaps grant me dreams of better days, days when it would be alright to unfold me, outer edges in, days when I could talk and not hide who I was, days when I’d reach out my hands and live.

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

-Mary Oliver

Good bye, Yoon Su.

“Letters are just pieces of paper. Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay, keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”

Norwegian wood, Haruki Murakami 

 We can disappear from here.

You and I, we’re tired of this: the city lights spraying neon beams in our vision while listening to broken anthems, scratchy on the radio and entirely foreign. Before dissolving in a world where no one has to pretend to know anyone else, we’ll write letters we’ll never send while outside cold cafes (in a world colder still). If it makes any difference, I’ll write you one, where I’ll tell you of my dreams of the thousand times we’ve met and the thousand times it ended in the same way.

One day we’ll be satisfied, even knowing all the things we cannot do, but tonight there are only trains and platforms where we’ll stand in and find where we fit—-away from stage lights and ambitions and the world too heavy on our backs. We’ll wipe away each memory of ourselves as we let too many trains pass in metallic streaks and  precisely measured noises, until it is almost too late to get on (until there is no more of us). I was sure, that time will stop when we cross the platform to the train, but when I look there is only the I that I knew a long time ago. The minutes are burning slowly in your wristwatch as the train dips in darker places, farther and farther away from the city and the expensive clothes which only pretend to fit along the blades of our shoulders.

I could ask you, with breath misting on the glass, if you hear me (in theory, sometimes loneliness is what necessitates asking if one’s existence makes a difference to another person’s).  It is a question falling under so many categories and having more implications than we dare imagine, but if you threw the question back, with the colors of the night darkening the hues in our eyes, I would be almost happy.

If the madness stops where the train does, with you and I displaced by several cities, perhaps the day the sun feels warmer on our faces has come.

Lately all the real stories sound fake. I would have written them myself, rearrange the words and bend the commas into mazes and fill the in-between sentences with people I’ll probably never know in my life, people who probably never existed in the first place. I’ll leave a chapter for you, and in there sunshine blooms in crystal cups, light trickling from the rims, warm like your cup of coffee. I hope you want a happy ending, final punctuations preceded by words capturing the way your cupid’s bow dips into faint curves when you smile, the way the light plays with the shades of brown on your hair.

We’ve always just been satisfied in life, not happy - I just want to tell you, I’d say, shrugging, while you brush a crooked finger against the side of your nose,  that there’s a universe separating the two concepts, but we’ve always just been too busy with a lifetime of pain to notice the difference. Every now and then I get by with painting a face that belongs to someone else, using words that sound only fancy and mean a little less than empty. I’d keep my heart tucked beneath the long sleeves of my shirts, covered up with layers of jackets, because when they see it they won’t understand the ridges and the contours, the erratic pulse drumming out from beneath the surface, folding in lines of poetry with too much feeling and too little skill.  Then again, I suppose I keep myself hidden quietly because there isn’t much to show. The world I make now, words written carefully over lined notepads, crossed t’s and dotted i’s, wouldn’t mind that I’m not much. That you won’t mind that, either.

This world would let us live a life of long, tranquil bike rides in the afternoons, people stopping by plum trees in spring to watch petals land like snow flakes on their hair. There are no crying children in the neighborhood, no begging for parents to stay and watch us grow, please? People will not choose who to smile at, and the world will treat you as a person rather than a category or statistic. Here we can talk about ourselves and laugh and ask for help and cry and not be left to our grief alone. Here we’ll cut out the sutures binding our secrets to our skins, the things in your past you couldn’t talk about, the things in my future I could no longer chase after. We’ll talk about how much your mother has suffered on your account for a father you could never talk about, about how, for a single, eternal moment I realized I grew up when I finally accepted that the heroes in my youth were as flawed and as imperfect as I was.

I will not be an architect to a utopia, because in it we will cease to exist. A world where we have everything isn’t a world for neither you nor I to live in, it’s just a place to play and trap ourselves to ideals we can never meet. If it were up to me, I’d keep you away from the things that draw you in your vast ocean of sadness. If it were up to me I’d keep me away from the things I couldn’t be, all the things I can’t have. If you’ve landed in the same shadow of loneliness I’d sit  quietly by you and erase all other words except, I’m here. Inside your palm I’ll write the stories I want to tell, the calluses on your hands filtering the facts in fiction, and you’d reply with the songs you want to play someday, in front of a crowd that listen more than they see.  We’ll look up at the wax paper moon settled on the grey sky and know that there’s someone in this world who hurts and we understand their pain like it had been drawn at the backs of our hands.

Today my father bought a picture frame, antique mahogany wood and gold gilded. Sliding a picture of me in between the thin sheet of glass cover and wooden base, a weight of a century falls on his face, marking shadows under his eyes and lining the skin on his forehead. The minute he spends to shut the back cover stretches to an era. He must have had a different outcome in mind, and when I came and looked from behind his shoulder, the edges of the picture are peeking at the sides, lefts and rights stretched far enough to hide the defects. Some things can’t be altered anyway, and we leave it at that on the coffee table littered with bleached spots and splashes, testimonies of my carelessness documented from when I was drinking cups of warm milk inside pastel ceramics to cool, sharp beers in manufactured cans.  On the afternoons I look over at where it bathes in the orange sun spilling from the window. At an angle it looks like the picture almost fits, the play of light making it adequate enough to fill in the whole space. When I turn away and look back, it rights itself in its wrong ways and I feel as old as my father looks.

The image shifts and morphs in my dreams, dreams of when I would scale the length of a whole train station and end at the last stop, dreams of when I would wake up on top of a drifting cirrus, sailing over cerulean oceans, dreams of when I wasn’t afraid of dreaming. I’d find the frame, one way or another, holding an image inconsistent with reality. It makes me feel ruined in a way I can’t spell out in words and when the picture’s burned at the back of my eyelids I take the frame, the intricate fleur-de-lis  carvings smooth against the pads of my fingers, I smash it against the concrete, the pieces flying in a prism of rainbows and splinters, settling themselves into tiny parts by my shoes.  When my dad finally arrives, weary from the day and the things that plague him, things that I only understand when it’s too late, I tell him every child’s favorite lie- it wasn’t, at the same time it was a lie -

It wasn’t me.