These are my minutes

In the course of 15 minutes, you'd like to tell the world your story.

There's nothing arbitrary about these 15 minutes. They're all you have until you have to move on to a new life. Like the 15 minutes in a cab on the way to your lawyer's office, where you will sign the divorce papers your wife wants you to sign three months after confessing to you the affair she's carried on with a college TA, met long before your courtship began.

It's a pity, though, that these are the only 15 minutes you have, because these are my 15 minutes, not yours. In fact, those 3 minutes that just passed? They were my minutes. As well as the one I just spent in silence. In the remaining 11 minutes I will give the world a piece of myself. You sit here and languish.

I have memories that are disembodied. Lives lived long, long ago. The feeling of calves pulling tendons pulling ankles lifting soles from foam. Foam lifting from cement. Ribs and arms encased in thin layers of cotton, too cool for the early spring weather, eyes tilted up, neck craning. It's a memory I relive too often. A memory that reminds me of distance.

7 minutes. A confession: 7 and 5 is my favourite combination of numbers. 5, a precious increment, a tenuous age, an incising number of letters. Enough to encase a life, to convey a lifetime's sentiment. An infinite sort of number. And 7, of little consequence. But intriguing for its oddity, for its excessiveness. And together, so worthless. Such a trope. So overdone. A number I've little taste for.

I've got less and less time on my side, but still an ample supply. The trouble with time is that you may never know it's there, that there are vast seas of it ahead of you, and yet you will waste it like copper or water, left running, tossed carelessly into a city bin at the corner on your way to school. 2 minutes left.

This is not what I had intended it to be, but perhaps it will be, one day. In any case, the stakes are being set. A toe-dragged line in the gravel. A juice box and a cap in the grass. This is where I will make fortunes out of nothing. This is where I will begin again my life.

Today Is not a Day Worth Comemmorating

Today is February 15th, and that is how I'll always remember it. A day after February 14th, a day before the 16th. Nothing in between.

There are many things I could say. Many things I could share. But I would tell them to the wind, and the wind would carry them away. There is nothing to stop the ebb of me on a day such as today. Nothing happens on this day.

There is a puddle of me spilling over itself on the floor. I'm a melting, lapping mess. I'm a pile of death and dust. Once this all was life.

I'll never forget what I held. I'll never forget the smell, the feeling, the colour. I'll never forget unfurling it, open, and letting the water carry it away. But that did not happen today. That was another day. And today, I have nothing to remember.

And Now, It's Tuesday

You left me on a Sunday night. A week and two days later, I realized that for the first time in over two years, I broke a Sunday ritual of loneliness.

Every Sunday morning, for longer than I can remember, I have navigated my way over to PostSecret to share in the sadness and happiness of others. This morning, frightened by a fleeting moment of isolation, I made my way back there.

As I made the brief journey, I realized that never, in the past week or so, had it occurred to me to seek this desperate moment of human connection. The weekly ritual I've relied on to make it through so many weeks past is gone. Somehow, with you, I'd always felt just as alone as I didn't think I was. Now that you're gone, I'm free.

Now that you're gone, I know I'll never have to settle for being alone.

We Two

We two,
We run at different speeds.

We thought
We were not alone.

We two,
We were never there.

You were always here,
And I...

We two,
We never found that place.

We never were so bright,
We never were so golden.

We two.

I was.

You weren't.

The Sarah Malik Revival

Note: Just a little something I'm working on, in honour of being newly unburdened.

I'm back, bitches. I know you missed me.

The world has lifted its grey gauze from my eyes. Colours are brighter, they move, they have life. Lines and water move through my mind. Images like images, shot on a film reel. The feeling, the passion, my fingers, they wander.

The world has me shaken, it's loosened, it's cotton, and now I am filled with the sound. The music, it fills me. It comes up to my brain, it crests at my crown. It comes down through my throat and into my heart. It makes my eyes swell, so they live, so they cry.

I can breathe. I remember. I smell the sweet air. I taste the sweet salt and I breathe til I'm bare.

I am released. Thank God, I am relieved. I was in prison. I was imprisoned, and I had commit no crime.

I have freedom. I have love, and am free.