Solar Powered

The warmth of sunlight pours down on me
Dripping through my pores and lighting up the insides of my veins
My white blood-cells and microbial bacteria will have some light to battle by today
Before the radiation washes them all away

In and out of love

I spend so much time proving myself to you. But there is nothing left to prove, because you are a poor judge. We simply wave our hands now, faking emotions we once had. Never expressing the ones we really dwell on.

Bacon and Maple Syrup.

We stand in the basement. The lights are off, and laughter bounces off the stairwell walls down towards us. The party continues upstairs, we can't hear the music but the bass reverberates and shakes our bones.

A single window, high to the ceiling, lets the sky in just a bit. The moon is full and high and bright in the sky, peeking in on us. A large square of milky white light lies on the green carpeting. It's enough light to make out her face.

Her hair is jet black, as are her eyes. I stare intently into them, hoping the darkness of the room masks what my intentions are. I see glimmers of red, embers of a fire burning deep within. She stumbles a bit. The alcohol is taking more effect. She laughs loudly and makes an embarrassing comment, about a dozen decibels too loud for the quietness of the basement's darkness. I can feel the alcohol in my own veins, sluggishly restraining my movements. I can feel it slowly filling my brain, making a fog of my thoughts.

She makes a soft comment. I'm not sure what it is. I lean forward to hear what she says, and she wraps her arms around my neck. I place mine at the small of her back, suddenly painfully aware of who she is, of where we are. The alcohol seems to evaporate from me.

She whispers into my ear. "Please..."

It takes me a few seconds to process what she has said. But she doesn't give me more time to think about it. She turns to face me, her face hovering in front of mine, eyes closed. At this point my brain begins to sound alarm bells. She's drunk and doesn't know what she's doing!


She opens her eyes again. She peers into mine. Her hand runs through the hair on the back of my head. The embers that glimmered in her eyes a moment before are now a roaring fire. Her eyelids slant downwards from her nose: she is beginning to have second thoughts. Embarrassment begins to creep in. It has an extinguisher at the ready, ready to douse her.

I feel a pang in my heart, and then in my stomach. A feeling of pity. Then of desire. I imagine a click in my mind, something has come loose. I am free.

I close my eyes and plunge. Even without seeing it, I can feel the surprise on her lips. Hard and tense, but slowly begins to soften. I can feel the heat emanating from her. The urgency builds, her hand pulling me towards her just a bit harder. I can feel her coming loose in her own mind as well.

Suddenly my eyelids are awash in harsh yellow light. We spring away from each other, squinting at the lights turned on. She falls back into an armchair, and I half lean on the wall behind me. We can hear feet and voices descending the stairs. They approach, and begin to talk to me. I glance at her, her eyes are closed. Either feigning sleep, or fallen into a drunken stupor. I continue to chat, but make for a blanket folded in a pile on a nearby table, draping it over her as she sleeps. I go back to the voices, hushed now in the presence of a sleeping body. We laugh softly and return upstairs to the party, in my drunken state forgetting what transpired moments ago.

~~~

I wake with a start. In an unfamiliar room, asleep on firm yet carpeted ground, my mind races to recall how I got here. I am suddenly aware of a hand grasped in my own. I let it go with another jolt, the second surprise in as many seconds. I half sit up, peering around. Memories come flooding back to me as I realize I am back in the basement. Instead of moonlight, the sunlight shines through the window. A curtain has been pulled on the window, and the sun pulses behind another curtain of clouds. The exact right brightness for a Sunday morning. The room is empty save for the armchair, a TV, and the table piled with blankets. One blanket is strewn from the pile, leading to my own body. Another leads from the armchair to the sleeping body beside me. She also begins to stir, her hand opening and closing, probably looking for warmth again. I take her hand again and lie back down on the pillow, staring at her face. A smile is spread wide across her face, angelic. I shudder once in silent laughter at the sight. This is enough to wake her up.

She opens her eyes, the confusion I felt moments ago now passed onto her. She sits up and looks around, slowly understanding, and then lying back down. She doesn't release my hand.

I whisper "Morning"
She closes her eyes again "Hey. It's too early"
"I know, but I'm wide awake"
She opens her eyes again "Yeah, so am I."

Her hand flexes around mine, and she releases it quickly. She must've just noticed now where it had been. She continues, "We shouldn't be though. I can smell breakfast being made, someone must be awake. That must be why we're awake"

I sniff, and smell maple syrup and bacon in the air. My stomach growls in response.

She laughs "I guess we didn't really get much of a dinner last night, did we?"
I laugh as well "No, not really."

She sits up again, running her fingers through her hair. I get up as well, stretching and yawning, the last ebbs of sleep retreating away.

I look to her, "Shall we?"
"Sure."

I offer my hand, which she takes and rises up. She brushes off her clothes, sending dust and crumbs flying from her clothes. We start up the stairs in darkness when I stop her. She turns to face me, standing a step ahead of me, her eyes just a few inches above mine.

"About last night..."
"What about?"
"About what happened down here..."
"Oh... that... " I can see red flush her cheeks, shame coloring her voice.
"Oh no, it's okay. We were both a little drunk, these things happen. It's not like I didn't enjoy it"
"Oh?"
"I'm just glad we didn't do anything we both regret.,,"
"Oh..."

My mind screams at me. TAKE A CHANCE
"I'm glad we didn't do anything we both regret... because I like you a lot, and I would hate for us to start off on the wrong foot."
"I... I like you too. I'm guess that's where that came from last night." She smiles again, her voice sounding confident once more.
I placed my hand at the small of her back, and I can feel my heart leap from my chest up into my throat, wriggling to escape out my body before I make a fool of myself.
I smile and swallow it back down, and pull her in again, closing my eyes. Our lips meet again. But not with urgency or lack of restraint. Shy and chaste, like unsure footing of an inexperienced mountaineer on the side of a craggy cliff. I pull away again. We both smile widely. She takes hold of my hand, and turns up the stairs, drawing me behind her.

We ascend over the threshold of the basement, our noses barraged with the smell of eggs and bacon, of syrup and pancakes.

To this day, the smells of breakfast brings me back to that moment in that dark basement.

Love letters I never sent #9

I read a lot. I used to read a lot more, but not so much anymore. I read because I was searching for something. A word. A word that could describe the feelings I felt towards you.

I was so sure the feeling I felt was love. I loved you with all my heart, but the word 'love' didn't quite describe it. So I started reading. Certainly someone else must have felt the swell that I was feeling. They must have felt it and wrote it down. Or told an author about it in enough detail, that the writer said "Aha! I know the perfect word for that" and put pen to paper about it.

But I read. I read everything I could find. It became quickly obvious that romance novels were never about love. Not about any kind of real love anyways. The same went for all other fictional books. Although I suppose I should've known: why look for real emotion in fake literature?

So I moved on to biographies and other stories of fact. There, I found out about the quiet and reserved kind of love that older couples feel. The kind that doesn't shine brightly, but burns forever. I found out about the firework kind of love. Explosive and larger than life, but fizzles out shortly after (is that really love?). I found out about big and small love. I found out a lot about lost love. But none of it seemed right. None of it seemed exactly the same.

This is around the time I started to doubt myself. Maybe what I'm feeling isn't exactly love? Maybe it's something else altogether. But no, that can't be right. I moved on to poetry.

Most of it seemed to either follow the fake love or real love I had read before. The different varieties and quantities and shapes and colors. But never anything new. Some came close. In fact, in poetry, love is perhaps best expressed. The writer is not limited to sentence structure or themes or continuity. The English language can move like water in poetry, surging at points and trickling at others as necessary.

Yet still, nothing quite like I felt.

This is when I gave up on reading. What I feel for you, I am now convinced, no person has ever felt for another before. You might find that hard to believe. I did too for a long time. But it's true.

"I love you" has no place in it. There are all sorts of variants I could use. Adjectives I can append and pages upon pages I could write. But there is no combination of words that expresses exactly the breadth or depth to which I feel for you. There is not enough words in the dictionary to describe it.

The closest I can come to explaining, is how the sun must feel about light. It doesn't think anything of it: it is the status quo. It can't see anything else, or feel anything else. The sun must not even know what it is, that it is a star or what. The sun must think it, itself, is just light. Light and nothing else. Nothing else exists for it.

Similarly, for me, you are my existence. You are all there is in my existence. Nothing else exists for me but you.

Does that make sense at all? At any rate, that's why I don't read anymore.

Love letters I never sent #8

Sometimes I wish I could talk to you in person. That I could be upfront with you. To be as sappy as I want to be with you, and say all the corny lines that come to my mind as they pop up. That you would laugh and blush at them, and then give me a hug and a peck on the cheek.

I wish we could sleep in on Sundays intertwined and tangled up in each other, letting the day grow long. I wish we could hold hands and laugh at the funny hats on the stands out on the street. And then go for a delicious meal in an empty restaurant with an old lady covered in wrinkles serving us food.

Sometimes I wish I would finally tell you how I feel, and that you would say you felt the same way all along.

Sometimes I wish it would just work out.

Love letters I never sent #7

I saw an old couple today. They were sitting on a bench outside the mall, and making out like crazy. They must've been 80 years old each.

It was pretty gross.

I hope we are that gross when we grow old together.

Love letters I never sent #6

I am scared to write this to you. I am scared to even feel this way. I have learned from a lot of lessons from my past mistakes. I have a lot of scars that show where I come from.

And every single broken heart, every single tear that has fallen, every sleepless night, all scream to me from my past "You are making a huge mistake!"

There are so many good reasons not to love you. For one thing, I am positive you could never love me. That alone should be enough. I'm not even sure you could like me. But more than that, I love you, but I don't even particularly like you. You're kind of repulsive to look at. You get angry with me all the time.

But when my conscious is laid to rest, when my brain is left to wander and I dream at night, it always comes back to you.

I love you, but there is no rhyme or reason to it. I don't know how long it will last. I suspect not very long. And I know you deserve to be loved. By someone more loving, more deserving than myself.

But this I write to you, hoping that maybe I am wrong. That maybe you might love me, or maybe even just like me a little. That maybe we can coax this into something more. That maybe the nothing that is between
us now could become the something neither of us can live without.

I love you without need and without encouragement. Perhaps that is the best kind of love. The most honest.