OPEN
CATEGORY.
But of course, which creative doesn't have a tendency within them for rule-bending and prompt-ignoring? Our Open Category features the creative works of our school at their dizzying, variegated, defiant, and luminous best.
HEADER IMAGE CREDIT: Caitlin
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Untitled, watchwielder
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I Do, I Do, I Do, Arissa
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floorboards, hashbrown
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The Night the Distance Closed Between the Devil and the Devout, Arissa
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that's teenage rebellion for you, Khai Lynn
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erosion, wraieth
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Untitled, En
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Palace, Caitlin
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Black and White, Gladys Koh
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To be anything at all, Tang Lanyun
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Riddle, Veronica
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Untitled, Geri
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walk, Shreya Singh
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Light up the colours, Toh Milo
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Photographs, Nat-nu Liew
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Cherry Blossoms, diphyelleiarose
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still, wraieth
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The Words You Left Behind, diphyelleiarose
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Untitled, megan
Untitled
watchwielder
I love reading.
Reading is, in its purest form, many, many things—escapism, connection, a fount of knowledge; desire, desperation, deception, curiosity; it is something born of colour-tinted daydreams and polychromatic fantasies and painstakingly loved worlds crafted brick by brick, layer by layer, piece by piece, to form a grand cosmos shared with the world.
It is reading that allows me to explore avenues I have never even considered. Reading that allows me to, if only for a second, be someone that I am not. It is nothing but words that manage to conjure sparkling enchantments and striking characters that shimmer and morph to life in front of our very eyes, characters that become our friends, our companions, our family. They say dimension travel isn't possible yet—yet I travel across universes; dance across continents; fly above the sky in magical journeys I experience sitting right on my very sofa. I summon forth elements at my very fingertips, glimpse into the infinite abyss of our future, and traverse from whence we came from.
And stories must be the devil for the end of every one is a piece of my soul carved out, hollowed with how much i have given it, how much I have screamed and laughed and cried and cheered at ink on a soft weathered page and my imagination sprouting wings to soar free as it wills.
“But bro,” you might say, “it’s just a book. It isn’t real.”
Though, really, how much of all this is real anyway?
Just kidding, I’m not here to give you an existential crisis. I doubt you need help with that. But as a certain wizard once said: “Of course it’s happening inside your head… but why on Earth should that mean that it’s not real?”
Where do we draw the line between reality and fiction? How do we distinguish between authenticity and delusion? I don’t know. Even so—to me, these universes are just as real as you or I. They are a part of me, and I them. Reading has guided me with a spectral hand through parts of my life consistently, a phantom echo through the highs and the lows. If the start of a book is sinking your feet in gritty sand, trudging towards roiling waves, then I am a seashell at seaside; words briny water coaxing me from shore; characters a salty tang suffusing into the gentle sea breeze. The progression of the book is a relentless tide; sweeping me from my feet and plunging me in its depths, dark and suffocating yet somehow strangely comforting, carrying me further and further until I can see naught but the hidden undersea filled with miraculous wonders and fantastical creatures.
From the moment we step foot on this earth we are clowns entering a funhouse. Neon lights strung up, looping round and round as we inspect our reflections on lacquered mirrors. The people around us—they stand tall, their own reflections distorted, warped at varying degrees when we look at them through tinted lenses. And with reading that distortion clears up ever so slightly to give a glimpse of clarity beneath grimy disfigurement; to provide greater insight to the world around you, the people around you, and most of all, you yourself. Reading can be anodyne, ambrosia, moonlight in times of dark; a salve, soothing, water to the thirsty, manna to the starved.
Of course, I’m not saying that every single book holds some sort of introspective road to enlightenment. If that’s what you’re seeking, feel free to check out the nearest therapist in your area. Even so—part of the magic is that no matter what age, race, gender, sexuality, size, you are, there’s something for everyone.
Or at least almost everyone. Books come in many different forms—picture books, novels, comics, manga, poetry, braille, even audiobooks. Don’t like fancy vocab? No problem, there are other selections to choose from. Prefer visuals? Comics exist. The curtains rise with the characters as the orchestra, the repertoire as the plot, and the conductor as the writer, while you sit in the audience, eyes wide and enthralled, and there are symphonies, concertos, sonatas, operas, 4’33, whatever suits your tastes, no matter how bizarre, no matter how eccentric. You don’t have to be a literature connoisseur, you don’t have to be some scholarly nerd, you don’t have to be a fan of classics like Jane Austen or Mark Twain or George Orwell to enjoy reading. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
I Do, I Do, I Do
Arissa
Mom, what if I don’t want to study Law.
There are no semantics
in passing the bills to court. Or to you,
your hand tapping for a penny (obligatory).
I’ve never been a liar, until the loops
of legislation slithered in the line breaks
of oath (I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth). The truth is this.
Mom, what if I don’t want to be rich.
Four-storey houses for a family of four?
You can hear hollow laughter emanating
from satellite sets on every floor. Which show, you ask?
Mediacorp dramas held in maisonettes (the ah ma
in sponsored silk and jade; the ah girl never home).
Parody of what we could be.
Every family dinner a prolonged mahjong game,
you tussle and I hustle for a lion’s share.
Mom, what if I don’t want to be married.
You’ve mired me in a museum of photo frames:
red gowns and rose bath honeymoons. You say:
this is good for you. Liar. Since when was love
a New Year’s exhibit? You say the gallery is mine
someday, I’ll have the ring laced with a phantom promise.
But I’m bad at keeping things. (You said you knew).
But do you.
floorboards
hashbrown
there is a dark, murky space
between the floor and your
sky high expectations
where you can be anything
you want
(they say)
so you can
hide under the tables and
take notes on the blank canvas
of your tender heart
taking care not to let the ink
bleed through
but when the classroom is empty
you creep out of your dark little
hideaway and are accosted
by the light pouring out of the
windows that your classmates
forgot to close
the sky is too bright today
there is too much light
and I am
burning up maybe
I am remnants of ash now
I can finally be
buried in peace? (I hope)
maybe I ought to
dig a hole in the floor and hide
in its loving embrace
I am grossly exceeding my expectations
I am breaking boundaries
I am (rich, successful, intelligent, kind, humble, honest)
hiding under the floorboards.
(please don’t look for me // I am afraid // of your radiance // there is no deeper // I can hide)
Arissa
Told in Bold, The Grammar of the Unsaid
DISCLAIMER: I have never said I love you before.
I have written I love you before. No one is charmed (because I am unlovable,
no, because I best express myself when I process it in a comforting Calibri, font size 11. When the unsaid is translated into the written. And you may not understand, certainly not in the same way, but that is the beauty of the written unsaid. Infinite interpretations of a single I love you
until the in-betweens of lines are read). Un-love-able. I was asked to use iambic pentameter for English Literature, but sat and spat free verse. Un-love-able, that’s what the teacher said. But language can bend without breaking, and that is why I push every boundary of form, every boundary of phrase. No, do not go gentle into that good night. The answer is to rage, and I have found it in words. The genres that I do write: MRT lines, untold histories, feminism and I love yous. I am searching for the meaning behind conversations along the Downtown line; a cultural past intertwined in the family bloodline; the patriarchy’s hold on the limits of who we can be; and unashamedly, the hopeless romantic in me. Punctuation can be skipped at times you read without a comma without the in-between halt of explanation, because in truth, writing is almost impossible to explain and that taught you a new way of breathing. As you are right now, aren’t you? The lack of pause, it sounds like a singer’s held high note. No one really tells you this, but poetry is just as equally about music as it is about meaning. Shakespeare was born in the Renaissance, and me? The last turn of the century! Timeless. Time, but less. The poet’s struggle to be heard. What is a suffix but an afterthought? (And me?) Et tu? Who? Who wrote the bruised encyclopaedia, who betrayed it by fingerpainting with the pulp of a poetic heart? What is the sound of a beating heart? Poetry! A deconstruction of syllables, and soon we crush ourselves until we are made merely of vowels and consonants. Lup-dup, lup-dup, tick tock, tick tock, I love you, I love you. This is the invisible ebb and flow of ley lines that only we see and lets us be, be, be o̶r̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ – that is not a question. Ah, the Bard’s famous line! Writing undoes and reimagines who I am, I am, I am as a person (and now, Plath’s famous line! The lore of nature’s alignments has been proven, again and again.) The rhymes you read along the curve of an ocular lens – how many times did you twist the knob? I inspect words the way a scientist looks at a microscopic slide. Every minute detail brings me back to curating the tone of I love you, never said, only written. And the line after? How would you, the reader, respond? That is what nags the mind, that is the writer’s quest: the evocation of emotion. I love you _ _ _. Unsaid, but it rings loud and clear. Our hearts have learnt their own grammar.
Arissa
At sixteen, I’ll do what I can.
I show skin in torn jeans.
I worship diets after dinners.
I write makeup on lips that lust.
In the hours after sleep, I am young desire,
drinking wine from the tap. Don’t get me wrong.
It’s not that I don’t try to swallow holy verse.
Doesn’t matter if you make the prophets
paint protection on my heart.
This is me. Just look at me.
Don’t you know that I don’t hate you?
How could you have forgotten
the trials of being sixteen? Look at me.
I’ve finished painting the town red
all this while you’ve been gone,
wait till I paint the world
and there’s no more colour
inside me. Come back home,
tell me the story of Yunus. [1]
The one who made mistakes
and yet was loved again.
You who hit a mid-life crisis at forty.
See, God’s books lined up like soldiers
on the tabletop.
Even your skin, once etched in tattoos,
now washed over in white sleeves.
Heavy metal thrown into the trash,
you can still hear the echoes of old angst
if you reverse the bin cover.
You were once the devil but now
you’re the kind of father who sings
in Quranic verse,
the type who’ll make the world out of a mosque,
and love heaven so much you forget about Earth.
Metallica CDs and tattoos and a broken daughter
are eaten by termites and silverfish
in a home that is hell.
I don’t know what made you come back.
Maybe, you saw the prophets
lighting the roads in the sky,
then you rode the night
to save the devil before it was too late.
I swear to you: I’m your daughter, not the devil.
Come, I know that’s you.
You’re flying atop a prayer mat, there are stars
stitched in threads of love –
did you steal it from the sky?
Come, come, read the signs of red doors,
close up the mosque tonight.
The young devil wants
to return to the old saint. Let’s burn
the forbidden pages of the past.
The Night the Distance Closed Between the Devil and the Devout
Notes:
[1] The story of Prophet Yunus a.s. in the Quran tells of a prophet who gave up on the task that was placed upon him, and then, faced punishment. However, he is eventually forgiven by God for his actions when he repents.
that's teenage rebellion for you
Khai Lynn
[TRIGGER WARNING] Death, apocalyptic themes, dysfunctional family dynamics
It begins like this: you cut your hair, leaving it jagged and choppy, and it makes you look like a boy but you’re done listening to other people. You look up temporary hair dyes and curse your black hair but you buy the nicest one you can find anyway, just in time for the last day of freedom you’re getting- it turns out a nice shade of violet and it makes you feel different in such a good way. You’re so done with what society wants you to be. You’re so done with family and obligations and duty. So you cut your hair short, you dye it bright, you learn how to live in your own body.
(You wash out the hair dye in time for school, but you don’t grow out your hair.)
It begins like this: you are in control.
It begins like this: the end of the world is coming and people do stupid things when the world is ending. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s close. It’s a glancing blow off the surface of the Earth, although you don’t know that until after you open your eyes and realise your hair is still violet.
When choice is taken from you, you make your own.
--
Actually, that’s a lie. It begins long before that.
erosion
wraieth
[TRIGGER WARNING] Gore, death, war
set in a world where photographs reflect how you look in the moment/how you looked when you were last alive, including injuries, tattoos, etc.
It isn’t a wasteland, not filled with the irradiated monsters that legends foretold. The sun beats down with the same intensity that it did twelve hours ago - this is a quick in-and-out. The gravel will burn through my skin, I am sure, from remnants of a nightmare or from the current dystopia, I don’t know. Maybe it will take both. The grounds of an ashen city shift beneath my feet, a thousand chasms of a single tragedy. Is this how gods are born?
I nearly convince myself that the scorches on the walls around me resulted from years of strain and overexposure - I nearly convince myself that the world will not collapse in a moment again. The walls not only burn, they crumble, and the cracks are within reach. When did it break, I wonder, at the outset of the apocalypse, or was that only the catalyst for years of erosion? It is only due to my full hands that I remember to keep walking.
I have to present this monumental tragedy - a childhood nightmare and an adult reminder - but what of it? Had there been a change within the last 30 years, surely there would be an army flanking both my sides. The camera feels heavy in my hands, and I’m close to sinking along with it.
I have a plane waiting for me only one refuel’s time away, and only that prompts me to step into a building; I would have gazed a thousand years through the city streets and there would only be more stories to tell. I only have one story in mind, so I trudge forward.
The floorboards creak as I shift my weight and I fear for its structural integrity, but if it held up for the wind and the stars all those years, it could surely perform for a tourist such as myself. It was once a home, I am certain of that, even if any semblance of warmth was stripped away when the world exploded. It bears the scars of that day:broken furniture, cracked walls, doorframes caved in, fallen ornaments, uniform with the rest of the city. I have half a mind to put on gloves as I dig for the true prize - the photographs.
They are the only reason my boss even wanted to send anyone out here, after all, a warrior’s journey deserved a hero’s spoils, and I am the drafted vessel. He only thinks in gains and prizes, and that’s what these remnants are to him, prizes of a lost war. But they’re buried artifacts in a king’s tomb, private with a dash of a curse. They were never meant to be seen, yet I am here to kick up the dust and uproot what was rightly buried.
I nearly throw up my lunch all over the sight.
Their eyes are pooling red, vampiric stares plastered on smiling faces, razed beyond recognition. The sight is nothing but nauseating. The right side of the father’s face is nothing but a mottled brown, bright red streaks where his hair was branded along his forehead. His hair is all but gone, leaving a flimsy ring to circle around his head, and his smile is skeletal, with teeth showing through his bottom lip.
It should have occurred to me that a catastrophe that levelled a city had no qualms in melting human flesh.
The mother holds their child up, yet her arms are patchwork, swellings and lesions peppering every surface. I can see her shirt burned onto her chest, yet she continues to smile, and I am convinced she could accompany the devils and the damned if she so chose. Echoes of the explosion ring in my ears and I feel her whisper down my spine, yearning for a forgotten ideal unearthed eras too late.
Their daughter seems the most ethereal of all, but perhaps it is simply an alien concept for me to see an innocent face twisted by the carnage of war. Her gums bleed, and it is no more gory a sight than her parents, but a crack in the glass across her face gives the image of a vengeful wraith, and I stumble back into the rubble of her haunt.
There was a reason why no one came back here.
Pictures hold power, and with it the utmost trust. Their glowing faces, marred and frozen, labelled as collateral damage, feels like a violation. I shouldn’t have come, not after the unease I felt by even existing in a space where phantoms were made and a city was struck down around them.
Would they want a monument to their tragedy, or was this a monument enough? My hands shake as I stagger upright and away from their home, thoughts racing yet frozen in the chill of time. I had a job to do. As much as the churning in my gut tells me to turn back and run away, I walk towards the hypocentre of the blast with bile clawing at my throat.
Untitled
En
Palace
Caitlin
Black and White
Gladys Koh
Part 1: humpty dumpty’s fall
25. Rook to e7
a present lies on the chess board.
wrapped glossily,
it grins up at you like the devil himself.
heinous hesitation;
sidestep the seductive invitation?
or accept it with open arms?
enraptured by a saccharine sweet voice:
“i don’t bite~ ”
the cheese sang a beguiling tune,
and so you double, no, triple check for any devious trickery,
baby steps now-
spring-
snap-
stuck-
caught.
suddenly, you’re grappling about in the trap,
the enemies’ shadows slinking in like silent assassins.
panic sinks in,
your wild, terrorized eyes scourging all around for an exit.
scream for help,
but all the your horses, all the your men,
they watch on wordlessly-
And you realise:
their horses are brown, not white.
No prince charming,
you’re on your own.
Part 2: on the run
creating chaos on the 64 squares,
a cold war reigned;
a brilliant spectacle of carnage-
flames licking the empty throne.
reaching a crescendo,
beautiful combinations and tactical flair
strip the monarchy’s hapless fortress
down to skin and bones-
In the tattered and barren land of his kingdom,
The lone king danced the pas de deux with the circling queen;
And the ever-so-calm assassin drew in-
Raising her cloak in a show of flamboyance-
All that’s left is-
A kiss.
A light brush.
Gentle as a feather.
It’s all over.
To be anything at all
Tang Lanyun
And on those days when the men dissolve away and slip down the drain
the gas stations will set themselves on fire
we can unbuckle our seatbelts and flee through broken glass
with hands clutching filthy banknotes
and oh! The fuzz of midsummer afternoons
with rain seeping through the rooftops and our tongues greedy,
freeing ourselves from Fate’s henchmen and the garbage
of this rotten new age,
prowling unfamiliar shores in search of gas-lamps and watershed moments
with irises blown as wide as pinwheels.
Riddle
Veronica
Come, hold us up
as if we were sticks of incense—
petrified things shrouded in flour,
bone-fine in your hand.
Your reflection convulses
as the water hums a lullaby
of a mother and a moon…
We haunt the pot like long ghosts
in the darkness of ages.
You lay down your chopsticks
and dream of weaving steam.
Untitled
Geri
walk
Shreya Singh
I am trying to drown everything around me out. The music is blaring into my ears with gusto. It becomes difficult deciphering the little crunches of the leaves beneath my feet from the soft, almost invisible backing elements of the songs I listen to. You are walking ahead. My pace is gradually beginning to match yours, perhaps in an attempt to elucidate that I am trying to be the bigger person, the mature one. Our fights have always befuddled me -- Is it really that hard for us to just get along? I am akin to a faulty wiper on a rainy day. The droplets are falling violently onto the windshield of the car and yet, there is nothing the wiper is able to do. It might shift to the right, to the left, but alas, the raging rain does not falter. I am unsuccessful in understanding how I should act. I am once again lost in my labyrinth of What ifs and If Onlys, even if nothing is my fault. There is no clarity in my thought. I am unsure whether I am meant to be sorry or to just let it go. Such is the exasperating nature of our relationship. Occasionally, you turn towards me, staring intently into my eyes before looking away. What is it that you want to say? Communicate. Talk to me. Yet you say nothing at all. You continue to walk. And I follow suit.
Walking is intimate to me. After all, is there not something so deeply intimate about knowing something, someone or even someplace in a wholeness that nobody else does? Being familiar with a path or knowing exactly where to make a turn brings fluidity to your movements, it comes naturally. Are we not, in some way, able to maintain the sanctity of such a place? Such a place that is unscathed by any outsider. The only one in control of the associations is you. We then start assigning a feeling to a place like this. My feeling was numbness. I went to this place to quiet the intensity of my emotions. To drown out my damaging ideation somehow. Where there is nobody, I can’t get hurt. Where there are no negative associations, I am protected from experiencing any extrinsic pain. Where there is quiet, my thoughts are quiet. And so, all is good in the universe right now.
As I walk, I make eye contact with the people walking in the opposite direction from me. What a vast number of things, people, sensations there are around me in this moment of time. I wonder -- What is it that drives the urgency behind the steps you’re taking? What is your life like? Are you running away from conflict like I am? Are you as broken as I am? My questions remain unanswered, but I find ambiguity charming. There is something so beautiful about feeling small. Feeling like all your worries, all the things that bother you, your life in its entirety is so infinitesimal. In being so unknown to everyone around you. Every person I cross paths with has probably had completely different experiences from me. We have all been at some point, hurt in different ways that have led to an eventual manifestation of who we are today. I am walking past all these people that are trying. They are all trying, just like me.
When I look back at you, my problems, my tensions, my pains all begin to exponentially increase. What is this effect you have on me? Sometimes I think of you as a puppeteer that is able to influence me in whatever way you’d like. The difference between you and a puppeteer is that a puppeteer is fully aware, deeply conscious of what he is doing. You, I don’t think you know. You would not be able to understand what you put me through. That never lessens the impact but at least there is a sort of integrity in what happens. At least I can assuage my own deepest fears through this unmanifested thought that you have no inkling of what you make me feel. Or maybe you do know. Maybe I should be more cautious with my naivete and be less of a wishful thinker. It is sometimes better not to know whether you know or you don’t know.
I look at you again, struggling to get my words out. My brain is suddenly unable to coherently form sentences. What is it that I want to say? You avert your gaze plainly. Most days, I’d remain unfazed by this. Today it torments me. Whether or not you mean anything by it is besides the point. You’re acting cold, and that’s all my tunnel vision wants me to see. The effect of the music is beginning to wear off. The sanctity of this place was no longer maintained. My heart would only palpitate like this when I was no longer able to dissociate and distract myself from what is trying to catch up to me. When feeling was becoming my drug of choice. Internal strife is imminent.
My breathing gets quicker. My vision becomes clouded. My thoughts do not care for what is true, what is realistic, what is going to serve me. They simply flood in with zero regard for their own legitimacy. I begin to spiral downwards, sinking deeper into my own sorrow. I start to feel broken. Broken beyond repair because of all that has been going on. This broken side is insidiously beginning to show in everything. It shows in this state that I have unceasingly returned to. Once again, so powerless. So weak. It shows in the people I attract. It shows in why I’m still walking right by you. Damaged attracts damaged, after all. Damaged goods, that is what I feel like. I wish I wasn’t this broken -- this terribly flawed. Perhaps that I hadn’t ever let myself be hurt. Perhaps that my experiences were different. But they are not. And they’ve shaped me into the broken mess I am now. This is what my destructive thought-patterns lead me to believe at least. In fact, it does not matter whether truth lies within any of my thoughts because they will somehow assimilate into my beliefs. And so once again, I am making the conscious choice to remain numb to whatever is going on in my head. I can’t spiral. I don’t want to cripple myself any further. I cannot afford to feel sad again. I am compelled to feign ignorance so that I can find myself out of what I’ve orchestrated for myself.
“You want to go that way?”
“Whatever, I mean whatever you want.”
“Huh?”
“Any way is fine.We can go any way.”
Even if my eyes are brimming with tears, it doesn’t matter right? Liquid could not rationalise my emotions even if I wanted it to. I wipe away the tears using the back of my hand. I don’t even know if it’s myself or you that I’m hiding from anymore. I breathe. A half-hour has elapsed and we’ve come to the end of our walk. Somehow, without speaking, we have grown to find ‘peace’ with each other. Even if you’re distant now, at least we aren’t fighting. At least I am no longer spiraling, right? The expression on my face is completely blank. Yet as soon as I walk through the front door, I plaster a fake smile. It taunts me almost. Put on your facade. Continue, it implores me. I walk back to my room with urgency. The walls in themselves bring back details I am fighting to forget. I start to let my tears run free, as I had unknowingly, carelessly, let my emotions run free. An influx of energy builds up in me, its pace increasing with every passing second. I clench my fists and open them with inroads forming on my palm. I am virtually about to explode. I secure a grip on my head, squeezing it while listening closely for footsteps. I sense someone entering so I let my quivering hands fall to my sides. Normal, act normal. I quickly open my laptop, typing in the familiar characters. Continue. So I continue. Sentiments seep their way through but this time I am resolute about this. I will not let my emotions dominate me. As a tear rolls off my cheek, someone walks in. Please, leave. I cannot be vulnerable again. All I wanted was to drown it all out.
Light up the colours
Toh Milo
Photographs
Nat-nu Liew
Cherry Blossoms
diphyelleiarose
She stops, looking around. Cherry blossom trees line the pathway, in full bloom. Their blossoms billow in the wind, floating wisp-like in the breeze, landing littered all over the path in front of him. She smiles, a smile wistful of times gone by, of memories buried deep, of another dream, another hope, another life.
Cherry blossoms always bloomed on his birthday.
"It’s the season when strawberries are delicious," she remembers him saying, mouth stuffed full, a content smile on his face. Secretly, she thinks maybe that's the reason why he likes strawberries so much — that he, like the cherry blossoms, will bloom and flourish in life even more wonderfully and beautifully.
She misses him.
She misses his smile, the way his lips would curl up slightly at the corners, slowly, then all at once, a beautiful beam breaking out, lighting up his entire face. She misses the way he towers over her, how he would occasionally pat her head like she was a child, affectionate and teasing. She misses their springtime picnics, always set in a field of cherry blossoms, and always including strawberries. She misses having her hand in his, how the other would interlock her fingers in his own, his larger hand swallowing hers in his grasp.
She misses anything and everything about him.
As she looks once more at the cherry-blossom-filled scenery, her heart twinges with a dull ache. Maybe if things were different, life wouldn't have turned out this way. Maybe if things were different, she’d be walking down this flower road with him together. Maybe if things were different, she would still be his, and he, hers.
Sighing, she bends and picks up a blossom. It is beautiful, to say the least. Five-petaled, each for one of the years they had been together. Fuchsia pink in the middle, fading away to pastel-tinged white. Fading away, that was what she was scared of. That the distance between the two of them would get too hard to bear, and they would inevitably close their hearts to each other, forever, their memories of each other fading away like an episode of a spring dream.
She lets go, and the flower floats away on the wind, coming to rest a distance from her feet. Closing her eyes, she lets the past wash over her, once again immersed in the times they had spent together. Then, as if something broke within her, she stops, forcing her eyes open. Brushing away a tear, she steadies herself, pushing down the overwhelming urge to cry. And she walks again down upon the flower road, leaving behind the memories of the cherry blossoms.
still
wraieth
they, with stagnant breaths and bated desire
still the trembling soul in their hands
hunched upon their alabaster throne
they are naught shy of sorrow
chased by memory
they, shaking amidst chilled hope
reach towards a burning river
choked in an act of innocence
they are free in faint imitation
haunted by dreams
they, shaken with their stone gaze
swim through a shattered sky
consumed by deities unseen
they are mottled with anchored hope
chained by fear
they, cracked by illusory wonder
hungry for the face of absolution
encased in throes of mock ambition
they are an exalted vessel sunken
drowned by reverence
they, painted to ethereal grace
float on seraphic charms still
swathed in untainted allure
they are broken with pity
warped by faith
The Words You Left Behind
diphyelleiarose
The weight of the words I couldn’t say
The streaks of sunlight eclipsed by clouds of grey
The condolences, the apologies that now seem so far away
The wisps of luminance you left behind that slowly dissipate
When darkness descends upon the land
And there is nothing but the sound of my footsteps in the sand
When in this space there is nothing but me and my regret
I look up, up above,
To find you who has become a star
So close but yet so far
Together, but two worlds apart
The red line of fate binding you and me
Across life, across death and destiny
Your light that burns so brightly
I hold on tight to the dimming memory
When starlight fails to ignite
In the dark palette of the night sky
When the landscape turns dull, as if colourblind
The flowers that cannot exist without butterflies
But for the rest of my life
I will live for you, finishing your story with the words you left behind
Through the storms, through the pain, I will fight
To finish what you started, to follow to the end, our red line
And when it’s all over, when I’ve reached the end of my time
I will seek for you, crossing over the limits of shadows and light
And hand in hand we shall walk together through this flower path
Our story ended, the pages still, together at last.
Untitled
megan
i don’t have a redemption arc,
but maybe i need one.
maybe i can write my own.
maybe the galaxy is wide
with spinning stars
and the world is light
with gentle sparks
and maybe my heart
has recovered enough
to hold this story.
winter
sarah
snow-capped peaks rise high
ginger is sweet on my tongue
a fire crackles
autumn
sarah
leaves of rainbow fall
the gurgling river runs cold
the birds flee once more
summer
sarah
the sun burns the earth
parched throats cry out for water
dry breezes brush through reeds
spring
sarah
bright green leaves unfurl
a thousand cranes streak the sky
dawn has awoken