Empty promises

How do you hold people to their promises?
Words on a paper can fade,
Rings on your hand don’t fit like they used to,
So can anyone tell me, how do you make it last?

You said, I won’t ever have to be alone anymore,
But you left, and now I don’t sleep anymore.
I don’t cry, I don’t call; I don’t wait for you at all,
But the nights keep coming back,
Reminding me how empty promises can be,
And every night seems harder to pass.

Loved me forever, didn’t you?
I never knew your ‘forevers’ are this short,
Now that forever’s over,
This eternity of being alone, doesn’t seem to end at all.

How can I trust something like this?
Pit hope against hope, dream against dream,
How can I unsee how empty promises can be?

The Used To Be’s

Sometimes I scroll down the social network page and look at all the people I used to know.

There’s the brother who played sports and stayed away from girls when I left. Now he calls me for advice regarding girls. There’s the picture of my extended family, all huddled together in the frame that holds faces I haven’t met yet. There are the people I used to know in high school. Some I have always talked to, some barely said enough words. I see them married, engaged to people I don’t even know. I see some of them making plans that I never got around to hear. I see pictures of how they look and try to find a similarity I can trace back to.

And sometimes I can, but those don’t happen very often. Often I just reach across the screen and touch the pictures, the messages, the stories they share and wish to know them once again. Instead I fist my hands and pull away, close my eyes and stop to wonder. It doesn’t matter anyway. Lives go on and that is true for me as well.

And then I wonder again, do they think the same thing about me? Do they look at my picture and see someone different? Do they wonder if I still sound the same, smile the same, cry the same? Do they feel that my life had taken me so very far from them that the only thing they can do now is gaze at someone who used to be?

But then, I guess no one likes to word their grievances. So we all go back to our social networks, scroll through endless names and go on pretending, avoiding how very separate we have all become. Perhaps even forgetting, the very things that once connected us all.

Wave Of Loneliness

Sometimes this loneliness hits me like a strong wave. It knocks the breath out of me with the sheer force of it. I am gasping, drowning. I know the wave will pass and I will be okay. Tomorrow I will love the ocean again. But in that instant it hits me so hard that all I want to do is curl into a ball. Or hold someone until the wave passes. As always, the only thing holding me in place is myself.

Loneliness is the echo of my screams. Reaching out only to grasp the endless waters. Loneliness is crying, but no one can see because in that moment the tears on my face looks like the waves that had washed me over. And no one stops to see my eyes are not red because of all the water that had gone in, but because of the ones that had flown out. Loneliness is watching my patience run out and bitterness take its place. I want to rant, to let someone know that I am giving up. Loneliness is knowing no one really cares even if I do.

And I know, I can’t be the only one going through this. So many people, perhaps this very second, is getting hit by this same wave. But when I am getting the breath knocked out of my body, I am not thinking about saving the others.

I am not the victim, the white knight, the damsel is distress here. I am just suffering for a moment. Tomorrow it will pass. It always does.

Tonight I am nothing; tomorrow this night will be nothing.

So if you ask me, know this, the thing about waves is it recedes. It goes back, away… away until the ocean swallows it whole. So tomorrow I will pick up the seashells left at its wake. After all, there is beauty to be found even in the tread of pain.