I fell in love once.

I do not know when it happened, there were no borderlines, no markings, no specific datelines, no receipts. I think it would have been a lot easier to forget and move on if it were something simple like that — like a shallow love at first sight.

Because eyes are quick to forget, a moment passes and it's already a faded Polaroid, back in the cobwebs of your mind.

But the heart never forgets. A sliver of a deja vu and memories from decades ago come barrelling back, playing so vividly before your eyelids like a broken record player that you cannot turn off.

For me, It was all the same. That feeling was slow and developed over time, all until my heart got enmeshed and the feeling became etched into my bones and vessels and lungs permanently.

It was a blur, a soft hue that blended into the time. It was all hearts in tandem, the sound of breaths when there was nothing else to say, smiles too bright to be forgotten and a touch callous enough to engrave its mark on my hands.

All I am now, is a guy with bruised knuckles because I like to punch walls too much and am trying to pry off from my brain a memory that's already a part of my blood and being.

Oh dear, eyes are quick to forget, hearts aren't.

•••

Either everything in this life happens too slow or too fast. You break and you heal. Forgive and forget. Lose and learn. If you fall, you're bound to root again and inevitably rise.

And grow, you must always grow. Because between rising and growing, there is a lifetime of incongruity.

Rising is bittersweet. The thrill of quaffing pint after pint, burning absinthe down your throat. Seeing the world become smaller and smaller as you climb the hierarchy pyramid.

And growth, on the contrary, it is soft. It humbles you, it changes you in a more subtle way.

Rising is grand. All glory and gore. Falling is also a journey in itself.

Rise, fall, up, down. Anything beats standing still.

Standing still on a red light signal glowing against the night washed concrete streets on a busy boulevard of broken dreams that reek of risks not taken.

With your meaningless leather bag and a styrofoam cup in your left hand filled with steaming dark coffee that gives a hazy reflection of yourself as you wait for the bus to arrive for your regular nine to five job.

That clerk life, plane jane straight lane life, is stillness.

You suppress the pulsating questions at the back of your mind. How different would it have been if I had, just once, followed the most reckless of my dreams?

What if I had deviated from the straight line?

And I lived that question until it constructed a cemetery in my mind.

I chased my dreams, caught them and displayed them in a jar like they were vibrant butterflies. The splendour of all my accomplishments on luminous display.

I was at the top of it, homogenised into the world of fame. And fame is immortal. Immortal yet fleeting. Like a fire, you throw everything into it, your life, your guts, your dignity, your desires, all. Only to keep it burning for just another second. Just another second, you even throw your own self into it.

And with the smallest breeze, it extinguishes. From a dim pilot, to a flicker, to mere ashes.

Hairline cracks appear and everything is gone.

Fame was just an inverted hourglass, sand sifting down the narrow vessel. It has you begging for a pause, the smallest pause. Begging that the time would freeze, and grant you a small break.

And I did get a break. Time did freeze.

And I never could gauge how life altering it would be, how incinerating. How badly I needed it.

Until our tangents met.

Until our tangents met at the ruthless intersection of youth. Hazy and out of the ordinary. It was inevitable, we were bound to collide. Like the sun crashes into the horizon, the sky and the clouds, the ocean against the shore, we were bound to crash.

And we did.

She crash landed into the graveyard of my broken dreams. We collided and I lost my heart on the impact.

A warm breeze whispered through the chimes hanging on the door of the library. The door bursted open and light seeped in.

That's how we met.

Before that, life was just organized. It was simpler to connect dots and calculate the slope of my instability. Life was easier to break into pieces and split into separate folders with sticky note labels.

One part labelled loss, because I had spent three quarters of my life walking hand in hand with loss. I'd lied on its lap and let it run fingers through my hair. It was full of crumpled papers balls with unappealing song lyrics filling trash cans.

The other part; tears. Full of disinfectant riddled white sheets of hospital beds. Discarded cotton balls clotted in crimson blood. Electrocardiograms, the same beeping sound that I would give anything, anything in the world to keep from becoming a straight line of stillness.

I had suffered. To the point where I'd become a vessel of self hatred and continuously auctioned bits of myself to bring a smile on another face because it certainly looked beautiful on everyone but myself.

I apologized, and smiled as I did. I had grown thin enough to slip into the unnoticeable cracks of anxiety, folded myself into origami, continuously creasing my edges to become small enough to blur into the background.

I gave and gave and gave until I was left with a hollow shell.

And then, she came in.

Much like a lightening bolt. A hurricane trapped in a chrysalis. A fractured memory of ocean whose salty air I could taste from miles inland. Dark disheveled hair, an electric smile, moonlit doe eyes and a callous touch.

The straight line of my being fluctuated.

Loving her was like panning for gold, sifting through arsenic with a lure of shimmer.

She often said there was no beauty within her.

But with her, it was the first time I felt connected to someone without feeling the burden of chains weighing my down. Rather, it was like opening my arms wide against the fierce breeze on a skyscraper. The whistle of the wind loud enough to muffle the sound of any unwanted contradictions screaming nonsense into my ears.

And once I got to know her, it felt like I had never not known her. It was less of getting to know her and more of remembering her.

She often said there was no beauty within her.

But with her, life became less nine to five weekdays and more lazy Sundays, morning light and sun pouring in. Her sleepy, sheepish smiles. Going down the street to pick up the news, flowers and milk. The season of cherries and the warm air. Her greeting at the doorway and sound of piano notes filling the room. You could tell, without looking, the spring was in full bloom.

My fingers stopped shaking, my smile stopped faking. All the mess cleared up, hourglasses stopped and my open arms suddenly were not meant for the wind alone to embrace.

She often said there was no beauty within her.

I never understood why.

But life, sadly, loves to take away the one thing you're infuriatingly and inexplicably drawn to.

Because that's the crazy thing about people with beautiful, beautiful smiles.

They leave the deepest scars.

But amidst all that, I was always sure of that feeling. The feeling of open arms, so achingly soft, so chaotically unsure, being ready to accept anything that life throws your way. Like watching the world catch fire and yearning to be so insanely in love with it.

It was, without a doubt, absolutely and insanely, without a breath wasted, without a millisecond of regret -

eu pho ri a.

She often said there was no beauty within her —

But there was certainly no beauty without.