It is best to write

with a fountain pen, with ink --


as warm as your blood.

She was August, I was February
months apart, but tied by the same number
Eleven, like a thread linking distant days,  
like Pepero sticks she loved,  
thin, sweet, and gone too fast.  

She was the girl who handed me slippers in the rain,  
who lent me her red, green, and white files,  
who sat in the third row while I sat in the first,  
but somehow, we always found our way to the same place.  

She was fries on one eventful canteen day,  
laughing about weight neither of us really cared about.  
She called herself Snorlax,  
but to me, she was Eevee  
full of possibilities, always shifting, always bright.  

She sent me memes, told me to wake up,  
to sleep early
to try again tomorrow
She saw Natsume in me
though I never watched Gakuen Alice to know why
Maybe she saw the quiet fire I never named.  

She was there,  
and then she wasn’t.  
Distance, time, then silence
life pulled us apart like a ribbon unraveling.  
But somewhere
in the space between eleven and eleven
she still lingers.

I remember the rain, heavy on our umbrellas,  
the scent of wet earth as we walked,  
silent, yet knowing.  
You handed me the slippers first,  
a small kindness that opened a password door in my heart.  

In our classroom filled with murmurs and pages turning,  
you sat in the last row,  
your glasses catching the fluorescent light and time,  
your hairband keeping time with your movements
You were a tomboy, you said,  
but to me, you were softer than the world allowed.

A quiet building, an empty hallway,  
fries shared between words that meant everything and nothing
The pull of something unspoken  
led us up the stairs, past the classrooms where fans hummed  
to a moment that rewrote us.  

Afterward, we laughed in daylight,  
separate yet tangled,  
our conversations shifting between equations and longing.  
You had friends; I had you in the quiet.  
And then time carried us away,  
first to different cities, then to different lives.  

You reappeared in pixels and midnight messages,  
a voice from the past steadying me in my new world
But distance is a slow tide,  
pulling even the strongest memories apart
I spoke too much, stupidly shared too much, or maybe just enough,  
and you drifted again,  
this time with no promise of return.  

Now, I hold you in flashes
the rain, the fries, the hush of a stairwell,  
the echo of a name I can no longer address.

When it seems as though
The human coil is unravelling
And we have peaked
Our REM of creativity
And we seem awash
In half-baked positive negativity
And the whole world seems
To be drowning in self-induced sleep
While even the watchers
Seem to have both eyes closed...

Turn this thing around
And open bloodshot eyes.
Stop your own unravelling
And delve deeper into creativity.
Strengthen the bonds
Of your own exclusive and non-exclusive spheres.
Allow your peaceful world to dawn
Even though the outside world drowns
In its own exclusive and non-exclusive pool of fears.

Three things I can’t live without…

Coffee, Creativity & Church

For coffee fuels my creativity;
My creativity comes from my worth –
A worth I only learnt of, going to church.