T/Slice of life/Because I've listened to Tom Odell too much/Inspired by stories I 'accidentally' collected at café, on the radios, anywhere.
for my muse, who is as far as the stars in the sky and the other side of the bridges that we’ve burned
If he could put all the blame on Tom Odell’s heart-wrenching “Smiling all the way back home”, he would. For meeting that person was the best thing that had ever happened to him in a long while. She made him able to see stars, through all layers of clouds and polluted smoke. She made him a believer in wonders and beautiful things. She made him walk without looking down, with his in the cloud and his feet off the ground.
She made him fall.
She wasn’t the villain. No. She wasn’t all about taking and he wasn’t all about giving. He was too smart and too realistic for such fantasies. He took her time, her smiles, her gazes, her sharp-witted remarks, her burning touches, he took all and claimed all of them his. It was a ‘win-win’ kind of association, as he used to tell her lovingly when they were stargazing together. Guessed he made her see the stars too.
It was the ‘win-win’ kind of association that pulled things apart. Maybe he was too busy seeing stars to realise that underneath the ‘win-win’ association was endless efforts to make things work, to compromise, to accept the other’s faults and if possible, to learn to love them until they were no longer faults. Maybe he was head over heels that he overlooked things the could not compromise with in the first place.
The same went for her.
The cracks appeared, at all the time and in all the spaces. Her gazes sparked doubts, his touches turned cold. Her remarks turned sarcastic, his smiles became smirks. Their dreams-filled kingdom slowly turned into waste land, “out where the dreams all hide, out where the dreams don’t blow”. They were too stubborn. It was a shame they found it out too late.
Smoke filled the sky.
There was no surprise they soon found they were standing at opposite ends of the bridge. It was neither long or short, length did not matter. It was the will to cross over that counted. In fairytale endings, the star-crossed lovers, despite all of their flaws and differences and selfishness and madness, met the other half way. For them, there was no half way to meet, because they did not need them to begin with. There was no return, all the bridges were burned.
They grew out of fairytales. He saw the city sky as it was, polluted and uninteresting. She crossed bridges in literal sense, hurried and dull.
Their memories were put in a box, buried deep in a faraway land. Forgotten. Untouched.
Saigon
22/10/2022
nyclovers
About featured image: Love Letters (series), 2014 by Jiang Zhi, b.1971, Yuanjiang, Hunan Jiang Zhi's wife, whose name meant 'Orchid', died at the age of thirty-seven. As a tribute to her and to "all who loved and are loved", he began to dousing orchids and other flowers with alcohol and setting them alight. His pictures capture the normally imperceptible instant when flame and flower will soon be ash, but in dream space of the photograph death can still be averted, and the flower emerges phoenix-like from the flame.
The T.A.R.D.I.S. 