The Atrocity of Buried Love and One Rainy Day

You buried the romantic in the dirt and stomped on the ground with your foot to make sure the ground was intact enough not to cave in and unearth that part of you. You swallowed the sun and her star sisters in handfuls of angst. The green land turned rusty brown. You cracked the moon in half and submerged each part on opposite ends of the gaping sea. You planted flowers in the dark and they adjusted to that. You planted trees with fruits that burst their pulps at night’s peaks and walked on the wild ground, thumping at your chest to lay to rest the heart that refused to stay dead, for your heart still danced when it saw a flower, it still gasped when you swam in the sea and laughed when you spilled the juice of fruit on your shirt. You went back to the dry ground where the romantic ought to be dead. Astounded, you found flowers had grown there too, yet you never planted them. What you buried was already dead. You cut the flowers in a wild rage and set furnace upon the entire land. You will live on the water. You had a boat and gallons of fresh water, and in the ocean were fish which you could eat. The sea carried you from east to west; no land, no disaster. Yet, your heart was not at rest when the seagull landed on your deck with a song in its open chest. You were unguarded and attacked by loveliness and so carried away by the bird, that when it finally flew away, your ship was on land, and you were mad, again.

The contrast from where you stood scared you a little; the sea so lapis lazuli, the land so bare, still burning, yet it had been months since your departure. You anchored your boat and sat on the shore watching the flames do to the land what they did to your romantic heart. Even in the sight of blazing fire, your heart still danced like the ocean waves. You were tired of running away, but who could you tell? Damn this land; always sad. The atrocity of love, the atrocity of your burying burning hand, the atrocity of being alive; better if you were dead, best if you were never born all together. But you’re here where the sea is kissing land! You had a spirit of defiance, blazing like the fire. You had flesh that could burn, flesh that could turn to ash and away you go back to your spiritual homeland. You herd there was no sorrow in this place, not a single sad day. You walked into the fire. Your flesh did not burn away.

The ground was no warmer than an ordinary day, the flame no hotter than a warm breeze. You travelled further from your boat where life was fresh and not crippling, and it seemed as though the fire pushed you further down its throat by some strange heartbreaking allure, until you chanced upon a lone tree, still standing, still green. Baffled by this mystery, you sat under it, but upon touching the tree, your palm was burnt, reddening as minutes passed. You hissed. A fruit fell on your head and split. You hadn’t had one in weeks. You took a gluttonous bite of it and was hit with regret immediately as you threw it in a temper, like how a storm throws lightning on a tree. Blood is what it leaked, so bitter as if it was outraged by your touch, or perhaps by the mere act of existing. It tasted like a homicidal revenge. Where it fell you looked beside it, and there you saw the beaded bracelet you thought you’d lost at sea. You turned around and looked at the tree, the ground that had refused to cave in. It was sick, you were sick.

Though it could grow in the dark, though it could grow in the middle of a fire, it still needed the light to turn its fruits from bitter to sweet. Why do things revolt against death? Don’t they know that to live is to live in never-ending dread? Why could this land not remain barren? Why is it that where you buried the poet is the only place where life is not dead? The sweet kiss of death has not found your lips yet.

You told your grief to mourn grief, to eat itself like a snake to its tail. To hell with the tree, you said, and begun to walk back to the shore. But suddenly, the ground was scorching with a vivid passion, and only around the tree was the ground scorch free. Nothing heavenly rose where you sat for you had swallowed everything. Nothing sweet grew to nourish you. If you were to make it back to the sea alive, you had to leave tout de suite, but how? You can’t run away now that the fire was not sparing you.

You thought your body was enough to carry you through the waves of life, but everywhere you turned, all you thought about was love. The forced smiles could hide that fact, and the clothes on your back too, but whatever you thought you buried, its fragments remained in your heart. You wondered how flowers could still grow in a place so battered, so ugly, yet an ugly pot does not prevent a flower from blossoming. Life survives winter, and past it, summer comes, stringing along behind it the next winter. Your soul still wants to sing, your heart still wants to flap its wings; why could that be?

You threw your confessions into the fire, “Please forgive my absence, dear buried treasure.” You turned to the tree and took a bite of another fruit. Still bloody bitter. The fire came closer, you stepped back. “What do you want from me?” you cried to no one, no thing, no space that glowed with the hope you were longing for. The fire was teasing at the edge of your feet. Your back was an inch away from the ark of the tree. There was no mercy for arsonists. In the oven-like heat, your teary eyed pleas evaporated in the heat. You had no wings. No stars to talk to before your skin was melted into the earth. No fulfilling goodbye to the world. It was pitch black from your eyes to your heart. All you could do was regret and cry. Were you really not going to die in peace, with no healing to this gnawing life disease? No sun, no sea?

Your hands met with the brown burning land as you begun to dig up the ground where the ruins of your heart lay. If you were to die, then you might as well die with all of your parts. Too close were you from losing your true love language, too close that you would have died that day. No words came out of you as you dug, just shrill cries, yet when finally you found your missing part, light was restored on earth just like that.

It had been a while since you died, and when you did, you set a devastating fire against love because of the lack of body to body heat. You had wanted a forever thing from your last lover, and when they left you forever, you said to hell with this love thing! But the darkness never brought you anything sweet, and all that did not burn in the heat of love, burned to kill.

You came together in the light of love as heaven was led by a celestial choir, and the point of love was never to turn stones into gold, but to love the stone and love the gold. The sun was smiling a teary smile, the fruit now orange and bursting with sweet juice. Like magic, plants begun to reach for the sky, vines curling around branches, flowers bobbing in the winds tease, nature happy and singing. Singing with it was your heart saying, “I want this for us and I want it with you.”

You laughed a shy laugh at the thought of letting yourself being touched again, being smiled at and looked at in a desirous way. The child you once were wanted to come out and play. The elder you are becoming said it is always a good day to play. The spirit inside, yet beyond your body, said the you beyond skin and bones is a dimension beyond space time. That love had always been by your side even after they tossed you aside; remember the heart flutters at the sight of birds and flowers? That is love. Remember the sea’s welcoming hug? That is love. Remember your panic when you first came back? That regret of harm? That digging up? That is love. To love, you have given a body to live, from your being’s joy; experience things. To your heart, you have given a happy ending by letting love in.

Loneliness grieved you as you walked towards the sea, barefoot and jolly, audaciously happy as a bumblebee sucking a sweet treat of honey. As you walked it hit you that in is not the only way love moves, that out was an option too. That to wait for love to come make green your plants would be to delay the nourishment of your heart, but to come from love and into the world with an open chest like the bird, would be to grow your forest thick and green and contagiously spread from being to being like osmosis with a hint of magic. A cup, a tank, -a world of magical beings loving on one another like the prophet loves his God or the lover loves to love. The rain met you fearless on your way. A storm split your boat so you jumped off and swam. Winter came and you remained calm for you knew that winter was not here to stay. When you travelled, you stopped running away, you stopped trying to find a home in a place, for now you knew that home was the feeling you carried with you on your way. You belong to you, I belong to me.

Your hands are now raised as if to praise a rainy day. You let the drops cover your head to toe, your lips to your fingertips, no eyelash is left behind in this wetting. You have faced the bolts-streaked sky in a smile. Your pulse is throbbing in a thundering day, and it is not because you do not fear that you do not fall, but because you have fallen many times before that you are able to stand in the middle of a storm and sing, “Oh happy day.”