Mother 🕯️

notice how it's "with mama" and not "with papa". even in a fake cutesy tumblr scenario, she took the fucking kids. <- what I imagine i'd be posting as a divorced dad on tumblr

I don't really visit my grandparents. They live in an rural area of our city, only really accessible to those with cars, motorcycles, or other personal transportation vehicles. It's not really somewhere you can commute to, so i only ever got to visit them when my parents did, which, to be honest, wasn't a lot.

So, when i visited them recently, during the summer after high school graduation and after not visiting for almost 7 years, it was only safe to assume that a lot would have changed.

Though, i didn't really expect that that place, where i found the greatest comforts in, would change completely.

The old bamboo house, which once stood high on its stilts, its floor creaking with each person it housed, was now flush on the ground, built from concrete, and much, much smaller. What used to be able to house our 20 something extended family for a collective lunch, could now barely fit five people, and even that would be pushing it.

The concrete 'chair' next to their cacao tree where we used to sit and tell stories or fix our fishing poles, had vanished along with the star fruit tree me and my cousins used to climb despite the many warnings from our parents.

The fishpond where me and my brother first learned to fish and boat in, had become overgrown with weeds, the water and its fishes long gone, along with our discarded poles, tossed haphazardly in god knows where. Even the pigsty and the pigs i used to feed had disappeared.

They kept their chickens and their dogs, but aside from them, everything had changed.

I wanted to cry.

As i sat on the porch of their new house, i couldn't help but long for the comfort of what i had known all those years ago.

This place, although it was still property of my grandparents', had become almost foreign to me.

Living forever in you!!

DUALITY of LOVE and HATE.

The thought of you begins the rapid beating of my anxiety ridden heart.

It thumps hard like a stampede on a battlefield of a war that is the wreckage of my ruined mind,

Torn asunder between two sides.

Love

Some days, I miss the person i wished you were,

and sometimes I still feel a platonic love, not for you, but for who I hoped you could be.

Hate

Most days, I hate you more than I could ever care for you again,

and the thought of a better you is tainted by the unforgivable memories of your deceit and the many times you lied to me.

See, the duality of love and hate are incomprehensible emotions to feel

I conceal these complexities that I've still yet to find the appropriate words to verbalise as the vernacular of hatred is foreign to my romantic heart, made fluent in the language of love.

And despite the spiteful lies of my tongue. I find that however much I may pray to truly despise you to my core.

With all my being, there is no denying that this heart is not a dictatorship meant to be ruled over by one emotion anymore

but an organ crafted in love and dipped in the deepest fountain of your most vulnerable tears,

That reminds me that you were once human. Before you became the origin of evil in my fears You were once mine, in some way or form, although not perfect. I remember who you were and I empathise

I truly despise my enraged heart, filled to the brim with furiosity that still somehow harbours the capacity to care for the devil that created it.

This coincide between feelings is a testament to say that the way in which one views the trauma of their assault is not a one size fits all. But rather, a puzzle of emotions that may not always come together in a way you see fit.

tragedy

we finish this together

Nostalgia and the Nicer Things ⭐ 'I think today is just a good day' Prints | Ko-fi | Patreon | Bluesky

- Clementine Von Radics

i feel so completely directionless