Dear Readers,
It’s been a year of sharing our stories, thoughts and feelings to each other and to you. A tumultuous year. An insightful year. A year of new discoveries and heartbreaks, of falling in love and in pain, and of understanding vulnerability and embracing it.
Thank you for your company. We’ve appreciated it.
Goodbye,
The Sisters of Diaspora
Dear Sister,
My feet tapping on the pavement in their natural rhythmicity, my side bag tapping gently against my side, I was glad to be freely strolling in this beautiful city – an activity that is now difficult for me to take for granted like most people seem to, like I once used to. Naturally, this became an opportunity for some soul searching. I thought, I felt, and I found.
I did not like what I found.
Whenever we don’t like what we find, we have this tendency to deny it. Whenever we can’t deny something any longer, we have this tendency to justify it. And whenever that too loses its appeal, then how do we reconcile ourselves with the reality?
What I want to do is lament over the lost me, somehow save her from the flames. The past has consumed her though, and the only one left to save is the current me: the me in whose soul I have found bitterness. This is not to diminish the value of sweet moments of pure joy that I have lately experienced, but once the awareness of bitterness seizes you, it cannot be forgotten and dismissed. (Trust me, I have tried.) Indeed, it seems it’s time for reconciliation….
Love,
The Resilient Virus.
PS: We should really think about making that blog announcement next week!
Dear Sister,
I’ve stumbled home just before the world splits apart, a moment before the sunrise that will break away the fragment of a nighttime I wish to hold in time forever. Suspended in an iced limbo in the heart of a scorching summer, my fingers reach out to touch a lover long lost to the lust of my limbs. Grasping desperately, heart aching and soul shrieking from the endless pain of it all, they at last find an answer.
She is drenched in lonely solitude, clothed by nothing more than the flimsy off-white drapery of yesterday’s departure. Her hands are pale, fingertips permanently stained with hues of blues, her entirety trembling from the coldness of her aloneness.
Shivering, she whispers my name.
And I, somehow rendered incapable of resisting, surrender myself to her.
Sincerely Yours,
The Vertiginous Wallflower
Dear Sister,
Do you know that feeling of having something great going for you but not letting yourself experience it because of a mixture of ungratefulness (not fully realizing what you have) and paranoia (worrying that it will disappear), and in so doing, destroying that great something? Well, it sucks.
There isn’t much good to come out of ungratefulness. But a slight dose of paranoia – let’s call it healthy skepticism – may have its place. It’s adaptive, enabling you to foresee disaster before it strikes and hence, to prepare for it. The only problem is when it crosses the threshold from such logical caution to illogical lamentations that obliterate your peace.
Then again, some would say our struggle to embrace the good while being adequately prepared for the bad is one of those quintessential struggles of humanity. What do you think of that thought?
Love,
The Resilient Virus.
Dear Sister,
Shit man, I didn’t know.
Sorry.
Simple miscommunication, really.
You say one thing, I hear another.
How these things always seem to go.
Sincerely Yours,
The Vertiginous Wallflower
Dear Sister,
Festivities often bring out the best of spirits in me! Here’s hoping that everyone had a good day of celebration on Friday / Saturday, and now I present some thoughts:
***
I feel the fall
and it is rough, this tumble
Gravity is a force too strong, free fall
Then drag and friction, all this resistance
but the real hurt
The heart-stopping, gut-wrenching shattering
is upon
Impact
with the Earth
From whence I come, to which I belong
***
Love,
The Resilient Virus.
Dear Sister,
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve forgotten how to write.
Because my fingers are having a hard time drawing letters they have always traced, scribbling words they were once incapable of misspelling, creating literature they could never question.
But I realize that this isn’t the first time
this tongue has felt so foreign.
That my struggle with poetry and prose
is perpetual. It is a reoccurring theme in the nightmare
that can be my creative expression,
and it always stems from moments of significant change:
I am becoming a new me.
I can sense her
infiltrating my bloodstream,
possessing my mind,
overtaking my limbs.
I am being rewired and reconstructed.
Because, you see,
I am standing at the edge,
applying the finishing touches of a final chapter,
sketching the inception of a brand new novel.
I am inside my body
and I can feel
that she is morphing
into the girl
that will become
Sincerely Yours,
The Vertiginous Wallflower
Dear Sister,
You, a Wallflower, seem to see the invisible bonds that shackle me
We wait, Vertiginous, for them to break, for me to break free
The seconds tick by in their regular rhythmicity
Tomorrow is a promise, full of possibility
But all the todays are amounting to nothings
Is it wise then, to imagine a future of kings?
Living often means wielding hope against misery
Yet false hope is a dangerous potential trajectory
And now I wonder what can be saved
For look at me: I am left altered, changed
Love,
The Resilient Virus.
Dear Sister,
I am prone to a feeling of falling, endlessly:
gravity exists everywhere but in the dimension I am alive in.
This is a vertigo that cannot be explained.
You are prone to falling into the arms of misfortune:
home should be anywhere but the hospital bed you are trapped in.
This is a misery that cannot be understood.
But you always fight because
it is the only thing you
have ever known to do
and your limbs
are only comfortable when they
are practicing
resilience.
Sincerely Yours,
The Vertiginous Wallflower
Dear Sister,
You are resilient.
Sincerely Yours,
The Vertiginous Wallflower
sisters of diaspora 