Saturday, February 28, 2009

I wish people are as happy as they look in photographs. Big white smiles, bright eyes. Class photos. Group photos. Lovers' photos. Happy parties. Silly moments. Perfect poses. The confidence of the future, of forever.

It pains me, that every picture taken is that of who we used to be and what we used to have. We were gone the moment the flash went off and blinded our eyes as we froze, our tailor-made pleasing smiles turning into plastic and helplessly stuck on our bewildered faces. There you go, a flat glossy one-dimensional surface of the rose-tinted past.

I prefer the pictures I take with my eyes and store in my mind- They are still moving. Perhaps they have now been discoloured and distorted, but they are still moving vividly and they are still mine. Not boxed up inside a rectangle or framed up. The eyes are still blinking, the lips are still curving slowly and the cheeks glow warmly as the hands flutter and rearrange the hair self-consciously... Alive everywhere.

And then there are the things which pictures hint at but never do manage to capture. The brief intensity of eye contact. The tenderness and firmness of a hand over a hand. The desperation and desire of lips on lips in the simmering dark. Slow momentous breaths. Hot breaths. Irregular jagged breaths. The lingering taste of each other, of each other's candy-coloured dreams; of the parts where the wings were ripped apart from the body.

The rawness of bliss.

The weight
of a heart
beating,
beating,
begging not to be broken,
in each new bursting intake of fresh air.

3 comments:

xiaocangshu said...

And at the same time a reminder of so many things that had not been.

From Alma Alexander's The Embers of Heaven

Anonymous said...

so poetic!!!!

Anonymous said...

haha, you have an uncanny way of expressing these thoughts just the way i would like them to, but i never seem to express them as well as you do...haha!