Author: Lily

Days in Cambridge

On most days,
you can find me in the 02138
working away;
taking a walk at lunchtime;
listening to the river flow,
the people come and go,
the city’s wild geese growl.

This land is not my native land,
but I’ve grown enough love
to call it home. Home: a memory
carved and buried deep inside me,
not unlike the aftermath of a surgery
splitting one wide open: examined, explored, and altered,
in one way or another,
before being sewn back altogether.

We are those sewn-back identities
immersed into a society of multi-way split,
taking part and taking apart,
looking for ourselves while looking for love,
calling it by different names,
seeking someone who is unlike us
and yet is exactly us
in the things that we deem matter the most
to the happiness that is meant to last longer
than the time it takes to start everything over.

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graduation

them college days
so far away
as if time did no time in memories
leaving behind only yesterdays

you are young, oh, you are young;
the world is in your hands;
you are fierce.
you live as if
you will be back yet again.

what do i tell you but smiles
and wishes upon you the soaring high
of spirit, of passion, of desire,
for we all are only here, like this, once.

every what-if belongs to a time
you have not yet known. i love you,
i wish to see you grow
among your people
where you can be children
and you can become adults.

each of life’s graduations
is but a reminder that you are still riding the current –
sometimes along it, sometimes against it,
and you will fall and you will get up.
and your hearts will survive
being broken a million times.
you’ll feel like it’s all over a million times,
you’ll feel like you’ve found what you’re meant to find a million times.
and one day it will all fall into place –
the puzzle you have been solving
without knowing it even exists.
you’ll look back to this day
and nothing in the world can replace
the smiles and tears under every cap
the way the wind caressing your gowns
as you say goodbye to the moments you will never forget.

so smile, graduates, and remember how you feel today,
because you’ve lived a kind of love that only exists
because everyone else has also been in it,
whether or not you have truly known one another.
the feeling palpitating within your chests
as you walk in lines, as your names are called, as you listen to the last speech, as you throw your caps up in the air –
feel it everywhere, let it stay with you forever,
because one day,
you’ll be where i am now,
and wish nothing else but to be able to be around
my graduating class
all together again at last
before yet another start
of another life.

It used to be easier

It used to be easier
to live with the worries that hung over our head,
the dreams that haunted us to sleep,
the troubles that we brought upon ourselves via others’,
the indecisiveness that somehow made things better.

It used to be easier
to live in the moment with its optimistic view of future
the comfort of not having to grow up
(in the cursed sense of the phrase),
the hours that hastily simmered
into the corner of an eye above a beautiful smile.

It used to be easier
to talk about love without love,
to feel too much love to talk,
to look for things that were not meant to be found,
to forget things that we would one day regret not having remembered.

It used to be easier
to feel alive, for a single moment of livelihood
was enough to expand across time,
keeping us busy, pushing blood through the veins.
Whatever happened, we knew what we had,
and were happy with only so little.

It used to be easier
to be someone else,
always asking, “Who am I?”
in a curious manner – or, rather, careless,
because there was no I yet
for the question to take itself seriously.

Now is not harder than before.
Only that we will always be longing for
the unknown of a known past,
and the trajectory of a past unknown.

mentalities

in between the two mentalities,
I wondered how to let go,
and I would fall right onto the abyss below.

nobody has ever told me why this could happen:
being happy and being upset about the things
that have not occurred.
maybe this is how I have to walk,
right in between, looking
into my heart, where it remained
intact, like a dream no one has had
during the seamless nights.

I cannot remember how you looked like,
how your lips almost touched mine, how
we could not let ourselves trapped.

why did I let us walk away from each other?
one day, you stood at the other realm of my mind,
and I was here,
never again feeling that I could
love you the way I did
one more time.