Love me while I am alive

Because tragic poems are just someone's sufferings glorified by someone else.

I guess I am just a picture wall of memories, of people I once loved and people who once loved me. Some are gone. Some stayed. Some disappeared in a blink. Some drifted away silently, achingly. Where there used to be talks and texts all day every day, updates within hours, years of that, there is just silence now. And to be honest, that sucks. And so do the nicknames. Whenever you are reminded of them. I still don’t dare to change the contacts back to the real names. I think things are easier when there is a conflict before the falling apart. A landslide would’ve been much better than the slow erosion, much kinder.

I felt it on a spiritual level when Emma said, “I’m not being a footnote,” for I’ve never wanted to be a footnote in the story of someone else’s life either. I don’t want to be a martyr. I don’t believe in the beauty of one-sided love. I like practicality. I like clarity. Because poetry looks good on paper, it makes you feel things for a while, some poems might stay with you forever. You may praise the poets, build memorials in their names, publish their verses on gold-leafed pages, sing the lines, appreciate the metaphors, find meaning in blooming flowers and drying leaves and rivers and forests from dusk till dawn. But the reality is that the poets don’t care. Because they are dead. They did not experience this might; they died in their misery. Tragic poems are just someone’s sufferings glorified by someone else.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved poems. I admit I still have a thing for words. But I will not romanticise my own doom. I will not sing about my ache like it’s the most romantic and heroic of the fables. I might be a poet, but I won’t die to be appreciated after I am gone. I won’t kill myself to be a cherished relic. If someone’s going to love me, they better do it while I am alive, while I still breathe.

I am not a goddess. Patience is certainly not my forte. I won’t be put on a pedestal and expected to preach nobility from an altar — too high for people to see, too superficially hypocritical for people to relate to, and too isolated for me to escape. I would much rather be in the crowd, on the other side of the theatrics. I don’t want to be the star act of the night. I don’t want to play pretend. I want to experience my life raw and real.

I am certainly not a fairy tale princess. I can’t roam around picking rags and eating leftovers expecting a fairy godmother to magically emerge and change my life with a glass slipper. I can’t wait for a Prince Charming to choose me based on the fact that a slipper fits. That slipper is made of glass. It would shatter. It won’t survive the weight of expectations, of preconceived perceptions formed in a two-hour interaction and then bestowed along with the fragile shoe. The shards of that shattered glass would slice my hands if I even tried to pick them up, and the sight of blood and tears won’t be poetic. It would be just tragic and utterly painful.

I am not to be tamed like a cat someone found on the street, picked up and kept because it looked cute and felt soft. I am not a snow globe someone saw on an expensive shelf and bought only to display on another shelf, to boast about how beautiful and unique and expensive it was.

I won’t be a possession. I won’t be an experiment. I won’t be an exhibition.

I am clay. Grounded and soft and cold, a little dry, a little dirty, a little delicate, yet so adaptable, so real. Art with endless possibilities. I am not made to be seen from behind glass. I am to be touched and felt and experienced for what I am. Not what I can be. Not what I am perceived to be. Not what I am expected to be. But what I am.

Raw and real.

I would rather choke on the terrible truths with a smile than gulp the sweet poison of vague promises. I refuse to become a symbol, a project, an object, someone’s redemption arc, an aesthetic choice. Don’t abstract me. Don’t turn me into a lesson, a trophy, a before-and-after story, or a quiet thing people admire from a safe distance.

A glass slipper is fragile. It was never meant for walking.

I want something that survives movement, intensity, friction, stories that aren’t heroic and days that aren’t cinematic. And I would die alone rather than settle for anything less.