choirsoftheheavens

I always want to save my friends. five he is the one I know I should steer clear from; he has done too many things in ignorance but my tongue keeps forming words too soft to do anything but excuse him. all I can think is he holds himself far too stiff to be natural. I wonder if he has ever been held [up] by anyone other than himself. - four she tells us in the morning, just before assembly, that some days she dreams of burning the school. but then she says, “don’t worry. I’ll tell you the date when I get it settled so you can be far away when it happens.” I don’t know if we’re supposed to feel comforte

She will leave him, quick so she will not look back. She will move so fast she won’t even take the time to shake the dust from her shoes, Because even if she cannot be with him, she cannot condemn him. But she will stop beneath the chestnut tree. For a time, it will remind her of what she has thrown away, of how she can still save him if she is willing to sacrifice eternity. But she will save him differently, leaving him so he can find the way himself, without his love for her to blind him. The path, like her father, will lead her on and the rain, like her mother, will drown out her footfalls. He will spend more time blinking b

When she sees him again, she is eating rocky road ice-cream. She stands next to the dustbin and picks apart the marshmallows from the rest of the goo slipping out of the cone. Not worth the calories, she thinks. She throws each and every one away. He is sitting with his back to her, the only loser drinking coffee in an ice-cream parlor. She feels something inside her draw back immediately, pulling her along towards the door. She feels something else in her want to call out to him, something that jumps, stutters, leaps and - falls. She is out of there, running faster than she has ever run before. Her ice-cream falls into the dustbin with a

     one: february 2012 I realise I cannot write anymore. I am way too happy to want to analyse my feelings and distill them into cold words, which will lose their spark and spice far too fast. it turns out that those feelings change quite suddenly, because it turns out you can still write, and you do write the worst "it's not you, it's me" text messages I have ever seen.     two: september 2012 you tell me the main character of the book that I love, that I lent to you back in August, is "too idealised". after years wrestling my romantic side and letting it win out, I won't stand for that. I tell you that he's a character. I tell you that

you'll probably never see this, because I think we've already passed the line where we could still read each other's writing without overthinking it. but for what it's worth, this is for you. -- it's true what you said. love that can be quantified in actions, distilled into letters, condensed into speech is no longer love. maybe love was always just an ideal, and we were never meant to understand the whole. words will only ever be words. waves from one person to another amidst a sea of others barely make a ripple. -- yesterday I crossed a river without even trying to step on the stones. the water made my sneakers feel like reefs, like th

when you're small, the hardest thing you ever knew was climbing stairs. today I am teaching my cousin, with his small hands swallowed by mine, his tiny feet on mine. down, I say as if he understands words already. put your feet down. but even now I am not concerned about teaching him, but only that I don't let him fall. -- people are supposed to fall in love all at once in a magical flash of wonder, surrounded by a crowd but only noticing a single soul. and after that, they just keep falling. -- apparently, the most common way to wake up from a dream is by the sensation of falling. as the dream shatters apart, that brief heartbeat of ve

once in a while, I get this dream; we eat breakfast silently, side-by-side, looking out over a cliff that drops three feet beyond our window. I don't turn around when I say today is the day. - somedays: I run. I run on. I run away. I run amok. I run out of time. - I spent most of my time liking boys with names I hated and who knew how to pronounce complicated words like "adolescent" and "zeitgeist" and "cadence". in my mind, we would be the type that read e. e. cummings and pause at all the linebreaks, the kind that didn't like to exercise. we would hold hands and watch the world burn if it would make a good poem. but you. you won'

Eighty years old, that's a big thing to the Chinese. Eight in Chinese (ba) sounds like luck (fa), so any multiple of eight is a cause for festivity. My grandfather's eightieth birthday last year, for example, definitely warranted a special celebration. And what better way to celebrate this than to go back to where my grandfather's life began, where his parents first met, where his grandparents lived their whole lives? And what more appropriate way than to have the whole family with him there? But China, how I underestimated you. No amount of Chinese tuition could have prepared me for you. For someone who had grown up being forced to stutt

I tell myself I will tell her that I love her before it's too late. but not a moment sooner because each time she doesn't sleep by midnight, neither do I. each morning she doesn't get up on time, we rush pell-mell to school only to be late, each time I lose something she gives me and she says it's fine even though I know that she knows that I know she's hurt each time. but each time that happens, this happens: I remember what day she will go away, and God, that puts me back where this all began. back when she made me Ribena even though it was her favourite drink too and it was the last few drops of cordial. back when she t

look, I don't know what I did wrong, mother. I just know that there were vengeful tides that pulled skyscrapers from foundations tremors that shook buildings from earth's embrace. I know that balance is what you do best. an eye for an eye. really. I understand. you are a mother as well. and yes, we did almost kill your son with our pollution deforestation globalisation that we saw fit to carry out. but look, mother. I am a mother too. and that was my baby girl you swept away. and if you love your son even half as much as I loved her, you would know what I am willing to do if it could bring her back. I would burn every tree, bleed