I'm trying to remember how I met you in my dream and what we were talking about on the floor. Or where we were and who was driving the car where we were holding hands.

I don't know your name. But you look like you could be a Luke, or a James, or maybe even a Steve.

Not all that glitters is gold

I dreamed of you last night.

Sometimes I remember when we used to hang out in nightclubs, when we left everything behind on our beds, along with the last couple of wardrobe changes we threw on the sheets and whatever books we had been studying earlier that night. I'd put on makeup with what little I know about it and try to convince myself that I look pretty in a short black dress, although my bulging limbs and my post-teenage acne scars were probably screaming their objection.

I remember when you danced with me, your breath reeking of beer but your neck smelling like pine trees. The music pulsated loudly in our ears, threatening to pop our eardrums, but I could only hear the primal cry of my heart, Now! Now! Now!

When we were in high school, everybody thought we would be together eventually. I thought so too, but time has a way of being disagreeable and cruel, and though I faced you with my heart in my hands, eager to offer you all its affection, you simply embraced me and told me we were just friends. My tears tasted bitter in my mouth, but what did I know about love? I was fifteen and stupid.

But then we grew up, and you called me out of the blue, saying you just got home and you wanted to "catch up" on old times. We hadn't seen each other for three years. I had lost weight, my acne had exhausted its term on my skin, and for the first time in my life, I didn't have to convince myself I was pretty—because, finally, I was.

When we met again, we weren't the same. Gone was the golden boy who made everybody laugh and who had so much vigor and passion that our friends made you the envy and trophy of our circle. You had lost your luster, and mine was only beginning to shine. You tried looking to reclaim your glory in others, but I was sick of the pulsating music, sick of the sweaty bodies and the smell of fuck and alcohol, sick of the shallow epicurean delights afforded by your lifestyle that has left me empty and hungover and miserable the morning after. I had outgrown you. I had outgrown the world. 

So I went back to my books and read with the kind of vivacity that I remember having when I was eleven, when the library was my wonderland, when the only friends I had were plain princesses, parading animals, and morbidly martyred saints. It was the best version of myself, the one I had lost to cynicsm and pride and envy. But I am slowly becoming kind to myself again, and I have rediscovered the love I had for the church, for whom I had once thought of becoming an eternal servant.

I still think about it. Whenever I see nuns or priests, I still feel a burning urge to run to their arms and cry unrestrainedly, to beg them to take me with them, to save me from this gradually declining world and give me the peace of the Divine. Maybe I should've gone ahead and filled that application to join the Capuchins that  I mysteriously found on one of my books. I wonder where I would be now if I did become a nun (perhaps it's not too late). The thought is somehow funny and always makes me smile, but now I'm almost certain my life isn't destined for the convent. Wherever that might be, I can only be grateful for where I am now and keep living.

Today I prayed to God to let me give up. My heart is so drained and screaming that it wants to expire.

I have no more left to give, no more fight in me.

It makes me sad that the people who remind me that this city, which I have grown to despise with a passion, is still beautiful are strangers. And you, who have promised to help me, who are supposed to be  a friend, only hurt me.

And now you have threatened to become a stranger, an empty thing with no life or laughter.

You have grown old in your heart, someone I don't care to know.

So really, what else is there? There is no poetry, no joy, no sign of Destiny. Just cruel words and mind games and stubborn people who have stopped at their wounds and cocooned themselves around it, watching it fester instead of opening up to be healed.

This is not the life I want to live, not the person I want to be or want to be with.

Today I am giving up.