written by Charline Chatelain. Charline (she/her) is an English and Creative Writing student at UCD. She loves practicing various forms of art like painting, photography, collage, etc., and has been trying to expand on some of those hobbies as well as writing. What inspires her writing is usually a mix of personal experiences and mundane day to day things that she has observed that often go unnoticed.
All my love-I poured. Into the cracks and dents of the wooden floorboards, Like burning hot red cinnamon wax
I poured it and it dripped and dripped
For hours at a time,
Without a second to spare
Holding my breath for what felt like years.
I loved you so deeply, so intensely, until all the love for myself was gone, Vanished, vanquished
And consumed by you, only you.
Until you used it all up and there was nothing left for you
to seek, to love, to speak
And, so, you left too.
Why wouldn’t you?
I had to search and explore and almost hunt.
To find this love, deep, deep within me.
This passion for myself that I was blind to and that only I could truly fulfill, I had to learn to love myself all over again.
Discover, who I am without you, without your touch. The empty silence of your absence
the bland of existence, when you’re gone.
I search through screeching crowds of creatures
to find you, but I never do.
I never do.
My solitude begs for a way out, begs for another chance with you,
But we are too far, too isolated and wounded to find our way back to each other.
We remain in this darkness,
separate and alone, surviving off scraps
of love from strange, dissociated
bodies, not feeling a thing inside.
I buried our words in soil,
The soil, where we lay our very feet.
The feet that we use to walk, to move,
to live our lives as separate entities, as
disconnected souls.
But we will never be truly disconnected, impossible, we cannot un-love each other, we cannot
un-feel for each other..
The faint perfume of your immaturity
stained my skin softly
like
lavender-colored
soap on dry skin
Your nicotine-induced kisses
hooked me from the very start. The first hit was fatal.
Our fingers tasted of sea salt and smelt of
cigarette
overload from the night before – what became a habit.
The heavy white sheets, wrapped around your body, nearly
melted your caramel skin like the candle on my balcony
And sweat dripped, dripped, dripped down my chin
From the heat, from the habitual Athenian summer life we led
And the surprising boredom it dragged along with it.
What was once a distant vision, a sleepless dream,
became mundane to me, banal [as everything does with time].
A simple morning – a simple night – repeated again and again.
Every morning, I watched them from my balcony, as I smoked a single stolen cigarette from
my mother’s forgotten pack.
Uncomfortable chatter [around the schoolyard] between burnt-out mothers
And I watched you from my balcony, sitting on a rotten wooden bench,
waiting for what?
Barefoot on the cool marble floor, I tip-toed carefully
across the living room so I wouldn’t shatter the ground I stood
on,
And I opened the door with a
single pull.
Image: Amour Onirique by Elaïa Delon
Elaïa (she/her) is a French Eramus student in Dublin. She is currently studying cinema and is extremely passionate about film and photography, especially portraits and wildlife photography.
