you were talking about entropy on our way back home.
thermodynamics. Lorentz theory of chaos. Gibbs paradox. two pendulum in motion. randomness of a system. greater degree of disorder. how cunning of you to hide those childhood dreams under the pretentious notion of physics and philosophy?
in a lot of ways, i must admit that you are better than me. maybe it was the ten kilometer run you took alongside the coastal road every morning. maybe it was the amount of self-help books you own. maybe it was your aptitude in things i can't even begin to learn. maybe it was the fact that you don't need any medication to feel sane. maybe its simply just because you're older. and wiser. and well, just, better.
we grew up together watching landslides unfolds. covering and uncovering skeletons in its wake. i was born an observer and you were born a thinker. i watch how the ground swells and fell to the earth, you question the magnitude of its damage. i kept count of each screams we heard, your mind wanders to the possibility of survival. two divergent souls learning which ropes to climb. two birds getting caught by one stone. i wish i could've told us that the world doesn't end on that small alleyway. it doesn't end when you came home with blood on your arms. or when i went batshit crazy from hearing cameras clicking all over my head.
i have simplified too many things. was it to save a face or as a undeniable proof of my cowardness, i'm not quite sure. to lift our chin and moves forward was our sole mission in life. but with you being constantly pushed to the school fences, and me against the school bathroom stalls, i never thought that we'd ever found our way outside this walls. and yet we did. it took so much of us to be able to stand this tall. but we did. if you follow all the scars and burnt marks they had tore on our skin, everything traces back to that one night where we set up a a campfire, bodies pressed to each other as we giggled to the horror stories our dad was telling us. for true horror doesn't lay on those faceless monsters, it lives on the eyes of our teachers and friends.
our coming of age has come and gone now. i once stood in front of a reservoir. wondering if it was my calling to just jumped into the water. you always said that you preferred to drown, but the idea of cold water filling my lungs was almost too hard to bear. i couldn't do it. i wanted to say to you. a heart is a heavy burden and i don't think i can handle such amount of cosmic turmoil. i am not as strong as you, who swam to point nemo for shits and giggles. you who jumped from a moving shinkansen with your high school shirt undone. you whose ideas of fun always involves committing arson and public disturbance. so many hills to die on. you said and left all your baggage behind for me to unearth.
the power is out and it's stormy outside. you were still talking about entropy and i had to stop you. there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. i wanted to say that it wasn't our fault. i wanted to say that we did so great in this thing we called living. i wanted to use our mother tongue and said that i love you. so so much words cannot begin to describe themselves. oh, how we were just a kid. we were just kids in a burning house with nothing to shield us from the heat. and yet we learnt how to recover. we learnt how to love and forgive. we learnt how to be kind. we were just kids, oh Gods, we were just kids.
so many things are said in the unsaid. silence was our answer so i tap your shoulder. you'll be flying back up northeast in the morning. we still got time to look back on the old albums, reading through all the old letters, or watch our favorite TV shows. we still got time to listen to that records. we still got time if you want to go to the beach and race me up into the sunset. we still got time to visit that old abandoned house near the mountain. we still got time to hop on our bicycles and go to the river. we still got time to return to that day when we were seven and thirteen and nothing bad had happened to us. i lift up my face to see the resemblance of us, painted on your usual grin.
i'll take the beach.
the beach it is.
