u/miningcraters2192

tell me, did it mean anything — you striking up a conversation after weeks of silence? or was it nothing? tell me, i need a definite answer. but i suppose me having the last word is answer enough. it obviously meant nothing. then why did you have to ruin my supposed peace? i was almost out of the woods and you dragged me back, only to leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere. it felt like getting the rug yanked from under my feet, like stubbing my toe in the dark.

but i can't blame you. you didn't know then and you don't know now that i harbor an immense amount of yearning, and it happens to be for you. it's one-sided. i have no expectations of reciprocity, and it would be so wrong if you felt the same. liking you feels criminal enough as it is. i've been trying to outrun these feelings, but here i am, back where i started. i should loathe you for it. but i can't bring myself to. you are a bane to my heart, but im still clutching this feeling as if it's the most precious thing.

I'm back. But then again, I never really left, dear one.

The last letter I wrote was three weeks ago. In those weeks, I managed to tame this wild beast I call yearning. I asked myself why I was still holding on when it only brought misery. And just when I was about to let go, you threw scraps at me again. But I know better now. I'm not stupid enough to pick them up and interpret them. I accepted them for what they truly meant, which was nothing.

I have always been adept at admiring people from a distance. Call it self-preservation. There's a quiet shame in wanting someone you cannot have, so I keep it like a well-preserved secret. But getting close is equally terrifying. With my blind boldness, I dared to reach out once and only ended up running toward a brick wall. Jane Austen once wrote, "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more." I think about that often. How the size of a feeling can make you mute. So I turned away, dear one, because what was there to say when this could never be.

But then, I think you noticed. Because you gave me the littlest bit of attention once more. I didn't take the bait. I gave you back the same scrap you threw at me. I can no longer delude myself that tenderness, however small, is enough. I think I fell in love with a possibility. But none of it was real.

Because, dear one, you have a life I can never be a part of. I am but a fleeting thought in it. Hell, I might have never crossed your mind at all. What I'm saying is, I am letting this hopeless yearning go. It's time to free myself of it.

I think I am almost done with you, dear one. Almost.

I could talk myself out of almost anything but apparently, not out of wanting you. I thought "out of sight, out of mind" would work. And yet here I am, pining still, clutching my chest as if I want to reach in and crush my own heart with my bare hands. Why, why, why?

The last letter I wrote was a week ago. It received one comment, "patience, grasshopper", followed by the suggestion that I may be wrong about this one. I didn't know how to take it. Did they mean I should wait until my feelings are reciprocated? Or simply let it fade in time? I responded that grasshoppers get eaten if they wait. They never replied.

I have managed to pull myself away slowly from you, from the habit of thinking about you, from the urge to talk to you. But at night, the yearning tugs at me, demanding to be given its due attention. And so the words, "I long for you still", keep hammering inside my head like an incantation, ceaseless and insistent. The more I suppress it, the louder it becomes. And now it carries something else with it — a desire, throbbing and pulsating, that I am almost ashamed to admit.

I have started to fantasize about you. In the shower. On the bed before I sleep and upon waking. You, tracing idle patterns on my skin from my shoulder blades down to the end of my spine. You, pressing your lips against my neck and leaving marks there. You, kissing my inner thighs slowly, teasing, unhurried, as if you know what I want. And what I want is actually you.

Perhaps the cruelest part of all this is that I have conjured you so completely in the dark that my body has begun to believe you're real. But you are only a phantom made of inference and longing. I don't even know your face, and yet I have given you hands. Given you a mouth. Given you a shape that settles beside me in the quiet.

This is all so wrong, I know that, given the circumstances. So I let it live inside my mind where no one can tell me I am hurting anyone but myself. I am gambling my heart away with full knowledge that I will lose. And people, most of the time, lose when they gamble.

I think that says everything about the nature of this yearning. It doesn't need the truth of you, only the idea. And the idea of you has become so well-worn, so lived-in, that I am embarrassed by the intimacy of it. You are a stranger. You owe me nothing, not even the decency of existing the way I have imagined you. And still I return to you the way a tongue finds a sore tooth and presses it compulsively, despite knowing it will only hurt.

I have romanticized you. Idealized you beyond reason, beyond fairness to either of us, refusing, until now, to fully acknowledge that this will never be. I wonder sometimes if this is less about you and more about the wanting itself. The ache as its own destination. Maybe I have missed feeling something so acutely that I am reluctant to let it go, even when this unrequited feeling is like a vise-grip, gradually tightening around my ribcage, crushing everything it finds there. But my body keeps its own calendar, indifferent to goodbyes.

And I hope you have thought about me today, wherever you are, dear one.

I swim and breathe in a flood,

tangled with the love in my lungs

The suffocating buildup of grief

as she slips away from me

And there you are

with the viscous waves

that crawl closer to the surface

Your fingers move steadily,

rowing me back, oar after oar

I half smile, thinking how my mind

and yours are in sync … again

Beyond this lazy drift,

I watch you kiss the neighbor’s creek

But dear one, I am ready to taste

the air from your mouth

And I want you to sweep

the pollution that curls around my neck

each time I love and drown

then perish in that sequence

I want you to tuck the sun

behind my ear as I write

stories on your skin

I want you to draw a map,

so I would stop running back

to the past

I want you to listen to

the suppressed whistle of

a boiling kettle every time I pine

I want you to inhale the steam

from its spout like smoke

coming out of my lips

I want you to be the ocean

that cradles me back to shore

And I want you to be there

when I decide to fall off a cliff

In other words, dear one

I want you even if

I’ll die … again.

~Recently, I revisited a poetry collection I made and thought to share one here. I wrote this back in 2022. It's one of my most cherished pieces.

Here I am, once more, with a gaping hole. That's what happens when a supernova explodes — it leaves a black hole in its wake. I told you in my first letter how my yearning felt like one, and sadly you never witnessed that bright and beautiful blast that outshined the Milky Way.

Yet the longing has turned mellow, and it's gradually slipping away from my fingers. I suppose writing helps more than I expected, so I'll keep doing it until it's completely gone.

I've been listening to one of my favorite Mitski songs (Your Best American Girl) on repeat for the past week; it's currently my most played. Perhaps if you listened to it, you’d understand me greatly. I think it captures this yearning better than my own words sometimes can, articulates it more profoundly when I fall short. It's playing as I write this, keeping me company.

But I'm starting to find this whole thing repulsive. I cringe at myself now. And yet I have to own it — my own ludicrousness — because this was a self-imposed burden from the start. I feel pathetic for listening to the longings of my heart when I should have just buried them and called it a day. I knew it was nothing. You were nothing to me. But my qualms goaded me to make this something, then my heart, stubborn as it is, insisted on making you everything.

And like the Hot Priest said when Fleabag told him she loved him — "It'll pass." That has been my mantra every time I feel such intense yearning for someone who doesn't reciprocate it. I should know better by now. I've been here many times before. And still I go through the motions as if I never learned.

So it happened again, but with you this time. Each day the feeling expanded, a buzzing against my ear warned me: it'll pass. Until it became too massive to hold. My hands are small, with bony fingers and gentle palms, I can only carry so much. Nor could I swallow the enormity of it, so I had to vomit it out through words. Writing about it, or rather pretending to write to you as if any of this will reach you somehow, has alleviated the heaviness. I do it as much for me as it is for you. Slowly, I can now look at you without the urge to collapse at your feet and worship you like a god. But you are not one. You are just human, too. And humans are fallible. Since I am one myself, I forgive myself for the blunder.

So I am going now, parting ways with this misplaced yearning. It was never supposed to be directed at you. It was a misstep, one I hope not to repeat. For a moment, I thought you were all I ever wanted. But the fog is clearing, and I'm beginning to regret the whole debacle. I wonder if my unease is well-founded, having survived the toughest phase of yearning while shrieking for it to be over, and at the very same time, quietly hoping you'd speak to me one last time with warmth.

Dear one, this is getting exhausting. I might just keep going in circles until I collapse from the dizziness. But I am not delusional. I know nothing will come of this. What was I even expecting? Truthfully though, nothing. I foresaw the heartbreak from the very start, and instead of turning away, I ran toward it without misgivings. I tripped, and the fall was laced with palpable pain.

Now, I am nursing my wounded heart back to health, putting balm on the bruises I incurred from the fall. So until then, I have to endure this gaping hole, which isn’t so terrible. I can only hope that my next supernova explosion befalls someone who finds stars fascinating.

But it was nice knowing you, or rather, nice knowing what you unknowingly stirred in me. I wouldn't have gone back to writing if it wasn't for you, so thank you for being an unwitting muse. You made for a good writing prompt, even if you'll never know you were one.

Like Mitski said in her song: "I am hungry / I have been hungry / I was born hungry / What do I need?"

What am I actually hungry for? Is there a better way to feed it than to keep filling myself with more emptiness through unrequited feelings? I wouldn't know the answer — I've always been oblivious to such questions until the rug gets yanked from under me. It's my blindspot, or perhaps I choose not to look at all, because it's an arduous task to sift through emotion, thought, and memory only to gain more questions than answers. I know I need to be more patient to get to the root of these patterns. I can't keep complaining about the symptoms without understanding how I got here.

It is true that I carry an immense love and boundless depth, but there are limited places for them to go — real, reciprocal places. And so it attaches to the nearest available thing. You.

I can fathom the whole ordeal of it, but what I fail to understand is why. Why you? Why not someone else? Why no one at all? I don't want to latch my affections onto someone I have no intention of being with, nor any desire to go after. I keep reminding myself: you're a man. And some men tend to disappoint; some can be disconcerting. I wish you were both — and yet I hope you're different. So far, you are neither, and I find myself all the more drawn.

The yearning has subsided somewhat, but I'm still coughing up water from the drowning. I've been deliberately putting distance between us — I see less of you, you see less of me. But in the moments we do cross paths, I almost go running toward you. It's a battle. And you love battles, whereas I have mixed feelings about them. Even so, we've fought them together, but you wouldn't know about the war that rages inside me every time you're around. I clench my fists and hold myself back from reaching out. I can't. I mustn't, even when I want to.

And still, I accidentally pick up details about you, things you share with others that I have no intention of knowing anymore, because it only adds fuel to something that's already burning. I've learned enough times that getting too close means subjecting myself to being scorched. So I decided to admire you from afar, keep you at more than an arm's length, stay at a safe distance.

But just by looking at you, the yearning coaxes me closer. So I'm teaching myself not to look at all, except you make that nearly impossible when you're almost everywhere. Even with how much distance I put between us, how can I actually escape you when I am standing right behind you, willing you to look back?

I suppose I can't romanticize you as my Orpheus. After all, I'm not your Eurydice. I'm just a woman who yearns, starved of something she cannot quite name yet — feasting on the crumbs you throw, scavenging on the leftovers.

But I want you, dear one. I still want you.

Oh, to feel so deeply — how long did I wish for such intense and consuming yearning! But now that it has struck me, I no longer want it. I feel like I am about to explode like a supernova, and you aren't even within the radius to witness the catastrophe. It's only been a couple of months and yet here I am, already wound so tightly around this.

I want to be rid of it. It's becoming all-consuming, especially knowing it isn't reciprocated, nor will it ever be. This yearning feels like a ravenous beast, frantic to rip open my chest and feast on my tender heart. I feel it so intensely today, how every heartbeat is a thunderstorm, how rationality abandons my body every time I see your name and chases impulse instead, how every corner of my mind screams you, you, you. Only you, these days. What have you done to me? I feel utterly bewitched. You are even haunting my dreams.

But I am mostly to blame, because you are completely oblivious to all of this. I let myself get swept away by your waves, and even when I made it back to shore, I threw myself in again and this time your riptide pulled me under. Now I am drowning, gasping for air. I need to find the surface, dear one. This is already heartbreaking enough as it is.

I wouldn't be in this situation had I not felt a certain affinity towards you from the start — as if you carried some inkling in you that pulled my attention closer, and then closer still. I tried to resist it, but the circumstances we found ourselves in made that impossible. And before I knew it, we were talking more often. Then I found myself feeling giddy like a schoolgirl with a crush. And now here I am, cradling a yearning too massive for me to carry alone.

So dear one, I wrote this as a goodbye, even knowing you'll never read it. Though it isn't exactly a goodbye because I'll still be seeing you. This is more a farewell to the yearning I've harbored, the one that has plagued me so incessantly since the first time we spoke. And there's a tiny part of me that hopes this reaches you somehow, like a message in a bottle, even when the chances are impossibly slim — after all, we're oceans apart.

i've been listening to megumi acorda since 2021, attended one of their gigs that time and i fell in love with them more<3

just wanna know other megumi acorda enjoyers here🤗

we tried staggered bear hunt for the first time today with everyone calling rallies, 45s intervals, an 85k march cap, and joining the top rallies on war tab instead of just the whale/strongest rallies. the results were surprisingly good and some said their scores improved.

we'd like to optimize it further. any suggestions? should we reduce the interval to 30s? what else should we account for?