To abandoned bodies and homes
Whenever I look at bougainvillea, I sense melancholy in them. They look like they're home yet they're homeless. They're always here, around us, and still they're invisible to our eyes.
I feel like we are all like bougainvilleas. We have so much of color in us, but we are an epitome of a shattered place that has endured centuries and centuries of storms and rains and scorching heat. We have let spring and autumn color us. We have let the dust paint itself over us. We have allowed mites to feed on our backbones for years and yet we stand, in all hues, but invisible. We know we might turn into debris any moment, we are still a shelter to so many homeless souls. Being someone's safe haven doesn't require us to have strong walls. We are an aftershock away from falling apart, and we still offer a support to so many.
I usually think about us, about how we have let loneliness nurture itself into each and every room of us, how we have allowed the wailing of a betrayed love haunt every corner of us.
People imagine us to have the eerie aura. They think we are dark, even if our outsides are a canvas of happy faces. But they don't realize that the darkness is harvested everyday by living, breathing people. It is them that turn us into a graveyard of living, abandoned bodies from a ball where wine was once spilled and love was made under mistletoe.
But what matters is that we stand, even if we are alone, even if we let time and betrayal haunt us, even if the bougainvillea on our walls have their colors fading. We stand firm. We always will, unless an aftershock hits us. And I know that if it does, we will happily crash into earth.

