with/without you from herbonestructure on 8tracks Radio. 

(songs i have been listening to while i write my essay)

24/12/12

waking up near noon     vanilla thought:
My First Christmas Away From Home

texting friends back home merry christmas
because it's the 25th of december in singapore

walk into the kitchen where i find you
sipping coffee and eating a warm sugary donut

have i become conditioned to your presence
the way babies become conditioned to their mother's

interpreting it as love       where is the space
in which meaning occurs      is intention as important

as consequence       that was what we talked about in
a political philosophy seminar a month ago

last night we went ice-skating    i liked the mindlessness of it
kept going and thinking about certain things

i don't think you can love someone forever
i think once a person is no longer in your life

the only hold someone can have on you
is the hold you allow him or her to have

but what differentiates the memory of emotional vulnerability
from the experience of it in the moment itself

the only distance that has been established is
the distance between you and what triggered those feelings

i thought about the way i sometimes say
 if, and only if,

conditions to love and loving
instead of unconditional love

that i could love someone this much
have never loved anyone with this much of myself

is still constrained by conditions:
i love only if i am loved
i want as much as i am wanted

still though a belief in the singularity of time
love's existence being valid and complete in every moment

no matter what happens to have altered it in the moment
before            that led to the way it is now

i walked out to the porch and stared into the trees

how damp the forest is after a night of rain
winter distilled into these hours alone

thinking about the way i feel certain about these feelings
like when you move towards me and in your arms

the ease at which i fall asleep no longer thinking
or trying to remember        just being, being still

with you         the way the people and things around me
always seem so immediate and suffocating

but almost at once will simply become part of the distant past
glazing over with new meaning each time i retrieve the memory

like all memories of home, my family
the people i believe i love