all your pieces

words & compilation by:

Chay Canceran
 I. a reminder:

II. palms

III. fingers

IV. Fists

V. Legs

VI. Arms

VII. Throat

VIII. Skin

IX. heart
a reminder:

If your hands look

As if they’d never stop shaking:
Let them shake
Maybe they’re reorienting themselves
With movement,
From being too stiff, from not being used.

If your eyes feel

As if they’d never stop weeping:
Let them tear up.
Maybe they’re emptying old tubs
Filled with stinky water -
Too stagnant, too contaminated to be used.

If your heart feels

As if it’d never stop breaking:
Let it break.
Maybe it is loving.
Maybe it has never ceased to.
Maybe it keeps breaking
As it keeps on loving, love

When the days are tough,

And all these parts of you
Are not working the way
They’re supposed to,

Breathe. Let them be.

Sit down and watch.

Allow yourself.
 palms

When you feel like the night is too long and that the questions are
too difficult and abstract, let me tell you this:

Open up your palms. Hold them up. Eye-level. See to it that you
notice the smallest details, those that just slip your eye on a
normal day. Notice the color. Notice the letter M being formed by the
lines.

Open up your palms. Don’t you realize how small they are?

How no matter how wide you try to stretch out your fingers, it will
only occupy what? 6 inches and 28 centimeters? All the other spaces
around it are for other things: the laptop, the microwave, the
coffeemaker, the sink, the floor, the ceiling.

Your palms will always be too small. Too small to fit in all your
school books in one go. You have to remember to choose which ones you
should bring and which ones can sit at home for the meantime. Your
palms will always be too small. Too small to fit in both the piano
and the ballet shoes. You have to know which part of your body knows
music more - is it your fingers or your toes? Your palms will always
be too small. Too small to hold the script of “The Perfect Daughter”
while the other side of your brain calculates the probability and the
proper trajectory of how to be “the Perfect Student”. Your palms will
always be too small. Too small to hold your sick mom. Too small to
hold your drunk Dad, reminding him not to do it again the next night
and the next night and the next. Your palms will always be too small.
To hold everyone. To make sure that they love you just the right way,
tucking them in every night, as if to make sure that the next
morning, they still love you, your palms will always be too small.

And, when you finally get accustomed to the smallness of your palms.
Hold them up again. Look at them with brand new eyes. Say hello to
them, like you’ve never met them before. See to it that you notice
the smallest details, those that just slip your eye on a normal day.
Notice the color. Notice the letter M being formed by the lines.

Open up your palms. Haven’t you noticed how big they’ve grown?

Your palms have grown big enough. Big enough to fit the world and its
many broken hearts. You’ve grown too familiar to pain, you now go
around telling people, “it’s okay. It’s always gonna be okay.” Your
palms have grown big enough. Big enough to fit cement and shape the
words thank you and sorry and not worry if you mean them or not. Your
palms have grown big enough. Big enough to pick up a rock and carve a
heart out of it, to give the heart to a little kid on the street
selling peanuts asking for a school bag. Your palms have grown big
enough. Big enough to embrace the elephant-sized truth that today,
the people you love might not be here anymore tomorrow, loving you
the same way. Big enough to let the rest of the things you cannot
control slip out of your fingers. Your palms have grown big enough.
Big enough to fit the elephant-sized truth that love will always be
bigger.

And, when you find yourself lost again, when you look in the mirror
and forget how to like yourself, let me remind you: Start again.
Start with the beginning.

Begin with your palms.

fingers
When you started making maps of places,
I was there - I saw everything.
How you
Slowly took your finger out
And drew bigger and bigger circles
“Europe”​ - you whispered.

I was there - I saw everything.

How you
Used the spilled mustard on the table
And sketched smaller and smaller dots
“Vietnam”​ - you said, smiling.

Love, I want you to understand:

That there are places you go to
Outside of who you are - Europe, Vietnam
Who knows how many more, but
There are places you always have been in
Inside your spine, under your skin

Here, you are who you are, here

You are allowed to be.

I slowly took my finger out

And drew hearts
And dots
Small circles
Big circles
The sun
The moon
The stars

“You”​ - I softly whispered.

 fists

You grew up being told that your heart is the same size as your fist.
When you were younger, you kept on asking why. Whenever you would
look at your fists, there wasn't anything special about them. They
would always look the same: four knuckles with unequal sizes, the
middle one slightly bigger than the rest; green veins that resemble
some sort of river across some land. When you grew older, you started
sharing your heart to people. Your fists looked a bit different.
Suddenly softer, more loving - their movements smoother, more gentle,
less precise. You saw all the signs, but you didn’t see what was
coming. You kept your fists steady. But people kept wanting to touch
them. You couldn’t say no to the warmth. But the warmth offered no
guarantee of permanence. They leave, sometimes as fast as they came.
Your fists are in pain, although used to it. Now, when people come in
and break your heart, you clench your fists as hard as you can,
thinking maybe if you clench them hard enough, nobody would dare
touch it again. You grew up being told that your heart is the same
size as your fist. Today you go around telling people the same thing.
After all, it does make perfect sense.
legs

The first time he did it to you,

You didn’t mind at all - “it was just once.
There can’t possibly be a second time.”

He would touch your legs.

Gently.
“As gently as you can”
You would say -
“Yes, as gently as I can”
He would answer back.

You couldn’t have known how

With something gentle like the wind,
Something as strong as a storm can grow
In fact, you didn’t know,
This is where it begins.

the dust has settled now.

Can’t you feel the calm?
The days have been ending silently.
And still you can’t feel your legs
the same way you did before the storm hit.

I say allow them to be yours again -

Run your palms over them
and feel every inch.
Those are yours from
the very beginning.
 arms
you have to be kind to yourself
whenever you are scared;
you must have the ability
to stretch your arms -
wrap them around
your body,extend them
as far as you can until
the warmth finally settles
on your skin, until
you become familiar
with the feeling
of having
yourself /around/
throat

Spit them out, love

those words

Foolish
Stupid
selfish
unworthy
Ugly

spit them out

they are not yours

they are not you.

skin
I’ve always been told to wear my sunscreen whenever I place myself
under the sun. “So your skin won’t burn.” What they didn’t tell me
was to wear my sunscreen whenever I place myself in front of the
mirror - where, seeing the ugly scars, I can’t help but scratch them
more. What they didn’t tell me was to wear my sunscreen whenever I
place myself in front of people, where their skin always seemed
better than mine and how I burn every single time. What they didn’t
tell me was to wear my sunscreen whenever I place myself in front of
love - whose doubt stings every layer of my skin. I wish someone had
told me before what I get to tell you now:

Wear something to protect your skin from burning - from the pain of
insecurity, from the heat of comparison, from the sting of doubt;
bring your skin to safety.
heart
You’ve been there for too long - that road. When you were younger,
you used to think it would be easy. You've set years and timelines
and to-do lists, patting stuff onto suitcases saying, "There. All
set."

You thought life was like that. Something to plan out – like travel
itineraries. Destinations with corresponding times. And you gladly
said yes to the journey - all hopeful, all ecstatic.

Then along the way, you've lost dreams and pursuits. You've gathered
hopes and longings you've been working to grasp until now. You've
lost old books and old notes and old friends and old clothes. For a
while you felt the losses sting a bit, but then they came in more
frequently you got used to them.

You were doing okay. You've got everything planned out and focused
on, you didn't have time to get attached.

And then he comes. Clothed with the promise of warm afternoons spent
in parks sipping coffee together, of long drives listening to songs
you've been used to listening on your own, of surprise coffee in the
mornings, of shared dinners, shared laughs, of a shared life. He was
sweet and sensitive and charming and everything you've imagined him
to be.

Except that he doesn't look at you the way you look at him.

And here you are, all frustrated that while you can easily make your
grades and test scores and evaluation rates shoot up, you just can’t
seem to find a way to make him fall for you.

You've managed to make yourself believe you've got everything under

control, but not this time.
You've fallen in love, and it felt scary because you then found out
that falling in love does not let us plan or choose.

You know he’s taking you for granted and you tell yourself that’s
okay. That you’re fine whatever happens. That it doesn’t matter that
much to you. You never got to admitting to yourself that this whole
thing isn’t working well. You've tried to set limits, and set very
little time for "being there for him". But the moment he calls, you
easily let go of plans and to-do lists and timelines.

I say, set them again, dear soul.

Set your timelines again. Set your to-do lists again. Set your plans
again. And then, slowly or hastily, whatever works for you, let him
go.

Let him stand, let him fix his own affairs.

Do not be caught off guard by his presence. By his sweetness. His
gentleness and vulnerability. By his weakness and pleas. I should
tell you, you won’t be able to fix him, because nobody is ought to
fix anyone.

He’s not a Math problem you can easily solve. Not a grammar lapse you
can easily encircle and have fixed. Not a scientific problem you can
experiment with and hypothesize about. It feels good, I know. To be
strong for him. And whenever he thanks you for being there, you want
to be there all the more.

But he has to learn to be strong for himself too, dear soul. You, and
your amazing guts, are not the solution to his grief.

So do not shrink yourself into smaller sizes only to fit his small
holes.
The world has had so much to say about removing standards, well I
say, set them again. Do not be afraid to be amazing only so he can
keep up. Know that while he might be here now, he's not all there
would be.

Dear soul, look for someone who will cheer you on. Someone who will
be strong enough to skip happily to celebrate your successes. Someone
who pursues to celebrate his own successes too. Someone who wouldn’t
treat you like a temporary relief, like a cart for when he cannot
carry his baggage by hand any longer.

You, on the other hand, have big work to do. Big things. Amazing
ones.
I say go on and conquer the world, dear soul. Your heart is too big
to be held back.
 for Cleah,
for when you are
old enough to read.