I fancy I'd write you letters. In long hand, like some distant lovers do in the old times. I fancy you'd keep it tucked in your weathered wallet, the creases permanent from the many times you have folded and unfolded it. I fancy you'd read it in bus stops, aboard the subway on your way to work, on midnights when sleep would not come.

But really, I fancy I'd write you letters, only so I can end it:



At your service,
or
At your disposal,

some fragments, way overdue

of a love letter to the only place I'll ever love.

• Every dark corner; every rat-infested room, every peculiar scent I've long given up on knowing more about.
• Love. And all it's perils - including, but not limited to: drinking in midafternoons, lying in the middle of the road and rolling down hills completely sober, skipping philosophy classes to drink, reading Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and de Botton's Essays in Love umpteen times and everytime, misreading every line as a direct quotation from your own existential love life (or lack thereof).
• Coming home to a broken mirror with a note that says: I'm sorry, the mirror was fragile; just like me. - Chase
• Snow in the guise of kapok, foretelling the arrival of summer. Foreshadowing goodbyes.
• Poking my face between the pages of Sexing the Cherry in his presence, after he's trekked the Kanluran road to my apartment, to help me apply the feminist and marxist approach on the subversion of roles of de Botton's lovelorn characters. Darn it, he so smart.
• Hoard of extra mattresses, awaiting, often hoping for, the fleet of surprise guests (welcomed or otherwise).
• Closing down Faustina's, the muffled sounds of violin, five cups of cheap coffee after, "to love someone out of compassion means not really to love."

lately, all I've done is write you letters I've nowhere to send.

I’m calling dibs on the word apathy. Like how you once did with qualms. Qualms in bold letters. Qualms in italics. Qualms over the line, while faith lies under.

You have since moved on. Never looked back (or wrote, or called). I pried your drawers open, dug through your trash, read your letters and  turned your room upside down. Just so I could inherit qualms instead of being so certain.   

But now I’m apathy. No bold letters, no italics, no underline; just plain old feigned apathy.

do not wander off into the unknown

Is this not the poetry in this banal matter - that it is fleeting? Then why would I rather that they write ‘prosaic’ in red across my forehead in order to keep what I know I cannot?

Listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.  I’ll be the one with the book. Sitting alone. Waiting, thinking: Shall I add this to the list?

a shot at subtlety

I mask you in metaphors, hoping to muster enough courage to read between the lines and flee. 


But even without the figures of speech, literally, I know the rhythmic beats that whip me bloodless. Even with feigned understanding, I catch the drift of the waves in your verses. I know from the waning sound of footsteps that you are attempting what I could not do: run away. 


But I am delusional, and my ears are plugged with dreams. 


And in the stillness of the flash between thought and sleep, I open you like a worn out paperback. I follow the lines with the point of my finger, pretending I could read you (at once dreading the worst: I can’t). Pretending I could continue pretending. But like you, I am masked in metaphors. And in the stillness of the flash between thought and sleep, I can only muster enough courage to confess: I am a phony.