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Love Letter, 2021
9 Kindnesses
You
Januaries were cold, and I couldn’t clearly see half a kilometer in front of me. My jaws had clenched awfully the night before. The body ached. The spirit whiled away in its fleshly enclosure.
I stood in the empty yard, waiting for you - my birthday present, but I didn’t know it at the time. I think I still haven’t fully comprehended what kind of godsend you’ve been. Understanding would dawn, a shy sun out of a long winter.
I melted into February, along with the festive joys that month would bring.
You were one extra cherry blossom on what was a city full of it. But, when all had fallen after frantic nights and deadened mornings, you remained, the sole color on a black branch, a ring on that twisted finger, nestled between my palms.
Spring came back into my life, and all its sappy words hesitantly budding out their bright-green vitality. I had vowed that anymore words, for anyone else, would be made moot. Little did I know that I would fail, as the seasons changed.
But like the Sun had promised the Earth, every spring, those flowers would yet bloom.
A Sandwich
You came, and you went, and so did I. Every month, a plane would bring us together, and another plane would pull us away, so that we would have to dream of each other’s arms, three weeks per month, if we needed our sleep warm, and our minds at ease.
I came, and you waited out front with a sandwich and a smile.
Prophecies reflected infinitely in the mirror house of our lives. What was supposed to be “our time” was spent in a suit and tie, sitting next to each other, pretending to be strangers. Little did we know, this scene would play out again and again. Sitting there, dreaming we were some place else together.
We traveled everywhere on our laptops. To where you spent two years in the scorching sun and then another two in blinding snow. To museums, where we spoke of our tastes, as if we needed to impress one another - I only needed to see you smile and pictured seeing you, with books in your arms, still smiling.
We had tea and said our goodbyes. A tiny white car took me to the airport, that lay-over of heartaches and ennui. I thought of how many goodbyes would we have to tell each other, and how much each would hurt.
Security
It used to be the case that I didn’t trust that you trusted me. The insecurities of those who were unfamiliar but chained to one another made powder kegs of us all.
Rationally speaking, anger was a normal part of life, but when our ire was directed *at* each other, nothing in the world made rational sense anymore. Even the simplest gestures or silences were subject of scrutiny, which was torturous, regardless who was doing the scrutinizing. Words were the tripwires waiting for tired feet.
Nasty thoughts would spill out of their prisons and, once landed on our tongues, sprouted into nasty words. Naively, I thought we would never recover from this, as if nothing again could be so horrible, and some ill-phrased words were the worst form of malice.
I won’t dwell on the specifics, some of which bring a chuckle, yet others...
These days, I’ve come to trust that you trust me. I wouldn’t call your patience saintly, but after so many times when we woke up among rubbles, caught each other’s eyes in the distance, and once again made our shy greetings, must I suspect anything less than the miraculous?
In reality, it has always been work rather than magic. Steady, moment to moment, word by word, everyday work. That was the real miracle.
Ears
I was young, uninitiated into the mysteries of work, where Sisyphus would roll his mound of paperwork up a hill, only for it to come tumbling down after one or two meetings with ostensibly bad feng shui. By the time the conference room had voided itself, I stayed to witness its utter desolation. Chairs with no-one to sit. Presentations with no-one to see. I thought, “So that’s what the end looks like - a tungsten emptiness at 8PM.”
I heard your silence over the phone. It was an uneasy sympathy, uneasy because deep down, anyone would have been thankful that they weren’t me. You saw how awful it was. It didn’t matter to you. As helpless as you must have felt, you gave me your knowing silence, which was music compared to the AC’s hum in this conference room.
That night, we might have started something of a tradition. Our listening ears were there, when there were tears and scoffs and huffs and groans left to be heard, even when helplessness piled up within our hearts and sank us down into shared despair.
We would hug our uneasy hugs afterwards, which was all we could do in the depths of limbo.
Porridge
Some evenings were longer than others, and some evenings never seemed to start, even if the sun had long given way to stark streetlights. Time stood still in offices. Fluorescent light and thick blinds made sure that I would not feel time slip away from my pockets and into someone else’s, a bleary casino where I gambled my life away in hopes of...
One day, you told me that you had a surprise for me. A delivery of porridge, so my belly would stay full, stay warm, so that I would remember that however long I had to gnaw on my exhaustion as the only sensation that tethered me to a semblance of being, there would always be you, waiting for me.
I often forgot these brief flashes of happiness. Even now, as I recall that night, the memories have faded to a point where I could replace it with all manners of thoughts, grateful and ungrateful, happy or spoiled, related or tired. But I had probably forgotten what it was like to be so full that by the time I exited those gates and the streets were empty, I felt as though worry could never enter a mind so filled with your care.
Photographs
Familiarity begot a sort of selective blindness, much like how I did not know the back of my hand at all! Photographs were our mirrors, one that allowed us to view ourselves as others did: A couple.
Without photographs, how would we know that we were anywhere or did anything or were anything at all? After all, the thing about memory is...
You’ve always brought your instant camera, as if I was some exotic bird that needed documenting, or my absence would leave a lack so unbearable that it would make fiction of any memory of togetherness. But you would invariably forget to use it.
We had a habit of taking photographs at the most inopportune times: while we were cleaning the house, while we were packing, while we waited for yet another ride to the airport, while we were not next to one another.
Maybe I’ve kept you busy enough to forget your empirical duties. Maybe you remembered but didn’t want to break the spell, so that you would never have enough and would always have to come back for another round. “This time, I swear! Let me be with you just a bit longer.”
Maybe I’m putting my own words in your mouth. I admit, these were the thoughts that went through my mind when the camera was close, but you were closer. “There’ll be a next time.”
Family
Family was where home was. But family was also home. What then, when home was no longer where family was? What would be of home when family was a tenuous and difficult thing to grasp?
You and I, we both had our troubles with our families. My trouble was that when I first stepped into where you called your home, I knew immediately that this was where your family was.
Perhaps it was thanks to your mother’s talent with making the place feel lived-in, like this was where people came back straight from work to eat rice, to drink water, to love the kind of love that did not stir the appetites or vices but instead calmed them and placed the soul right where it belonged.
At the dinner table, I glanced at you in-between lively exchanges (those that felt they cared) and thought, “Would you be the one to give me this kind of family? If you lacked any ounce of your mother, then I would be the one to give you back the family you’ve always known, when you no longer saw them everyday.”
Such a silly thought. Like homes, families were not given, but built. In the meantime, I would have to call up my parents and tell them how much I loved them.
Freedom
(Absolute) freedom has always been a thankfully elusive goal, for its fulfillment would be devastating. If there was anything we had to be grateful about, it would be the fact that there still existed “unfreedoms”, those which we could resent, circumvent, and acquire a relative, joyous freedom from the sense of absolute progress.
When lost at sea, progress was a moot concept. In this perfectly smooth space, no matter which way we swam, the ocean remained just that - a vast expanse of saltwater and dark horizons. When all progress was relative (but even that was hard to say, for we could not tell how much we have swam since we last started), we were confronted with the terrible weight of absolute freedom. We were truly free, and there was nowhere we would go, could go.
Must we ask why old people spoke of prudence, of what seemed to our young minds the perpetual delay of any philosophical conclusion? They might have been once-mighty swimmers, who saw that the horizons swam faster than they did, who then decided they might as well float and watch the pretty clouds go by.
Age must be catching up.
Time
We’ve lived another year, and it seems likely that next year, we will still be living. The river of time is contemplative on most days, but on others, it is an opaque, furious thing. Along its flow, joys, sorrows, those inexorable events drift, those lily pads of today, flotsam from the fate’s wreckage, passing into the ocean of forgetfulness.
What is to remember, if not to swim into that ocean looking for a single pearl? What is to celebrate, if not to set adrift a paper effigy of that which has passed, upon it the dwindling candle of hope, hope that tomorrow we may still remember? What is to mourn, if not acting out the utter pain of realization that these paper boats will also soak in the dampness of time and disintegrate into figments that the mind may chance-encounter in the depths of night?
On which bank of this river do you stroll? The little things you drop into the water will travel downstream, and I will record each smile, each tear, the little soft, drunken snores on my lap, and which piece of laundry hangs today, these little traces we leave of our time here. And with time, will I come to know you better?
One birthday at a time.
One day, we will take leave of our senses, plunge into that river together, and be carried faster than what the water can wash away. There, we would see the past rewind in a beautiful daydream, see the old things as they’ve never been, those glorious days, falling into each other’s eyes, towards the sea where time pours into, where all the wonderful things live.
My dear, we will be the clouds, floating above the old patch of soil and see that it has always been a narrow place. The ground is marked with our little footsteps that we once thought had traced the Earth.
And when the rain falls, what little clue left is swept away, and in their place, beautiful blossoms spring into existence.
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