I should say your name.
But then again, what’s in a name? Right? Wrong.
When all is said and done, the sound of a name, the stray odour of a forgotten love story, the quiver in a pair of lips as the past thwarts in between, the littlest things begin to matter. You become a miniaturist.
So, hello Old Love,
I have come to your doorstep. I have some words to say. And perhaps I shouldn’t call you ‘love’, when the story I started was left unfinished. For a minute there, I want to take my pen, draw a line in between a page, make a border between you and me, and write the reasons why we remained unfinished.
For a minute, I want to do the ordinary thing. Because ordinariness is safe. Because predictability is home.
But when you a have a stark-white page that peers into your soul, sometimes, just sometimes, you want to do something extraordinary.
And so you scribble. You cut, you write, you bleed, you melt, and then, you become words. There is no red pen in the corner of my page anymore. I won’t correct my words. I won’t look back and see the mistakes I have made. After all, I never did that for you.
So let the words hold flaws. For even love, as beautiful as it often is, is flawed. I used to see that beauty. Now, I just remind myself to smile again.
There are the nights though, deep into the bosom of darkness, when I let myself fall a little more than I would let myself in the transparency of daytime.
When I would curl up in my bed, my pillow in my arms, and I would close my eyes. And I would see you. I would see us. Perhaps you and I would smile. Do the most ordinary things, sit for a breakfast, or I would throw a stray piece of paper at you, with its undiscovered trove of words inside. In my fantasies, there is always daylight. And maybe that is enough to make me remember that I have drifted a little further off from reality.
I would bleed tears after, or words instead. I have come to love the words more now. You see, when dawn cracks into the night, light filtering into my room, I like to be reminded it was never a dream.
Seasons change me the most, though.
Summer colours, the yellows and the oranges, the purple hues in the dying hearts of sunsets at riversides, and the slows kisses in winter, azure and purple playing with one another, until the sky itself becomes a confused infinity of grey. It is beautiful, oh so, beautiful, that it almost breaks my heart.
I lose my track often, as I do now. I write to you, and instead I lose myself in the montages of unmade memories. It is a new habit I have developed, to love things that are incomplete, unmade, forgotten, abandoned. Fallen leaves, crushed flowers, crumpled papers, broken quill nibs, I find a strange love for them, growing each day inside of me.
And in loving them, I, too, fall into pieces, brokenness and halfhearted remembrance lingering as effigies.
There should be an end here. According to the laws of words, I should scribble lies with ‘yours lovingly’ or ‘yours forever’. But I am mine, only mine. I collect all these fallen pieces of me, stick them with glue and watch them break away again. But there are still all mine.
So until I find some of me to share with you, in fantasy or in reality,
Farewell.