LETTER
To the Heart I Left With a Stranger
Lovesong | Romance
I haven’t written in so long. It has been a long break and a block. As difficult as it is to be put into words, words have abandoned me. Be it poetry or be it a song. Days turn into nights as I watch the sky change colors every hour. Seated at the window in the library and in the comfort of my room, I get drunk on these lights. There is always some noise, the slow piano outside my library, and the excited honks of vehicles returning home after a long day. My fingers fail to keep sentences going. Staring into the black sky behind my curtains, I wait for a miracle, like I do every day. I wait for one of these shining red headlights to be you: a honk, a curve, a turn. I wait for it to break at my apartment’s gate, but it never does. Not writing has got me in a chokehold, but so has trying to write. In crowds, to pretend to not see you, to pretend my eyes don’t search for yours. The mention of your name still gives me butterflies, I pretend I am 19 again. My hands feel empty again, like how yours did when you walked in. Colour theories abandon me now for all the red in you I tried to paint green with my yellow. The skies mimic your now-dead eyes. I plan days without you now, as I sit at my table watching the lights turn orange at every place we planned dayouts. There’s a wire of orange lines hung about a roof in shabby lines, mimicking in perfection the scratches your nails left on my heart. Days have been getting better now, their happy descriptions though tearing to pieces instead of long rants. They call it my coping — to listen to a lover’s songs when you are not here. Is it not easier to pretend to fall in love again, but not with you? To talk dreamily of your eyes but in the name of a newly swiped match. My fingers substitute yours with books, but your name remains too heavy for their pages to carry. I look into the windows of apartments I know you never stayed in, and pretend every shadow I see is yours. The books I read, I pretend talk about us. The movies I watch, I lie are yours. I call you Noah. I call you Connell. Too afraid to call myself Allie or Marianne. I could love you like Gatsby, but not at your door waiting for you to see me. I will love you like Karthik if you say No to being my Jessie. We can call each other cringe after every extra mile we walk in love. We can do it all over again, pretend the world is ending. We can do it all over again if you say Yes.
