Short Stories: Dear X

Dear X,

Hey, how have you been?

I heard you’re in love with someone else now. That’s good, great even. I bet you’re wondering if I’m in love. Even if you aren’t, I’m sure that you must be guessing if I am.

I found her back in winter, far from home. She appeared gradually, she was the sunrise in Myanmar. Gently, she raised her head to meet my eyes and how splendid it still is to feel her warmth. I remember her quiet grandeur and how she glides the halls of my thoughts so exactingly. Each step a masterful stroke of a brush in a painter’s hands. I have allowed my heart to fall under dusk for too long after you, but when I glance shyly at her, I know, my love has always been for her.

It must have been, even when I still loved you.

That’s the thing about love, isn’t it? I asked you once if you could ever love anyone and you told me that love was expendable. I believed you then. Now I’m not so sure. I’ve seen the way love grows in the smile of the crescent moon, in her head thrown back shaking with joy. I’ve seen the way love sparks between her fingertips and the rounded curve of her cheeks. I’ve seen the way love swells when the bees jump from bloom to bloom. Love is not as you have said it is, love is expandable.

There is a love that teaches love.

No, I don’t believe that love is what you’ve found it to be. I had to learn and allow myself to be taught, because for so long I was stubbornly clinging on to how you had taunted that to love was to destroy. And I ask myself, why I keep bringing myself back to you in words and letters, how I can still after all these years find time to give to you. And I know that it is because I loved you in a way you could not bear to love me. You hated yourself and you taught me how to hate myself too. And all the time I spent hating myself, I still managed to love you.

Now, I have no hate left to give. And the love I have learnt is unselfish, which is why you have a share. Even if you don’t know it. I wonder if you still hate yourself and if you’ve taught another girl how to destroy herself for you. I wonder if she knows that she should never love someone who cannot love himself.

So yes, I met someone new. I learned how to read her, to re-read her and to read poetry in each of her careful steps forward when she stretches out to me. I made promises to hold on tight, to make sure she never has to second-guess what the space between words means. Because she’s travelled the space between worlds to find me, and for me to find her. I won’t let her go, not again. I’ve already lost her once.

Now I listen when she tells me the secrets of her skin. I believe her when she says the Sun and Stars live in the lining of her lips. I’ve watched how the Moon greedily pulls the tides of her tears close, I pull her closer still. All this time, it seems that I am indeed a jealous lover.

Or perhaps I just found someone worth holding on to.

Fondly, I recall the ache in my heart moving to my back and my shoulders. The invisible weight of loving someone like you has lifted off my chest and settled deep in the spine. Each bend and pull, each arch reminds me I have grown stronger with every motion forward. I breathe deeply and easily. I am no longer dragging the burden of the version of myself who was in love with you. I am springing forth with the surety of a nomad pacing towards her next rest. And the next time she settles, she knows the earth will be kind and the waters will be sweet.

I have found love within me and beside me.

Countless unfinished letters and a shameful amount of self-indulgent poetry has brought me here. I am still needling words to paper, pressing each emotion down like pen nibs, bleeding ink and staining the pages I know you will never read. Each time I felt like I was falling, it was I who would weave a net of words to save myself. The love you have forced me to learn is one I am now grateful for. These are the pages of my story I cannot rip out without denying the part of me that was in love with you. What we had is now merely captured by the stacks and sheets that sit solemnly, but I still wanted to remember a part of me that was in love with you. We deserve that much, I know I do.

Love is putting the work into words.

Yours in truth and love,

Y