Letters I Can No Longer Send To You - Part 1

 Dearest darling,

I spent the whole of last night wondering how you would have felt about this film I just watched. There were so many moments when I turned my head in reflex, expecting to you see your face scrunched up in a laugh. Maybe in awe. Definitely twisted with glee, once or twice. I'd like nothing more than to say that this was a one time thing. It's really not.

I turn my head to catch you smirking when I'm all alone in the car and yell at the other drivers. I turn my head to tell you the food is tangy, even though I've set a table for one. I turn my head to ask you to pass the water bottle, conveniently forgetting that I sleep on your side of the bed now. I turn my head when I have really good sambhar, hoping that we've finally found the one that fixes your sinus. And then without fail, every morning, I turn my head to check if a minor miracle has settled you under the covers next to me. 

It might sound odd to you, but I often turn my head and pretend that it's the first summer that we met, and you've just walked up to the table for our first date. I pretend a lot these days. I don't mind. I've become excellent at imaging the shape of your body pressed up against mine. It's like having phantom limbs, only I'm thinking of yours instead of mine.

I hope you watch this film. I'm not entirely sure why, but maybe you'll see why I'm too stubborn to accept the reality in front of me. Maybe you'll even text to ask me about it. Maybe then I'll turn my head, and you'll finally be standing in front of me. Maybe.

Yours, lovingly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rant.

Perhaps it is the lack of fellow insomniacs who crack terrible puns at 3 in the morning or the constant honking of horns in the evening while going back home, but I seem to be coming apart. So do forgive the rants that will follow. It is a season of wrongs. It is all wrong. The wrong cities and the wrong time and the wrong thoughts. The weather is wrong. It is supposed to be unpredictably hot and then comfortingly mild within seconds and it just won't happen. I'm sitting on the wrong chair and on the wrong side of the laptop screen and this whole room feels wrong. The books are kept in the wrong order because why, just why should they be in height-wise order anyway? Who says it is wrong to stack them in the order of which they were loved? The light is wrong, it no longer falls gracefully and has to be forced in through a tubelight that has something wrong with it and so won't start until I clamber up a chair and twist it forcefully which is again, a terrible way to start
Read more

An Ode to Him

Circa 2007, watching Breakfast at Tiffany's. Hoping, wishing, praying and demanding that one stranger who walks into your life and turns everything around. Fast forward, January 2011. For the first time in many years, something that another person has said rendered me speechless. In a way that makes my heart skip a beat every now and then. In a way that has me almost crying for sheer joy one moment and smiling softly to myself the next. And like all the good things in life, it doesn't make any sense to me. How does someone go from an acquaintance to friend to filling up the whole of my message inbox in one week? How did I go from being socially awkward to telling somebody everything there is to know about me? How can he possibly know the words I want to hear and be the person I want to spend time with? How in the name of God does he get me singing with him in the middle of the night, especially that one song that speaks to me? Knowing him is reassuring, like a promise of so
Read more

In The Time of Cholera, Love and Other Musings

I never did imagine one could read the way I do now. I picked up Love In The Time of Cholera for the 3rd time last month, in an attempt to finally read it. I've been rummaging through it for years now, making futile efforts to move beyond three or four pages. The fact is, at the time, I would have start building the streets that Dr. Urbino, Florentino and Fermina walked on all over again each time I started after keeping it down for a day. It becomes exhausting, imagining the crowded streets, nauseating odours and myriad of emotions throughout. This time around, all of it changed. I knew the city already. I could see it forming in my mind as I opened the pages to where I had last stopped. Somehow, I could fathom every cobbled path in the city as surely as the characters tread upon them. Florentino Ariza's love letters seem written by a hand no more experienced than mine. All it takes is one whiff of the air and every floating aroma, odour and smell from the harbour comes ru
Read more