day 70

A Letter to Sentiment

Appearing often during the pinnacle of one's solitude, a figure that simulates your senses of love walks across the stone-tiled streets of a foreign city. But you know it is not she. And the window of despair reopens completely to invite the gush of wind and the biting cold of a mistaken autumn. It is summer, but the senses are often more in-sync with the temperature and brightness of the afternoon city than convention.

You walk alone, and you also walk with others, mistaking yourself for someone else you do not know. And you and I both know, we are incomplete now, dependent on the other to balance our clumsy steps. There is nothing conventional about us as a couple. There are only mistaken identities - I thought I knew who I was until I met you and soon I noticed how I refashioned myself! Only our senses, or the lack of your warmth, your touch and your voice tell me how it is not yet home. A single bed, an empty single room, and a pair of legs do not tell me where I am. They tell me where I am not.

However, it is useless to think of pairs and binaries.
I think, with only I to think.
Eventually, thinking of you in order to understand myself is just self-centred. I must be sadly mistaken, to think that with sentiment I could find you next to me.

There is something a letter cannot do. And I know this for a fact, despite the romantic notion of a letter communicating sentiments and emotions to the faraway person. It only reminds the other that you are faraway. So far away that words are all you could afford to soothe the pain and anguish of a separation. A letter is also belated. A letter reaches only the face and eyes of the reader; it cannot bring with it the tangible body, where the other can touch and feel the well-being and safety of the writer.

A letter does give us a presence, of which the reading and misreading of the text determine the form of the sentiment. But it is difficult for the reader to know the exact emotion or sentiment of the writer. The problem is with the distance and the belatedness, isn't it?

I think there is a simple reality to letter-writing. It is the medium in which something can be expressed. It can only replace the body for a while. But nothing is compared to your body, your soul and your heart, beating next to me, guiding me, supporting me as we both trip and scramble through more bodies, uncertainties and the unforgiving urban landscape.

I'll come back soon. I am my own letter.