I write about love to tell myself that this heart is still capable of loving, and giving love.

I pluck out love from another world, another dimension. from another time when I was still that girl who rather than long for sleep, I long to hear your voice, the sound of your footsteps, your laugh–soft like a whisper, cold like the chill air that surrounds us at night when I go out of the room and you are at the study area, your head and your nose buried in your books; your eyebrows in a sharp crease and your arms on top of the table all serious and all focused.

do you know how my heart flutters every time your eyes perk up, and your ears twitch when you hear me pass? do you know how when you crane your neck to look up to me I feel like it is sunrise? do you know how my cheeks heat up like I had sunshine on my face every time I try so hard to pretend you are not there  but fail miserably?

do you know what goes through my mind as I pass you by in the hallways, being too conscious that you are there as if I was a murderer that just killed someone and you are the cop that’s going to interrogate me?

I am nervous just thinking you exist in this space with me, and I am this close to you. I feel like we are caged together. That your bones are my bones, and that you’re sucking all the air in me with just existing in this closed space with me. Like you are kissing me and I want but not want to kiss you. The tragedy of a conflict: I want you to kiss me, but I don’t want you to just kiss me.

You don’t know.

No, you don’t know.

For you I am clumsy feet and unrhythmic arms. For you I am this unguided girl who’s too nervous around you. This person who has a silly crush on you.

Just that. Only that.

You don’t know that you are the lullaby that lulls me to sleep every night. You don’t know that you are the movie that plays over and over in my dreams trapping me in this delusion that you will always be there inside my heart, inside my soul, merged with every fiber of my being.

it’s not untrue.

fast forward five years and I’m still here writing these silly notes. When I think of love, I think of you. When I think of lost love, I think of you. When I think of happiness, I think of you.

You.

You.

You. 

When I think of the rain, I think of you. And the way your cold face turn into sunshine when you smile. A gleam of a raindrop. This must be how it feels like to look at something and feel as if you are born onto a life that’s worth a while. As if Spring has come.  Well in our tropical country we cannot confide in spring. That is why you are the rain for me.

Cold and soothing when the sun’s heat is unbearable.

And then I realize. I miss you.

It’s like a punch in the gut. I am out of breath when I realize that all this time I’ve been missing you. Or missing the feeling of missing you. The thought of you is infinitely joined with everything that screams happiness in my life. I look back at my past and I always remember you and the things that you made me feel. It is still warm in my chest, as if my heart was a passenger seat where your heat still lingers.

I guess this is what it means to love. A heart is a passenger seat. You carry the weight of the beloved. It sits on your heart, weighing you down but you tolerate it because you are made to love. You are made to carry the beloved’s whole being, everything that they are into your heart without any qualms.  And when they leave, you feel light. You feel free. But their heat still lingers. A reminder of their existence and that you had loved. You carried the beloved as far as you could.

That heat represents memory just like how the body remembers the way the ocean made it feel that bones melt when an arm is wrapped around it, afraid to let go. when there are no fading footsteps, just a tight embrace that you’d like to keep forever.