love letter 0

maybe it isn't a valentine's hangover anymore if it's already march and i'm still constantly thinking about you

I’ve admittedly procrastinated on this. I last opened this document on February 4. By the time this goes up and out into the world, I presume it would already be March, because February likes to fuck with our sense of time that way with the scarcity and haste of its twenty-eight days. I could blame my waning focus, my consuming fear to start things without making sure every detail’s been perfectly mapped in my head. I could go on and on about how the two-way commute from my house to the office has sapped the soul out of my bones. But you’ll hear all about that from me eventually. Perhaps on our first date, when you ask me what I do for work, and the conversation inevitably takes a turn down that road.

Maybe this time around, I’ll blame Valentine’s. And before you offhandedly comment on how much of a spoilsport I am, I need to make it clear that I’m not entirely cynical about the whole thing. Somewhere beneath the sideways glares and the muttered jabs about marketing teams going crazy with all of the Hearts Day-themed ads, there’s a smile reserved for every flower shop I pass by teeming with new blooms. There’s a fluttering in my chest when I see friends celebrate the love that I’ve long known they deserved. My cousin asked me to be a flower girl at her wedding this month, and I was reminded of how moving it must be to find a person to want to spend the rest of your life with. To know that the kind of person taking shape within you will mold to fit each other.

I waited for the first two weeks of the month to pass, thinking whatever that dryness in my mouth was that made my morning coffee taste more bitter than usual would pass. The world gets so saturated with red, red, red until the 14^th. And then everything’s back to grey. I waited and hoped that it would just be some weird mix of hormones and exhaustion from work snowballing into yearning for someone to kiss it better. Maybe by the end of the month, I’d forget I’d even gone looking for you. I would stay in my lane and be on my merry way as I had been my whole life. I’d be alone. I’d be okay.

There is no shortage of love in my life. I come home to my dog and her sweet, sweet eyes remind me that there is at least one living thing in this world that loves me without reason. What I lacked growing up was made abundant in my friendships. Patience, unrelenting belief, innate understanding. Compassion without question, without transaction. Love that I’m still convincing myself I’m deserving of. Love that I am forging into a shield against whatever or whoever will try to tell me I am incapable of feeling it.

I thought I’d be okay. Hell, I’m more than okay at this being alone thing. I fear I’ve gotten too good at it. But you know, two days after Valentine’s, I got a promotion. And I told all my friends. I told my parents. My colleagues were ecstatic for me. That same day, I worked overtime.  It felt like a slap in the face to be rewarded for good work by being given even more godforsaken work to do. Up until now, I don’t think I’ve unpacked that shitstorm of a day properly, along with several other minor disasters and desserts I impulsively bought thereafter. Because at the end of all of it, I’m waiting for you. I’m waiting to find you and tell you all about it.

I’d tell you about the stupid Instagram ads I keep getting that feed into my pie cravings. I wonder if you’d rebuke me for spending so much and then tell me to get a whole pie in the same breath. Whether or not you like sweets, I like to think you might indulge me every once in a while. I’d give you only the best pieces: the cookie with the most chocolate chips, the bigger mango cheek, the corner piece of a cake. And you won’t have to ask for seconds, because I’ll insist on us going back for more. Either that, or you’ll remind me, gently, with a hand on my back and a warmth in your eyes, that I’m allowed to get seconds, too. And thirds.

You would tell me about work. All about work. From the meaningful things I am sure you’ve accomplished to the petty gossip that makes the rounds along your office hallways. Every now and then, you’ll complain about the tension in your back and neck. “Enough to start a war,” I’d quip, while reaching to rub the sores out. I don’t know if it would do much, but you would tell me it’s more than enough, in that moment. If I could ease the burden of the sky you carried and put some on my back I would. But you would never let me.

I’ve been looking for you, perhaps in all the wrong places. I hoped that maybe you would have felt the same reckless adrenaline of setting up a dating profile and swiping left, left, left, right, left, left, left. As jaded as I’d become about dating apps, there was still a sliver of hope I held out for us. It worked for a handful of friends, I thought. It would make a great story at the wedding. If you’re anything close to what I’ve been picturing, though, I’m certain you wouldn’t be looking for love on the Internet. Or maybe you are, albeit fatigued from the constant cycle of never feeling adequately attractive to being above online dating. Been there, done that, wouldn’t go back.

Some days, though, I don’t even want to think about you. I don’t even want to meet you.

The blame is not yours. You will learn, eventually, once I’ve decided to start wearing my heart on my cardigan sleeves, that I grew up never knowing what love meant beyond barter. I had a mediocre father, who was a cruel husband. And his wife, eldest of five and picking up her pace to catch up with the races of city life, was a crueler mother. I have wounds that cut deeper than bone, and I don’t know if they’ll ever completely close. It’s difficult to picture myself being loved when the ghosts of anger and intergenerational curses paint my face in their ugly, resentful hues in this house. When they hold up a mirror to my face and I see everything my mother despises about herself. When my father’s firecracker of a temper leaves rubble in its wake. On Sunday mornings, I do not go to worship. I take refuge from the destruction of an ageing marriage.

I want to shield you from that. From me, should the centuries-old spirits catch up to us to haunt us. What if I’m no different from my mother, and her mother, and hers, and hers? What if, at the turn of the decade, the timer runs out and I go off like the bomb I’ve been made to believe I am? What if the shrapnel cuts you so deep and places the same hurt in you that I’ve nursed for years? What if we never recover?

I don’t even know you, and yet I love you too much to think about what you’d be dealing with when you meet me. I want to spare you the awkward family dinners, the forced smiles, the tightrope I delicately tread on when my fists clench under the table at some backhanded compliment my mother serves with pasta carbonara.

But dearest, it would be a great injustice to deny you the chance to try. Because even if I don’t know you yet, I know, before anything else, you are gentle and kind and everything that makes me want to be better. I have to believe in that, and in you. I have to believe that through it all, you’ll take my hand under that table and smooth my knuckles and edges over.

So I’ll wait. It’s taken me a bit longer than expected to find you, but I will. I’ll look for you in crowds, in a plane landing somewhere across the Pacific. Search for warm eyes and a laugh that feels as familiar to me as the lyrics to “peace”. Or maybe you’ll gravitate to me in a room full of people we don’t know, because we’re the exception. Because there’s been a lifetime before this where we had our coffee out on a terrace every Sunday, the quiet speaking for the both of us.

Home was ritual enough. Home was a soul tangled in mine during and beyond death of the flesh. I will know when I’m home in this body because these fingers will fit between yours like keys to a lock.

I have plenty of things I want you to know, but at the end of the day, I wrote this to tell you that I filed my taxes last month for the first time. I’m having fried chicken for dinner tonight. My back hurts. I’m already thinking about what to have for breakfast tomorrow. The BTS members are enlisting in the military one by one and I feel like this is a sign that a chapter in my life has finally closed. I’m thinking about cutting my hair short.

There is no one else I’d rather talk about everything and nothing with but you. And the world may look different from how we’d seen it before, but when I meet you, I’ll love you all the same.

Belated Happy Valentine’s,

youknowwho

P.S. You’re cute