no crash. no bang.

Love letter, No. 2

In defense, I never thought this day would come. I never understood that we might be able to know each other, and never thought that the languages that give us speech and heart would be understood. I knew you and you knew me. In the beginning, both of us thought it an impossibility.



J

You and your exuberant, symphonic self. Shit, everything you can’t keep within yourself you allow to spill out, like music, like a performer losing control on stage. You perform for this beloved audience, belonging to the world, although the world never reciprocates and belongs to you. I’m always catching up to you, aren’t I. You became yourself so long ago, but here I am, becoming more and more like myself everyday, falling behind with the new ideas that expire before I can reach them.

Not that it matters.

See, for the longest time I found it difficult to talk to you, thinking that we’d forever be untranslatable to each other and thus the possibility of conversation would always escape us. Your self-assurance and your easy, breezy sublimation of daily anxieties that belied your so apparent yet all too easily forgettable fragility made me want to kiss you and hurt you and uncover you and bury you all at once. But then I think we found that, a fait accompli, we became a “we,” without any choice in the matter. People used to tell me that I have too much spirit for my circumstances. And your spirit was never ending, unseen like the wind and the most forceful gale to ever sway me.

So nothing else mattered.

You convinced me that I existed. Disregarding our masochistic need (everyone’s masochistic need) to be conflicted and stay that way, we held mirrors for each other and peeled the second faces off so that the heat emanating from the first, true ones could finally be released. We mingled. We borrowed languages from each other to add more to our names. Nothing else mattered. You always acted like the war reporter who was born after the negotiating of peace, unable to understand the news around you or comprehend the terms of peace. By those terms, I’m forever acting like the war-stricken veteran, inanely rambling a steady stream of dialogue that consists of questions constantly answering itself and never arriving anywhere, too sarcastic and ironic to sound like any language. At least not one you could discern. Too much emotion there; not knowing what to do with them all, we involuntarily let them escape, revealing them so we could live beside each other.

You
mattered.

You still matter; you’re the fragile extension of myself that I keep closer to me than anything, like utopia and like memory, to assure myself that I am, indeed me. I am the darker half of you. I yearned to be nostalgic for childhood even when I was a child, and then we met and there was no such thing as growing up, so remembering and childhood and youth became one and nothing mattered. Everything was everywhere all at once: we were everything and everywhere all at once. We were, we are, the raw and trembling energy, music, motion that can only be boiled down to “feeling,” forever moving and dancing, speaking in tongues and meeting halfway to grant peace and comprehension, forever living like so, forever loving.

We’re assaulted and overwhelmed by memories that always seem as though they’re not ours, but nonetheless feel like they’ve happened to us. We own them, just as we own each other.