#love letters i cannot send

[coepiteamare]

i took you up to the observatory, just shy of closing hours when the sky looked like a black oil canvas splattered with stars. 

i wanted to show you how wide and vast the world was, how dark the sky could be when the sun sets. I looked back at you, glowing under starlight, and the same wonderstruck daze on your face struck the centre of my chest, and i knew then. 

i knew when i tried to take a picture of you, dazzling and brilliant, but no picture could capture how beautiful you looked. i knew when you were awestruck at how big the universe could be, but all i could see was you. 

"the universe is terribly large, isn’t it?” 

yet, here i am, cheeks heated from the supernovae bursting in my chest. 

here you are, in this sea of stars, just a fingertip away. 

here we are, together.

- love letters i cannot send #25

[coepiteamare]

you told me you loved me and i tried to convince you out of it. i begged you to find someone—anyone—else, to fall in love with someone with hands gentler than mine, mannerisms softer. you refused, shook your head and said all great things are gambles. 

but love, no heart is meant to be gambled. it’s not something you give away like you have an arsenal at your disposal. it is your only one to spare and not meant to be spent on me because no love of mine has ever left in the same condition it came in. 

i wanted to show you the serial heartbreaks, the collection of past lovers who have fossilized their trauma and broken hearts in my body, how nothing kind or good has ever managed to last in my hands because i am incapable of keeping things alive. because i am incapable of letting things thrive as they are. 

to get to the truth, you have to perform surgeries: cut people open, peel back layers of skin and history, and plunge your hand into the core of their being. you have to dig your fingers into the bones of their past and grasp for evidence in their feelings. my hands try to be gentle, try to gently find the truth lying in your vessels, but stitches leave scars behind and skin never heals the same way. there is no salvaging broken trust, not when the operation table resembles more of a crime scene left behind by someone with indecisive hands. not when the embalming table is a graveyard of could-have-beens and once-upon-a-time. 

so instead, i take the insecurities apart and reshape them: i stuff dismembered hopes and misplaced affection inside broken breastbones so the body can't cave into itself.

i do not know the difference between surgeries and autopsies. i do not understand that trying to love someone is not the same as trying to keep broken things alive. i don't understand the difference between having someone and suffocating them, do not know where to draw the line and when to let go. 

so in the end, when everything has fallen apart, i try to put it back together. i stuff my love into their chest and sew it shut, until the relationship looks whole again. in an act of desperation, i pray taxidermy will resuscitate the dead. 

no love of mine has ever left my hands in the same condition they came in. 

how do i know if your love is real if i do not dissect it? if i do not cut through flesh and feelings to find the truth? 

how do i love you without harming you in the process?

- love letters i cannot send #23

[coepiteamare]

did you know greek mythology believes humans to be halves of a whole? 

we used to be two bodies—two heads, four arms, four legs—entwined into one being. we used to be perfect until zeus, in a fit of jealously, struck us with a lightning bolt and tore all humans in half. he believed that, if split apart, we would look to the gods in search for an answer. because humans only seek miracles when we are unhappy, when we are desperate, or when there is something missing: we pray to the gods only when there is something slipping through our fingertips and carving our chests hollow. 

time has passed, and the myths have been forgotten, but we still spend all of our lives searching for our soulmate. our souls are still yearning for their other half: our bodies are proof of that. 

if we walk together, our steps will align, footsteps in tandem to one another’s. if we spend time together, our chests will rise and fall in sync. if my chest is pressed against yours—arms wrapped, bodies locked, a crude imitation of the image we used to be—our hearts will beat as one. 

maybe my body craves to be closer to you, fall into step with your breathing. maybe this is the next best thing to being one. maybe we were soulmates in our past lives before we were torn apart, because i look at you, watch your smile bloom and sunlight spread through your cheeks, and i understand why zeus was so overcome with rage. i look at you, and i see something holy, something otherworldly and beautiful and powerful. i look at your hand entwined with mine, and we are so close to perfect. 

i look at you, and i find god. 

- love letters i cannot send #16

[coepiteamare]

i love you.

i've tried to think about why that is, but that's it. 

there's no poetry, no flowers, no embellishments. because i have travelled to the ends of my brain and sat in the fields of my feelings, all in the hopes that i might find an answer. i've tried to write-write and write and write-in an attempt to describe how much you mean to me. i've tried to explore the caverns of my heart in an attempt to learn how my heart beats for you. and every time, i come to the same conclusion: 

i love you. i just love you. that's all there is.

- love letters i cannot send #19

[coepiteamare]

they say dancers die twice: once when they stop dancing, the other when they take their last breath. they say the first death is more painful than the second.

icarus died twice too. first at the touch of his lover, when the sun burned him for coming too close. second in the aftermath of his decisions, when he plummeted into the ocean, drowned by wax wings that could not flap under the weight of a broken heart. 

do lovers die twice too? and if so, which one delivers the fatal blow? 

is it the first bullet, triggered by broken promises and hollow forevers? or is the second shot, the one fired by your presence in the absence, the way you haunt me like a ghost i cannot shake?

or perhaps the first bullet wasn’t the break up, wasn’t the i don’t think i love you you aimed directly at the centre of my chest without even looking in my direction. perhaps i signed off on my death the moment i told you i love you, when i ripped open my chest cavity and broke through bone to reach into fleshy organs and place my bloody, beating heart into your hands. 

maybe that was my first death. 

maybe that was the fatal blow.

- love letters i cannot send #7

[coepiteamare]

my therapist asked me why i am so tired, why i cannot sleep at night, so i told him i am haunted by ghosts.

i am haunted by you. 

my house is brimming with them

you find your way into the corner of every thought, into the hollows of my insecurities, into the crevices of my desires. you make a home in my ribcage, lock the doors, and swallow the key. you imbue yourself into my dreams, paint fires on my skin.

 i can turn the corner, and there’ll be another one there, hovering over me. 

i find you in every hallway, every dead end, every door i open. i see you with each turn of my head. i am being haunted by the memories and thoughts, by events that have not occurred because you infiltrate my sanity and hold it captive, letting my dreams and wishes loose to wreak havoc. 

i’ve thought about moving. 

there’s a superstition in my country. to shake a ghost, make multiple stops before you go home. that way, the ghost will get confused and forget to follow you. but how do i do that when you are everywhere? how do i shake you off when your presence is built into the carbon of my bones? 

but i don’t know if that will help me sleep at night.

even the dust won’t settle where you’ve been: it falls around your silhouette and leaves a ring around your footprints in the closet, your shadow on the bed. i still find your hair tangled in my hairbrush, clogged in the shower drain, stuck to soap and clothes and shoes, no matter how many times i clean and clean and clean. no matter how many people i take to bed, the scent of your shampoo lingers on the sheets. i could make a bathtub of the apartment and it still wouldn’t be enough to rinse your laughter from the walls, the floors, that stupid light fixture you bought from the flea market. 

i’m not sure if that will make me less tired. 

i started therapy because you reminded me i had an obligation to myself to try and get better. so i tried: i started therapy, started to get better. but now, getting better seems to be synonymous with getting over you, and i don’t know if i want to get better at all. i don’t want to get better at nursing my broken heart or get better at getting over you because i don’t want you to leave. i don’t want to be alone. i don’t want to be in this version of reality where you and i are no better than strangers. 

so i think i’ll stay where i am. 

stay with me. i’ll get better at living in faded memories instead. 

- love letters i cannot send #13

[coepiteamare]

i call you at the end of the day. 

ring ring, goes the telephone. 

hello? comes your voice, scattered with static. inter-dimensional calls are still a work in progress, finicky, but you are worlds away, and this is the next best thing. 

hello, i whisper, i’ve missed you. 

sometimes we are quiet, but we are never silent: all the things unspoken do not go unheard. i hear the loneliness rattle in your lungs, the exhaustion laced in your sighs. i wonder if you hear the desire hum through my heartbeat; i don’t ask if you pretend it isn’t there. instead, i focus on the soft breaths that fill the space between us and rest my head against the embrace of your laughter. 

other times, we talk about our day: the good, the bad, the mundane. i could listen to your voice for hours on end: the periodic uhms sprinkled into your vernacular, the drop in tone when you can’t remember something and have to look it up, the way you laugh until you’re breathless. you tell me about what you’re thinking of eating for dinner, what you’ve had for lunch, how you saw a dog today and wanted to take them home. you can’t hold my hand through this vast void between us, so you try and send all the comfort through your voice instead.

i love you, you tell me, send the words through the miles and miles and miles between us. 

i love you, i tell you, drown them in the shade of my heartbeat and seal it with forever. i don’t know if the meaning gets delivered, if the words get warped by the void that separates us. but i send it anyway. 

and when the line disconnects and all i can hear is radio silence, i linger and wonder what my "i love you" sounds like to you. 

after it rings through your ears, does the sincerity distort and become something it was not? does the meaning dilute as it travels through passageways, as it gets passed from neuron to neuron? does my i love you, saturated in heartbreak and dreams of romance, become just another i love you you hear in your everyday?

because your "i love you," drenched in adoration and sunshine smiles, wobbles through the static, and all i hear is "i love you, but not in the way you want me to."

- love letters i cannot send #22

[coepiteamare]

i don’t love you anymore, but sometimes, i can’t help but think about you.

i can’t look at the moon without remembering how you used to text me to look outside because you knew i loved the moon. i can’t eat a grapefruit without remembering how you told me the sweet and sour managed to capture my personality. i can’t listen to the rain without remembering you telling me you could hear my laughter in it.

i don’t love you anymore, but sometimes, i find shards of you piercing through my present, and it makes me wonder if i should have stayed. if the hellfire of your personality would have quelled if i walked a little further.

i don’t love you anymore. but when the nights get cold, i miss the warmth of your words, the way you would tell me i was beautiful. i miss the way your hand felt in mine, the way you let me drag you outside to run across the sprinklers.

i miss you sometimes, but i don’t love you anymore.

- i don’t love you anymore (love letters i cannot send #6)