I memorized your number unintentionally, unconsciously. Let this be my compliance to what the automatic female voice has requested me to do, over and over and over and again and again to please leave a message after the beep. Beep. Hi (insert name), it's Hannah. I just called to talk to you and here I am leaving you a stupid voice message flaunting my insensitivity to the unspoken rule that I shouldn't have called you first. Why don't you call me on your own? 


Why don't you. 

The late-night-monologue showers must stop. I must stop the late-night-monologue showers.

Paul, published

I wondered if ever he was tired of waiting for someone to talk to him first. Because he always waited. In the hallway walking toward him he would not smile nor wave nor say hi unless you did first. I remember in class he never asked questions and never answered them. When I met him after college, he was reading the book I was looking for. It was called Jane Eyre, which went out of print and there remained only a handful of copies left. It was a rare luxury to have such a book in your possession.

            He told me about his dreams every night after we married. They were all strange and ethereal to me. I became jealous of him whenever in those few words he told me how real everything appeared inside his eyes. As if nothing was real inside this world. Listening to him always made me want to go to bed, to see if something happened inside my own eyes. But I am a dreamless insomniac and in those sleepless nights I wrote him letters. Letters about what I would like to dream about and whether he is still waiting.

            Dear Paul,

            It is raining outside and I can hear the raindrops quietly drumming the ceiling. They make me think of your dreams, how the rain came through and you stood in this room, holding my umbrella. How all the books on our shelves dripped of black liquid because the rain was washing away the ink. Except Jane Eyre, you said. 

            I wish I could dream about you, to understand the parts of you that I fail to understand now and before. To find out why you often sing and only sometimes talk.

            And at the end of every letter I would write, Until when will you wait? Then I would quietly place it on the piano next to his dense sheets of music. We never talked about the letters, but I knew he read them and kept them somewhere.

            Behind or beneath, he avoids to tell me something. I know he has a remarkably good memory that sometimes scares me. He remembers every meticulous detail--the scar under your lip, the flat F#. I imagine it must be immensely difficult to live a life like that. To carry with you the memories and dreams and times you hardly speak of. What are you waiting for. 

            I loved reading Jane Eyre with him, loved him because he did not mind the silences when we chewed our food. He loved to be hugged and was always hungry. And in that way, he was still a child. He used rare words like “beautiful” and “quaint” when he spoke. No one talked like that anymore. I loved searching the house for the places he kept my letters, playing hide-and-seek by myself. I loved that he whisper-sung in my ear when I couldn’t fall asleep. I loved him because I did not want him to wait. To love him was to keep him from waiting. 

To love him was to keep him. 

11:55 PM David: its like, a story written from inside me
Paul was inspired by David. His constant waiting, tacit demeanor, unusual dreams, keen memory, the piano. But this is only the character. The characterization of Paul was inspired by someone else. Save that he read the classics, the details are from Jack. The easy opulence of having books on his shelf, the natural sensitivity of being pitch perfect, the pauses when we would eat together. Jack is the best person that happened in my life; David, the best character-like person in real life. Subsequently when a writer applies these two people in her short story to create a character, Paul becomes perfect, organic. 

anatomy of a heartbreak

My heart gets cold and empty as it sinks with every beat. I don't know if that's what you feel when your heart is being broken.

I had imagined you could actually hear the heart splinter into its atria and ventricles, into its four chambers; and the atrioventricular and sinoatrial nodes would rip, the strings of your heart dangling from its walls; and your capillaries would burst into bruises; your veins, greener, mapping out the sad traffic of your body; your arteries, purpler, as if your heart was once drenched in his wine.

We were looking at each other without knowing that we were. Then, as when you suddenly hear the clock tick as if for the first time, this realization struck me--that the clcok has been ticking all along, that we've been loving each other for so long.

I wake up with a new bruise, fall asleep with another scar.

a simile

David: Your feelings get hurt easily.
Me: Yes.
David: It's like my skin. I understand.

a wish and a fear

I want an eidetic memory of you lest I never see you again.

Years later I would see your brother. No, not in a coffeeshop but in his room, watching his favorite cartoon on his bed, in his blue PJs, all of a sudden sitting up, happy to see me. He's eight. You're there beside me in the warmly-lit room, your hands on me, look who's here Ben, but I can't see you. I'm remembering your brother.

His lambent eyes

I can't see you.

Afterwards, I would open my eyes and see in the dark his lambent eyes, pupils dilated.

I can see you so clearly now.

You

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say.

Tobias Wolff

  So finish your coffee. Let’s have a conversation. 

I woke up one morning with this unbreakable fact inside my eyes that you are irreplaceable, that you are impossible to be substituted by anything or anyone else. You are not basil that can be traded in for parsley on my pasta. I cannot fabricate you like I created Paul (whom I wrote unsent letters to, justifying myself that he is real because he exists in my own reality). You are not imagined or supposed. You are here reading me. (Paul could never do that; he could only be read.) You certainly surpass my idea of a perfect character.

I wish I could tell you exactly the things you need me to say. 

There needed to be weeks and months of uninterrupted time to say all the things that needed to be said.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

I want to read your mind. What are you thinking about? You look nostalgic. Say it. 

Home. 

I’ve not been home for three years. I don’t know what it looks like, save for the detail that it’s on the seventeenth floor. I always had to move back and forth between two countries so that the coming would become the going and the going would become the coming back. I had to leave the people I loved. Or they left me. (Please don’t leave me yet.) Perhaps this is why I read books so much. Books never left me. The characters all stayed--as if belonging home--in the pages which were bound, on which I could underline, fold to remember, come back to. And one day you came into my life as if you walked out from a book, and I found that you're better than books, that you defy the impossibilities of literature. 

So I write. To go back home, to wake up again, to be your coffee as you are mine. 

An attempt at satire

     Did I ask you for a cake on my birthday? Of course not. I knew something like cake would be too much to handle for you. You’d first have to order, then drive to the bakery, pick it up, bring it to me, and pray dear God let chocolate be her favorite cake, which it's not. I only wanted a handwritten card. Was that too much to ask? I wanted something to hold in my hands what you had held before, that caused you to turn over the words inside your head how best to pen them down. I wanted to feel the same difficult endeavor you underwent of saying something so banal in a moving novelty. Defy cliché. I wanted to guess which verbs you lost, admire and smile at the blithe then wobbly penmanship across the page. The choice of paper, the time and thought it took you, the color of ink that wrote my name and yours. I wanted to feel the careful pressure in my fingers opening the envelope you had sealed, like a child opening a wrapped gift, suppressing the jumpy eagerness at something so happily rare. 


     But an email? At 11:32 PM? What terrible things technology has done to you. I thought you knew better. I thought that you were different, that you’re this unabashedly old-fashioned person, but I guess that’s my impossible conjecture. Do you remember, there was a time when people took out a book, a newspaper from coat pockets, backpacks, and began reading, at airport terminals, subways, and I would silently gauge what they read from the titles and peeked passages. Now their sophisticated hands and ears and mouths and eyes are behind phones. Can you believe it? You’ve become one of them. 


     Books don’t look like books anymore. Letters don’t send like letters. Are you even the same person? (Yes, I know, you’re different yet the same.)