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.)