Drought

Dear E,

Drought arrived without preamble. It came out of nowhere, an intruder puncturing the stillness of things with cunning and stealth of a kingfisher that plunge upon the lake, burning with malice and hunger.

It caught me unaware. My thoughts reeled, my composure scattered in every direction like yellowed leaves being plucked by fury of unsympathetic north winds. Blankness soaked my waking hours and I tally every dissolving minute into restless anticipations of midnight when tiredness and emptiness finally submit to slow gravity of sleep.

April has almost left me speechless. Pages I need to fill out remain empty and I have seem to have lost my grip and self-assured reins on creativity. Even my freewill remain motionless like a dulled heart that seemed to have given up, forgetting even to dream.

Storms abound and voids outline the hours like constellations looking for proper orbits to occupy. This is when I miss you the most and your perpetual absence that scrapes craters in my core. I can't help but ask: Are you thinking of me in equal frequency the way I do about you?

This cheerless state of affairs I’ve sinked in this month defies description. I wish I can just walk into your kitchen, poke my nose inside cupboards, rummage for something delicious to perk my spirits with, or, simply sit beside you watching reruns and breathe freely.

We both know this is mere wistfulness on my part. The distance bisecting us is not simply geography. We have drifted into dissimilar lives and only faint voices of each other occasionally surface to remind us of those midnight whispers, bedtime geometries, vocabularies of endearments populating a language that is entirely our own.

When deep reveries of you touch my vacant stares a smile would sprout in my mind and warmth would permeate my saddened self. I would harken back to Christmas morning eight years ago. I remember it well like the full wakefulness of noontime: I stirred from sleep and beheld sunrise bathing your face in luminous glow. I marveled at the ghostly trellis of shadows your long lashes have conceived, brushed like delicate calligraphies in protrusions of your closed eyelids. It was a lovely moment. I think my heart skipped a beat and I kept that splendid memory private, unspoken of, even to you.

Nowadays I am struggling to make every single day mean something but circumstances are less compassionate. Yet I forge on, floating, kicking my feet below the water in stubborn gasps for endurance. I sometimes slide into defeat and skepticism but my irrepressible determination always swerve back into blurry glints of optimism. I sometimes wish I’d plod on easy streets and live an easy life, but that would do me more harm than good.So I persist, despite of inescapable times of momentary weakness.

However, there are afternoons when I felt like I am standing in a hall filled with junk drawers spilling over with overlapping choruses of remorse, exasperation and guilt that would pour out and scatter on the floor. Again, in a time like this, I would think of you. Your giggles. Your mixed tape masterpieces. The way you would ignite a room into sudden explosion of buoyancy just by flashing a smile.

Beloved E, I wish I have the patience to absorb your relentless positivism, especially during trying times when horizons never cease to alternate between blue and grey. But of late, my attempts and determination are constantly assaulted, eroded, and nothing seems to help. Even silence draws me more into pensiveness than clarity.

When evening arrives I feel like one of those crumpled widows, who after a love is gone, sit in porches, behold the infinite sky, drink in the ecstasy of distant years and whisper:

“I used to be fine, I used to be beautiful.”


Remembering you
in ways words cannot substitute,
Loudcloud