Scintilla

Dear “L”,

Oh, my Love, hug the Silence; our whispers dwell in it! “Listen” and “Silent” use the same letters but are arranged differently. We can attend to emotions that words and sounds can’t construct, but in silence, the realm beyond our acoustic capacity fosters them tenderly. It is not empty of sound but an invitation to concede the boundaries. We do not hear a ping while standing close to a sound source because of our ear’s structural deficiency in deciphering it. Or, the wave could be far away and have dissipated before reaching us. Without silence between notes, music would not exist—the gap between notes is as important as the instruments musicians play. Or between the words we gift, the unvoiced makes us the lover.

When we are together, the gap between our figures is soaked in the warmth of tenderness—only endurance can let us discover how to embrace all there is between us. Would you linger—for the ‘yet to be,’ my Love? To gaze through our “Moni,” which reveals the most profound glaring void of the soul? The luminescence in our eyes is the affection of tears, if you didn’t know.

Let us briefly close our eyes, be patient, breathe slowly, and surrender genuinely to our “Mon” in rumination. We ponder: When did we first meet, and how many eons have passed since? Do you, my Love, hear the sound of the heartbeat as I glide through memories for an answer to the question? Or do the winds snatch the wave from reaching you and leave you alone? Know this: once we bathe in love, we may dry out of it, but the presence of love lingers—always in our senses—like many of our wishes that did not come true, leaving us empty, yet we never stop remembering them. Do we? There is no transgression to visit those yearnings again and again. The longing for your intimacy melts me. I used to live in your presence under the starry sky. How much do you remember?

Before entropy ultimately snatches you away from me completely, which it must do, slide your arm through mine like a crochet and make a curl of devotion. Lean on my shoulder to settle and rendezvous on a never-ending field of acquaintance. We wander in this landscape with the hope of reaching our destination. We could write or draw for each other, but blanks in between dominate, like unspoken emotions, to convey more of our sentiments.

Perhaps the diction of my feelings for you, my Love, is similar to a “Kipuka”—an island that survived with plants and bare breasts of soil in the sea of boiling lava streams. Without the sudden pause of the fiery march of lava, the Kipuka, the land would have been a sterile backdrop for a more extensive terrain of scorched earth. But greenery in the patch sprouted from the blessing of the molten lava’s second thought. My psyche, too, burned from the searing grief of regrets about Love. You must feel countless fissures from aches when you caress my heart with tenderness. To cope, I anchored in waiting—yes, in waiting and making “Kipuka” with the memories of your fondness for my limping, spiritless soul. That is all I knew. That is how I bore love! Ignoring that no love can flourish without sustenance from the truth and the resolute efforts to seek it! Love emerges from grinds—grief midwife love in our senses.

Yesterday, it was last year. Now, I am staring at the four seasons, the sun, the winds, and the changing colors. Day in and day out, I would sail through the waves of time with a clear view of the harbor where my vessel once docked, perplexed at my floating temper, looking at outdated periods as if what seemed genuine once should always be so. I may now articulate what aporia in “seeking or searching” means, but I am uncertain if it matters anymore, even if you and I could start anew! The abrasions of time change what once was and what furrow we draw for the future. That is what time does: take away, drip by drip, what is dear to our hearts.

Standing by the sea, my breath in the twilight hour feels borrowed. I watch the waters skate in and out of the shore, unmindful that the earth’s motion makes the water hop and skip, not the mighty sea. What centripetal force coaxed me to think only of you, of love, staying in love, and being with love? Would I realize the warmth of your arrival or the wisdom to wait?