Oops. I just found out that you're with someone new.
He looks Korean—tall, has cool sunglasses. You always liked your expensive Gentle Monsters; I always thought they were kinda lame.
My bad, this one’s on me. I went to your channel to see your face and found two. I know, I know, boundaries.
I did it because I missed you, and it's hard when I know you have a vlog. Like trying to quit smoking with a cigarette locked in your top drawer, and you find yourself going to "check out" the drawer every now and then, but this time the key is in your hand, how did that happen? Ah.. Well, too late now. What can you do? Only human after all.
It's a little strange to feel heartbroken by this when I was the one who decided to break up with you, twice. But, if I’m being honest with myself, I think I know by now that I’ve been carrying you with me all this time.
I confess, I’ve been holding on: to memory, to the feeling of the memory, to the memory of the feeling. To gold, tinged with blue, dissolving ever so slowly. You haunt me—but what a pleasant intrusion you are, C.
I've been grieving you in a hundred quiet ways, in the hollowness that dwells beneath the joy, in the melancholy that creeps in when I look away, in the duller green of tree leaves, and in sunsets less spectacular. I looked through my journal just now, and counted that I wrote about you on 22 separate days. Oh all the ways I tried to process you.
I read, somewhere, that the homing pigeon is able to find its way home even when taken 1000 miles away. Deep down, a part of me hopes that we are not so unlike that, that now we just have to find our way back. Can you imagine how the owner must suffer? They wait, not knowing if their bird has been ensnared somewhere, or become lost. They have only their belief, that one day, it will come back to them.
Well, you’re finding your way to somewhere else now, and I’m not your home anymore. You aren’t a boomerang, so I shouldn’t throw you and wait for your return.
Maybe, there’s no constellation in the night sky that tells our story after all. Maybe, the stars aren’t conspiring on our behalf. Maybe, there’s no red thread, no Yuanfen, and no 인연.
It looks like theres no karmic insurance on always and forever, and so, maybe, I’m just calling your name to hear the echo.
Summer is almost here. The cherry blossom outside my house was in full bloom, and as the petals fell, I wondered how you were doing.
The weather is getting warmer, and the days are long again, C. Sunlight strikes the trees and the leaves glow my favorite shade of verdant green. I think of Komorebi, the Japanese word which means “sunlight leaking through trees.” I stop and stare for a while, soaking in the beauty, surrendering to it.
The bay is vibrant and alive, and I know a hill from which the sunset over the skyline is absolutely breathtaking. You would have liked it here—over the past year, I must have picked out a dozen cafes and god knows how many fun restaurants for us to try out. There's so much to do; all the time in the world wouldn't have been enough, and now there's no time left for us at all.
But, that’s alright. Seeing you with someone new, I feel a bit like Bruno Mars singing When I Was Your Man, which makes me laugh—to know, how human it is to find myself here, how eye-rollingly common, how comfortingly trite. I think of Kintsugi, the Japanese word meaning “golden repair.” To live is to break and then come back together, stronger, more beautiful.
So, I’ll leave it here. I'm happy for you, at least, a little bit. I can't mean it fully yet, but some day I will. Only human after all.
Until then.
Love,
E
“There's so much to do; all the time in the world wouldn't have been enough, and now there's no time left for us at all.”
😭😭😭💙🎯