29

I’m in love with this girl (who sings me lullabies over webcam, as we recreate our histories and find out who we are and once were, hiding our faces behind thin veils and 3am lighting)

Love is such a complicated word, and this is why I find myself confused, drawing the lines between infatuation and lust and the dreaded four letter word. I wouldn’t know now, but it will be too risky to try.

I’m in love with this girl. I’ve been in love with this girl for as long as I can remember –

– and will never tell her.

28

She opened her mouth to proclaim a sermon she had full faith in. She waxed about the end of times and antipopes, how Benedict XVI would be the penultimate pontiff before Christ’s second coming.

This, according to her, came from a saint’s (human, nonetheless) letter, as told to her by a local pastor.

I remember watching a documentary in which indoctrination was blatantly demonstrated. Religious extremes, to say the least, are incredibly daunting.

And there I was, pretending to listen to my mother as she ranted about Armageddon.

When I tell her I’m agnostic I either die or get disowned.

27

This isn’t a love song. Neither is this a poem some teenager with oversized fringes would post on his vampire themed blog, nor a manifesto slash note I purposely leave behind before I end it all.

This is the last message I write while I’m still in love with you.

Or maybe slightly out of it. I’ve stopped counting the days after all. There’s so much more for you to see when your eyes are opened a little more than usual.

I’ll be waiting for the day everything returns to normal – if ever that day ever comes.

Life goes on.

26

I had forgotten how to love because of the pain associated with it.

In my apathy, I felt peace. However, there was something missing in this solitude, something that made me feel incomplete, desolate.

The law of interaction states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Emphasis on the opposite.

I always thought that with every risk I took, there would be unfortunate consequences. For every word, an argument would ensue. Every shoulder leaned upon would disappear, leaving you falling.

Pessimism led me to let go of positive possibilities.

And then you came.

I learned to love again.

25

He had stopped talking to her for so long that he had stopped counting.

The what-ifs haunted him, as he mulled breaking the silence. At first, he wasn’t sure if he felt bad because he was guilty or if he just missed conversing with her.

Days seem to fly by faster this way, he thought.

And they did.

Days would turn to weeks. Weeks would eventually compose the months, the years, the lifetime they could have spent in each other’s embraces, chanting sweet nothings under the moonlit sky, breathing, sweating, living.

She never gave him the chance. The silence remained.