Author: Ags
Read whilst listening to —Futile Devices by Sufjan Stevens— if you want to
Dear De I got your letter. I know it’s been three weeks. I’ve been meaning to write, but it seems I don’t have a pretty enough picture to send. Your presence is all over these pages. With the flower petals dried out and stuck to the side, and that decorative tape you always add in front. You even bother to circle the letters of my name. “To make them look 3D,” you say. And those Alfons Mucha cards from your favourite shop in town! I swear, I could almost know the vendor from how much you speak of him.
Hello.
Hey,
Sorry for the delay.
Well.
I, unfortunately, don’t have tape. Or flowers, in fact. I tried; I did. I stole some of these plumerias from the train station I was in last night. The petals dried up in my suitcase. And yes, I know you love it when I send you these cards from the countries I’m in. But seriously, airport postcards are just the most soulless things I’ve ever seen.
Anyways, this may sound like an excuse for the delay of my answer. It’s not. I promise.
I’ve been moving, as I’m sure you know. In fact, I haven’t really set foot on the ground since the last time I heard you say, “see you soon.”
It’s never really “soon” per se. We both know it though I am particularly skilled at denial. It’s more of a tradition, an embellishment to our goodbyes, like those little led lights you cover your room with despite the sun that peeks through your windows. It’s a promise—a way of saying that we’ll wait, that time is just a side character to our plot.
See, there’s something I understood recently about us about you. It struck me when you left my house last October. I remember I told you, “I’ll be homesick.”
The strange thing is, I wasn’t the one leaving home for once. Were I more articulate, I’d have formulated some poetic verse about how the absence of you shuts out colour or something like that.You know that part in “Tintern Abbey”? When Wordsworth writes:
— And now, with gleams of half-extinguish’d thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again —
Yeah… that. The feeling a place changes when one looks at it again. Only for me, it’s not so much about time passing; it’s more about how different a place feels when you’re in it from when you’re gone. Like a picture that loses its tint, you know?
See, the images in my mind, they all include you. We don’t need to be talking; we don’t even need to face each other. But you’re there in the frame. And when you’re not, it’s like the little filmmaker in my mind decides to add the muted filter to everything I see.
I’m not saying I don’t like moments without you as well. It’s just not the same camera.
So, it gets complicated when I see you once every eternity. It seems my life doesn’t like me picturing things too long.
I’m sorry I move so much. Sorry I can’t stay in a place long enough to find my words with you. Sorry I fail to send you those airport postcards just because I feel jealous of your gorgeous letters. Sorry that, despite your constant efforts, I fail to breathe a bit with you.
Workaholic, anxious mess of a mind, I’ve subscribed to decades of guilt whenever I take the time to imagine myself settled. And you know my parents, of course. They like to stare at paths and remind me that change is the only way not to close any of these doors. You don’t turn down opportunity—not in my family. It’s like some god you can’t refuse.
This “need” to see the world, to flee from your comfort zone like it’s some fruit of Eden, it gets tiring. With it, ignoring an open door is like missing out on half the world. And then you come in, and I take a moment to sit with you, chat. One conversation, and it feels worth traveling the entire earth. One day together, and I’d miss out on seven planets for all I care.
I wish I could show them—my parents—how much I get from you. How much you bring me. It’s not that they don’t care; I just don’t think they see how traveling makes you need something else to grasp onto.
I hang onto things—letters, books, posters that wallpaper my room. But then again, I can’t be taking everything to each new place, can I? Clothes unworn for more than a year, comics read more than twice. Posters fall away along with the houses. Every move sheds something or someone.
Gods know the times I heard and said, “We’ll stay in contact.” Gods know how many people I’ve forgotten the names of.
Switching between stations and airports the way I switched schools through childhood, the way you switch clothes. Spending holidays on trains in the hopes of seeing a glimpse of you before I have to leave again. Running between houses that don’t feel like home. Countries just cannot seem to stick.
I work in two languages, aim for seven different futures. The possibility of an exchange, the opportunity of a job far away. I don’t keep diaries; descriptions and images I try to paint of my everyday sound blurry and unsure. And the memory compilations that my iPhone suggests every month just don’t do the trick to build a frame.
But there are exceptions to every rule, even those that structure your life. Every postcard needs a focus, and my camera seems to like your smile.
I thought places defined people. I travel, I change, I lose some and gain some. It’s a cluster of changes. I’ve moved four times since I’ve known you. And when I came back for a year, you went off to some successful school. Naturally, not the best way to secure a grounded relationship. It’s like a dance on a seesaw where we just can’t find our way down at the same time. And I just assumed it would pass, the feeling of missing you, like so many other times. But it didn’t. And I just kept working for the moments I got with you, as short as they were.
But this isn’t a sad story about how I can’t seem to be happy since we met. You’re a little more special than that. You crossed the borders with me—in phone calls, through letters. With the way you have of actually keeping track of what’s going on with me, miles away, making me feel like you’re in my story.
And me? I guess my brain won’t let go of your name so fast. People come and go, but places remain. It was on a post once: Artists like Jean Léon Gérôme paint a harem in the 19th century, and the public claps at how similar the halls look today.
I’m not here to debate how resistant the harem walls are to centuries. But as you left me last month, when I told you I’d be homesick, I understood how wrong that saying was. You remained—more than places, more even than some memories. You stay on my mind, by my side. You watch ruins fall apart at museums with me, read poems about how everything disappears one day. You call me through time zones and different languages.
And yes, places change just as much as people. Halls fall apart; they erode, they grow. But when I close my eyes and think of a place to settle, you’re the most stable part of it. And when you tell me you’ll be there when I come back from my courses, when I text you that I’m passing by, when we hop on a night bus to the edge of nowhere or open the door to another creaky Airbnb, it’s like coming home.
Comments by the jury:
“An optimistic take on relations with plenty of sentiment…but that is perhaps a nice change of pace from what’s in vogue in literary production these days.”
“The writer manages to pack many layers into a short piece of writing – their appreciation for letters, and the way they cannot return them. … This reader finished the piece hoping they will find what they are looking for.”
“The language is so fluid and lovely to read, it’s almost like a train of thoughts but well-curated.”