“Perennial”

Dearest,

Adamant to what I’ve been feeling in the past and even today, I always envision a great field of grass shaded by the lack of sun, coupled with the most mesmerising view of the atmosphere. There is a lake near my home that now embodies whatever this is supposed to be. It reminds me of the dreams that I’ve been having of you, the ones in which the both of us are surrounded by the sweeping fields of pale emerald as lined up against the amorphous sapphire in the distance. The fishermen and sightseers around us appear blank-faced, their entire silhouettes lacking detail; they are like the figures in the background of some landscape rendered in watercolour, halted in the middle of what they were doing. We, of course, remain too far from them to tell what their expressions hide.

Regardless, it’s beautiful outside. If there’s one thing I’m going to miss about this town when we decide to leave, it’ll be areas like these. Only here can I actually sense so much of my surroundings while seeing the lake’s surface as the most malleable pane of glass in the universe. To me, it’s but an aquatic mirror, what with its temporal churning.

It reminds me of us, you see, in how I’ve been feeling like I have nothing to do with you. I am indeterminate to the eyes of your reflection, translucent at best. Between the pair of bodies in laughter, between the ones in the mutual fatigue of dreaming, I remain ashamed. I have no right to impede myself against you like this.

Dearest, let me apologise. I never meant to scare you. I never meant to make you feel as though you had to nurse me into loving you again.

To that regard, the clouds of unwinding despair begin to swell in my mind. They force my sense of worth off whatever rails it’d been riding on; like some hellish Claymation film, I watch it careen into that mental sea, the water’s surface cradling and consuming it in shaped teeth of foamy white and waves of colourless liquid. The formless concoction of thoughts lands without a sound, the door of your consciousness having been rammed open at the first light of my screams. I am in tears again at midnight, shivering. You come and drag my body into our bedroom as if you were an EMT worker, lifting me onto the stretcher of your comfort. You tell me not to weep. You tell me that I’m well. You hand me oxygen.

Even then, however, I cannot think of myself as much. My confidence lingers like a boat on my brainwaves, rocking with unease in its travels. I begin see myself thrown overboard, drowning without more than a pitiful whimper. I begin to feel the way newly picked flowers probably do: degraded, watching in surrender as Death marches towards them.

Dearest, I’m sorry, but I cannot believe you.


That is why I have brought myself here, away from you. There lies a certain sentimentality in the course of the waves that makes the passing of these days just that easier for me. Even lately, as I’ve spent so many of these afternoons and nights shivering in turmoil while you’ve called out my name in renewed shock, I cannot deny that spending time here brings me a calming pleasure. From where I sit, the landscape is sprawling out its limbs, and so it appears in the form of some forgotten photograph elsewhere in my head. In that time, the wind-borne dance of the trees around me would appear to have ceased, the movement and low speech of the strangers in my vicinity seeming to have gone mute as well. Everything I could behold becomes but a cheap postcard to my memory after every blink, after every habitual shuttering of the eyes.

This never will be a place I’ll have in mind for our future. Granted, maybe from here, I could add an element to that dream we’ve been trying to build together, once we move away. We could live near a lake of some sort, perhaps a river.


I know you’re sick of me saying this to you, Dearest, but I’ve been missing you so much that I’ve begun to feel like I just might go beyond those damned “boundaries of sanity” you’ve told me to never cross. But -- and here I am, getting ahead of myself as usual -- I promised you, didn’t I? When you found me atop a chair, a yellow string collaring me, you pulled me closer to yourself, there in your room the other night, and I told you how much of a perspiring nervous wreck I knew myself to be. I could feel it from just how much I couldn’t stop shivering, feeling nauseous and wanting so badly to disarm your own worries with a smile I’d have crafted for these occasions, for this feeling I’ve kept from you for months. And yet, it was when you damn near crushed my hands with yours, tearing the lifeline from the ceiling, that you clutched my temples and you yelled at me, your face deformed by this teary-eyed grimace you held. Your eyelids were shut as if you thought you could silence me in doing so -- you might have not wanted to see me at all, not with how hollow-eyed you later told me I had looked. I suppose that, even then, you hadn’t wanted to hear anything but yourself. And so you shouted at me, made me promise you that I’d never do it, that I would never even try. That, even with the dispositions I’ve spoken to you about, I would never even think of it.

Dearest.

The last thing I want to do is prove that you were right, that I am a terrible listener after all.

. . .

I last came to this lake when I had first fallen in love. Have I ever told you about that time? I had known back then of what it meant to adore someone, but, like an old children’s toy, I was just played around with in return, discarded all the same. I became a bore, useless and insufferable. I ended up leeching from the person’s optimism, draining him to a corpse.

I suppose that’s why I’m glad you’re with me. You never seem to mind my being here. You should know, Dearest, of how much I cannot wait to see you again, of how much I wish for you to be here too.


I have moved to the top of a hill, and while the water continues to be in my view, people (myself, even) begin to fade from my peripheral vision. In moments, I see it: there is nothing here but the earth. Along the canvas, I am but a smear left behind by mistake. I must appear to be staring into the distance, not a single thing in my focus.

It’s then that I hear it.

Something in the back of my mind speaks quietly, and with it comes a sort of film. It spills past my range of hearing like loose paper in heavy wind, the whole of it rolling by in a cohesive blur: I see us again. We’re together, the both of us sitting up in bed, the whirr of a machine somewhere beyond us. There’s two hours left until sunrise, your face having been beaten and bruised by the lack of sleep. Yet, when I looked into your sunken eyes, you simply smiled. This one was not carved of falseness.

"I can’t believe you’re still all right," I heard you tell me. "I can’t believe it."

And then I hugged you, my arms as harnesses against your virulent fit of trembling, something in your temperament breaking as you cried yourself to sleep. I had forgotten to join you in dreaming. I’m sorry for that. I had you know, however, within this mere vision, that I was glad for having existed alongside you. For that, I was made happier than you could ever know, than anyone else could have ever made me.


I hope that the news of this allows you to sleep well, if not for now, then after all of this has long been over.
You’ve done me so much good.

Yours,
E————