When I was in love with you; I would write you poems. Long, sensuous poems to tell you all that I could not say to you on the phone, on msn, on facebook and all the places we half-met on the internet. I was scared that my self would berate me for being too dramatic, for living in a book, for making you out to be what you were resolutely not.
I found comfort in showing off pretty words to you; to make you believe that what a fifteen year old heart was able to feel could sustain us through adolescence into tentative adulthood and finally into this place I am now making home. In those years, we saw each other as our best selves. World changers. I romanticised your history and till now I remember you only as a boy who survived a war and took on the world, and still managed to have pockets filled with love, responsibility and hope. I wish sometimes that I had only seen you. Clearly. I am sure you would have been a surprise. We started off exchanging poetry. I cannot believe you brought that up when I was leaving you for the final time. The final time. Now look what you did? It is what I have held on to since. I no longer write you poetry. I no longer write you into my stories. I think of you and take care not to embellish. So that at last the truth of what we had can emerge.
I do not write poetry for this place I am in. I do not write of this experience in my stories. I am determined to live it, unwritten and only recorded by memory. Memory then is my witness, here I do not embellish and do not even feel the need to. This love...self love, NEGRITUDE, call it what you will, is to be lived.
