the voicemail letter

I am a writer. A dreamer. A reader, most importantly. I am the “poor, mad girl back home”. I am a hopeless romantic, a doer, a mediocre photographer, addicted to Diet Mountain Dew and mini Cadbury eggs and clumsy and listen to bad music and love Disney movies. I triple knot my shoe laces and they still come undone by the end of the day. I’m a girl that, instead of stuffed animals, has books crowded on her bed (oh, the times I’ve woken up with words imprinted on my skin!). I have devoured many a book in one day, in hours, refusing sleep until the last page so I might be satisfied.

           

My blood flows ink and words, colorful allusions and metaphors; and every thought is as a book. I map out conversations such as dialoge and try to figure out the plot of everyone’s lives so that I might one day learn the plot of my own (although I suspect you have some to do with it).

           

            We are reading the story of our lives

            As though we were in it

            As though we had written it

                                                ~ Mark Strand

I am a collector of vague words and lost phrases and people’s quirks. ‘Pulvis et umbra sumus’ – we are but dust and shadows. Sleep-warm. ‘I was dying of wanting’. Tá mo chroí instigh intí. “And from death I return with words.” I speak in some loose collection of words, phrases, thoughts stolen from others. One minute I am Clary Fray, another Lizzie Bennett, another Gemma Doyle, Hermione Granger, Rose Hathaway, Kaye Fierch, Katniss Everdeen, Almathia. I am broken verses strung into a symphony of sound. I am quotes and stars and momentos and books. Oh, how I am books!

I am a girl, a thing usually deemed fragile though I try not to be. But I am, and it’s simply terrible at times. I am strong for others, weak for myself. A caregiver of sorts, latching onto the unfortunate and the needy and the lost.

And then there is you.

You, with your music and guitars and jazz and your smile. That smile, that I love. When it pops out after something particularly clever (or stupid) I’ve said, when I can feel it when you’re kissing me, when it’s so automatic that one side quirks up before the other and the smile starts in your eyes before it hits your mouth.

How your music is everything, and there’s a song for every moment. Is there one for me, I wonder? I should hope not, but I do, darling, I do. How the range of your music is everything I could hope for in mine.

The fact you’re just as comfortable in a plain shirt as a sweater vest (though, no offense to them, but when you’ve taken them off and are down to just the button-down and roll the sleeves up I swoon) and are just so you in everything you do.

Everything you’ve dreamed up for us and how it makes me not want to live in my books anymore. Makes me want to live, with you. To just simply be, together, as two halves of a whole.

Or a hole, one we’ve dug together that could be scary but instead is comfortable and quaint and pretty perfect.

How I can read any book, pretend to be anyone and fall in love through words time and time again (often with the same characters) and every single time it is nothing compared to you. To how you love me.

And maybe it’s not how I feel about you – it’s how I don’t feel anything close to this for anyone else. Maybe it’s how I can never pin down exactly what shade of blue your eyes are or how I can’t explain how I feel about you without grinning like a schoolgirl. Or how I can listen to any love song and relate it back to us. How I have been writing til my hand hurts to try and convey to you the depth of my affection.

How I worry about giving you this, simply because I overthink everything for fear of screwing this – of screwing us – up.

How you are not Mr. Darcy or Peeta or Kartik or Dimitri Belikov, JAce Morgenstern, Ron Weasley, The Great Wizard Schmendrick, Roiben Rath Raye but at the same you’re so much more. You are every good part of every book, movie and song that I was already in love with, some from childhood. Truly.

How I could write tens of hundreds of things, compose sonnets, write novels, compose music or stand under your window with a boombox like those 80’s movies (though with my luck, you’d choose that night to sleep in the basement) and it wouldn’t be enough.

            “Time together is just never quite enough.”

            “When you and I are alone, I’ve never felt so at home.”

            […]

            “So tell me darling, do you wish we’d fall in love?”

            “All the time, all the time”

                                                            ~Saltwater Room, Owl City

You, with your jokes I don’t get and your coffee and every little thing about you. Blue and green. Your scarf. Chase. You want to do graphic design. You want to get out of this place as much as I do.

You, with your soothing words and just-right comments. How you can be talking to someone else and yet tracing circles on me and I melt. You with your games and friends and secret place I don’t know how to find yet (I can’t wait to, one day). How I want to one day understand you, all of you, how I understand myself. Maybe more. How you say things and I believe you, and it scares the living hell out of me most of the time because everyone has left me at some point for some reason and I’ve learned to not trust. But you, you, oh you make me trust you with every word of the future you offer me – and I take, quite greedily.