I remember when you arrived at my house.
It was the dead of night. Around 3 A.M., which is when the fire of disjointed reality clouds over the fissures in my bones. It is a dangerous time. A time when reality shimmers like satin; and if you outstretch your hand into it, it slips through. As if reality never existed at all. Both you and it are ghosts.
I was asleep, with the humming voices of dreams circling my hair with translucent fingers. But the clock struck 3 A.M., and my hands outstretched— out of their own will. As if I was looking for something, and the constraints of reality were weakened enough so that I could.
And then I heard it. I woke up at the sound, my heart beating a million miles a minute, gripping the pillowcase as if I had fallen out of the sky in my dreams.
It was your voice. It was like music. It was like angel music. You had laughed at something. My mouth shaped the syllables of your laughter, and my hands traced the letters in the cloudy, broken, 3 A.M. night air. It was wondrous, as if the stars had dropped out of the heavens and hung around my head on silver strings.
A yellow light had flickered on outside, the strip of it glowing between my bedroom door and the floor. You were speaking to my mother about your basketball game. I smiled. The music of your voice, so long since it danced around the halls of my house, decorated every room in golden ambiance. I could smell the jasmine floating in the air. The walls themselves leaned in to listen to you.
These love letters are letters I will never write to you. These are letters I have burned and cried over. But their melting ink confirms one thing— that I loved you once. I loved you so painfully, so fully that I could fill the moon with the drops of love that still cling to the edges of me.
And no matter of angry, smirking poems can erase the fact that my hands— at 3 A.M., emboldened by the loosened grip of reality— reached toward that golden strip of light beneath my door. To the laughter that sounded like music. A desperate, quiet plea for you to hear me, also. For you to forever decorate my house with your laughter.
At 4 A.M., reality established its reign over the night once more. Slowly, it spread its ringed, bruised fingers over my motionless figure. All at once, I was fast asleep, the lights were gone, your laughter faded into starry velvet, and my hands were limp against my bed frame.
But I never forgot. And neither did 3 A.M.
