Unsent

It's three thirty am. I have been meaning to text you or to call you, and you know well how much I hate making phone calls. Three phone numbers—I don't know which one to dial to get to you. The last text you sent was eight months and three postal codes ago. One spring, you woke up and decided New York was no longer home, or was it Paris?

I write so much about you, yet not enough to you.

In the quiet silence between us, I write and rewrite words that are yours. Words after words, they pile up in drafts, note apps, and stray papers, yet never find their way to you. Did you finally settle on the color in which you will be dying your hair? Did you finally get around to getting that doctor's checkup? How is it that you can find time to keep with everyone else yet fail to text a simple hi?

My thoughts reach out for you, but my letters stay suspended somewhere between intent and release. I spend too much time staring at the blinking line where there should have been an I'm good, hbu?.

Instead, I wrap my thoughts about you in metaphors, half-real, half-imagined, leaving trails of you hidden in plain sight, hoping you would notice. Sometimes I think of what I’m missing by not writing to you directly. How, in all those held-back words, there’s a kind of loneliness.

At any other time, I would convince myself that writing to you is the easiest way out of this limbo. But, tonight, I'm either a coward or a fool, and tonight, I too shall write about you. Unfiltered, unguarded, real.