Empty Letters

It was late spring. Flowers unfurled from their buds; fluttering in the slow breeze. With their petals spread out, they watched the people walk by or sometimes stop by the sunshine bathed lake. Over it, a small wooden bridge arched under which you'd usually find two white swans with their necks intertwined. And whenever I'd catch a sight of them, I'd be reminded of my own lover. Someone quite far away with any part of us to be touched and be bathed in sunshine together, but somehow close enough to always have our vines of hearts twirled together.

I move away from the window sill which holds my way-too acquainted spot. The spot where you'd usually find me. Sitting and glancing outside. My eyes sail in the room and stop at the dock of my desk. The desk which holds an empty page and a pen sitting beside its inkwell.

I might've lost count of the number of letters I've ever written him, but I suppose that the count is not for me to be remembered. What for me to be remembered, though, are the countless feelings and thoughts I've had over the past one week which I gather inside my mind to pour on the single sheet of paper for him, because my every feeling and thought is a branch of his tree.

As I sit on the wooden chair, and pick up my black pen, I contemplate how I'll begin the letter. Perhaps with the same old salutations. I uncover the lid and begin to scribble on paper in my cursive old writing 'Dear...'

"Wait" I stop as I hear the sweet voice ringing from the tip of my pen. I stop and leave the pen hanging midway, hovering above the page. "What?" I ask in a whisper. Still holding the pen. "How long are you going to do this for?" she asks.

I startle, "what?" I ask again.

"How long are you going to bleed me on the empty page for? How long would you willingly pour yourself on the page through me to someone who always returns your letters with empty pages? The same empty pages which you fill up for him again?"

"His returns of empty pages means that he wants to listen to me and wants for me to write to him again" I reply, while still holding the pen in the air.

"What if that's not what his empty pages intend?" she asks, and I can't get myself to ever settle upon any different idea than this.

"Has he ever once written to you?" she asks, and I grow quiet and stare blankly at the Dear I wrote. I slowly shake my head. "But he's confessed his love to me before he left the town" I tell her, and I'm reminded of the only sweet memory of him I hold onto. The memory of him telling me he loves me.

"You keep bleeding me for someone who won't pour down parts of him for you to read" she complains in a sigh. "I not only crave to write, but crave to read too. What if I'm an empty soul once? Words are what I live for. And if his empty letters return, whose words would you trace me upon to reignite my within?"

I not only crave to write, but crave to read too.

"But he said he loves me" I defend.

"I see you drowning in love only. Drowning in a lake of assumptions created by your own self. You can't truly ever love someone whose pen never bled for you."

I finally set down the pen beside the page which I'm staring at with my blurred lens now.

"You're way too full of love to be let hanging like a broken bridge over a lake. You'd only be engulfed by the depths of despair at the end then."

A teardrop trails its way down my face and drops on Dear and the black ink swells and smudges.

I hold the page in my palms and then crush it in my hold. I lay my head down on the wooden desk and shut my eyes and try to dream of what it would feel like to be written a love letter for. A letter which I can whisper read to myself for the eternity until the next one arrives.

Funny to think how I'd never feel what I made him feel.