Art by Elsa Li

May 3rd

J,

Now that you’re back, it feels like even the stars are taking notice of me. They see the dead glowing centre of my stomach, emitting light to parallel their blinking. Unbroken, it feeds on your gaze and grows to fill the space below my bottom rung of ribs, warm and desperately hungry. Like classroom fluorescents brushing particle board walls, it’s a gnawing light you can’t look past, can you? Please don’t. Please keep looking. I worry sometimes that you don’t know what to do with me. Or you won’t. Please keep looking.

August 30th

L,

I am in Paris right now and I miss the orange light of your living room sending spears over the road and through my venetian shutters. The man living across the street from me here is mean and every night, from his balcony, he throws glass bottles into the skip below. The spray of drunken misthrows sometimes reach my side of the street. In the morning, children in school shoes crunch over the broken shards. The sharp clockwork of everyday life.

I always think about you in the mornings, wondering if your tartan slippers have disintegrated, succumbing to the moths, since I last spent the night. Is it warm enough for you to sit on the balcony and read yet? I hope you’re watering my fiddle-leaf fig (I’m picturing your eyes widening at this sentence, an exclamation of “oh shit” escaping your lips). I can’t help but hope you’ve killed my plants, so I can hate you for a bit.

June 18th

B,

I want to tell you every single thing about myself. I want to rip open my chest and let you read the slippery red scrawl  like runes, nothing sacred. When you do, you will look at me with that awe-stricken face, and I will believe I can always surprise you. You, always so quick to kindness. As if everything I do is changing the world, leaving a mark. Eyes telling me that everyone should be noticing me and you’re lucky enough to be the only one watching so intently.

September 24th

E,

The weeks convey their painful passing, weather getting warmer, storms spacing out. The mother blackbird has disappeared from the upstairs window box. There are still baby birds nesting inside the chimney so that Spring echoes through my empty bedroom. I find myself singing to them. I miss you.

November 2nd

R,

I am looking out at the street and it is eight in the morning and the postman is opening the gate to deliver the Saturday letters. Saturday is the worst time of week because in two hours the market will open and I will put on my hat and my shoes and my glasses to pick up the bread and the butter and the fresh fruit (apricots at this time of year), but I will be alone. Seemingly, Saturday was your day because still you drip and drape from it like liquid silk, expanding to fit the container of my spring solitude. Come back and I promise you can have all the sweetest apricots; we can pick out fish together and leave our sensible shoes by the front door for Sunday morning.