LIGHT
By BJ CRISOSTOMO
A warm gentle kiss grazes my face as I push the curtains. Outside, I hear children laughing, a familiar sound that reminds me of happier days. A mailman calls my name, and clumsily hands me an envelope with paper too thick for its sheets. “A little more to the left than usual,” my pinky says to him. I imagine him awkward and silent in short shorts, and a shirt too tight for him. I walk down to the table, letting my fingers feel the weight of my incompetence and impotence, the burden of living… no merely act of living from one breath to the next. Now I sit down, and open the letter with a blade. I start to read with my hands.
The letter comes from a friend long lost. Long forgotten. His face no more than an ink blot in my memory. He was a lover from a time I did not live in darkness. “Good day,” he greets. “Good bye,” he speaks from a million miles away from me, each day a mile more. “With love,” I read, and as my hands pass through the word— that sacred word spoken so many times with the banality of a “Good day,” and a “Good bye,” I remember how to see— all flashes of blinding searing light… remembrances from happier days under bed sheets and candle light.
I throw it away. My mind images a crumpled mountain of love letters avalanching as a teardrop falls on it. No. No. My mountain is not even a hill. My mountain is composed of three measly rocks: a rock from my mother now dead, another from an organization treating those impaired with the criminalities of nature (perhaps god), and my new addition… my sacred rock. I guess it’s hard to write in the only language I understand.
Does my kind cry? Can we still remember how tears look like? At least that, I want to see. At least my sadness. I want to see.
…
“I want to see,” my hands tremble as I lift the letter opener to my eyes.
(348 words)
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