Phoebe, I Just Want to Say...

"We hung about the tenderloin and tenderly you tell
About the saddest book you ever read,
It always makes you cry."

Piazza, New York Catcher (2003) by Belle & Sebastian

"I suddenly miss you today while I was walking alone in Melaka Mall," I said to Phoebe over the MSN Messenger. I already knew her reply as soon as I sent that. I already felt guilty before she said it.

"Now, only you miss?" she answered pithily. "I miss you everyday, okay."

"Guys are different," I said dismissively.

Is that true? Are guys really different that way? I like to think so, if only to exonerate myself from the insinuation hanging in the air that I have been less than a good boyfriend.

I don't know how to finish writing this.

I started this almost 3 days ago because I felt that I had something to say. So many snippets, little words, tiny thoughts and quiet whispers swirled vitriolically in my mind in a mess which is vaguely coherent but you know that there's just something beneath all the static. It's like feeling that you're constantly on the verge of having a good idea, but you keep falling short of it right before it hatches. There are so many things I like to say to you, Phoebe, but somehow, I just couldn't put all of them in an orderly fashion and spell them all out to you here.

But why on earth should it stop me from saying them anyway?

I want to say that when I called you a couple of hours ago, I didn't really have anything in particular to say to you (sorry, I woke you up but your sleepy voice was seriously HAWT). I just feel like hearing your voice after spending a whole day out with friends. I thirst for something familiar, private and wholly mine. I think "thirst" is much too corny a word to describe how I felt but I said it anyway because I think that it's accurate and honest. I really did thirst for your voice. You don't talk that way to anyone else. It sounded like there's an ever-present undertone of suggestion suggesting that I should hug you, and love you, and spoil you rotten like my only child. I'll admit that someone else hearing it might think it annoying, disgusting even. I have heard other people talk that way, and their voices grated against my soul like nails on a chalkboard. But it's okay when I hear you talk that way. It's okay because it's for me, and me alone.

I want to say that I think I talk too much about you to other people. I'm afraid that it'd sound like bragging, and that it'll disgust and turn other people from you and I and us. I hate to have it done to me - some one yammering on and on and on about how awesome their girlfriend or boyfriend is (I know you hate to have it done to you too). I've heard how other people complain about a girl who talked too much about her boyfriend, that she's such an insufferable showoff and that her boyfriend isn't half as great as how she made him out to be. In fact, people go out of their way to make fun of her and her boyfriend because she talks so much about him. I don't want to be that girl. But it's just so hard to shut up. What I want to say, Phoebe, is that this one time last week while I was Tioman, and I was talking about you to a friend - and that friend stopped me midway and said, "Wow, you're really in love aren't you?" That made me smile like an idiot.

I want to say that I missed the times we spent reading together, in some cafe in Ooty and Kodaikanal right after lunch or dinner, in our hotel room at night on the bed before we sleep, in my place back in Manipal... I consider those moments to be definitively "us" - you and I, reading quietly, not talking because we don't have anything we felt we needed to say which we haven't already said and not moving because there is no other place we would rather be. If one day in my old age when senility overtakes me and I forget everything, if I am asked then to try very, very hard to recall just one single thing about the life between the two of us; this is what I'll remember.

I want to say that I have developed that photograph I took of you while you were reading and put it in a photoframe on my desk. That way, when I read in my room, you'll be reading with me too. I know I have a weird sense of sentimentality, but you knew what you were getting into when you fell in love with me. Do you know when I miss you the most? It's when I read, when I come across a line that made me laugh out loud, or a piece of prose so beautiful it made the tip of my fingers and the top of my head tingle. I always look up from my book when that happens, feeling charged with an almost irrational impulse to read that bit out loud to the person nearest to me - to share - and find, to my dismay, that you aren't there.

This is you, Phoebe, on my desk.

I want to say, for the umpteenth time, that I feel so very lucky to be your boyfriend. It's a heady feeling - kind of like winning the lottery. I have spent the last 9 months telling myself that it'd wear off soon. It's just the sensation of going into a relationship at the start, I kept thinking. I remember that one time, I admitted to a friend that I thought precisely that and I said, "It's probably because we are only together for 4 months; that's why I'm so giddy." Just a few days ago, I remember being in a conversation of a similar nature with another friend and I said the exact same thing; "It's probably because we are only together for 9 months..." but I had to stop there because I was surprised - not because it was already 9 months, but because the days in between the 4th and 9th months flew by so damn fast. It made me breathless just to think of it. It made me afraid that all my days with you will be just as mercurial - that they will all pass me by before I even have the chance to really bask in this happiness I feel I barely tasted.

I want to say that I am really glad I found the courage to kiss you that first time when I did, when we were just friends. It was perfect; I just knew that I must lean towards you and kiss you. I just knew, out of the blue, that you wanted me to. I did not even tell you a single time prior to that kiss that I was somehow in love with you - and neither did you tell me. It's one of those things that just happens, unintentionally, accidentally and most of all, naturally. Against the sound of Robin Williams doing his stand-up shtick playing on my laptop, I held that kiss as long as I could because I was afraid that when I stopped, I would have to explain to you why I kissed you. "Must. Not. Stop. Kissing," I breathed soundlessly in quick successions and thought, for one ridiculous second, I could hold the kiss forever. And when you kissed me back, it was magic. The fear, the need for explanations all dissipated in a single very quick, very fevered heartbeat. When the hour-long Robin Williams video ended unwatched, we still have not stopped.

I have many, many more things to say but I'll just leave those off for another day to let them mature into things more worthy of words. Now, I have to go to bed (and in fact, I was already in bed before I got out of it to finish this post) but before I put a stopper on this, I just need to say this one more thing,

I guess I did miss you more than that one time three days ago when I was walking alone in Melaka Mall.

I just don't realise it all that often.



Yours in Love,
k0k s3n w4i