para kay lucas

Lucas,

I finally pulled my nose out from the pages of your stories last night. I was trying to find myself in one of your characters but I couldn’t, instead I found myself in you. I thought they were about how those women got crippled by love, but in the end, it was all about you--the only and sole casualty in your own story.

Amazing are the words that gushes out from a broken heart. I understand why your characters were so miserable, and lost, and unhappy. It is because you were. The bitterness in your heart contorted your version of love that made your book an omnibus of tragedies instead. I love tragedies. I think that’s one reason why I easily got lost in those tales written by your frozen fingertips.

I know the feeling of writing for someone you love. It’s like immortalizing a sublime feeling into words that screams through the edge of time; an endless and echoing gesture of love printed on paper; a bottled scent of passion and affection sprayed, lasting in the air. But sometimes I wonder if the words that I breathe are the same ones that are holding me back, choking me.

I agree in what you said. Writers are powerful. They can do anything they want. They could reveal every dark secret, raise the dead to life, or even make time machines so that one could undo things, revise sad endings and replace them with happy ones. We love wide and blank spaces so that we could fill them with anything we want. But everything is not fiction. Imagination is proven lacking and insufficient. We are powerful but only to a world standing opposite the realm of reality. To the real world, we’re helpless and ordinary. Vulnerable. And as a way of coping with this fact, we write, hide ourselves in letters, poetry, and make-believe stories of what could’ve been and alternate endings to melancholic conclusions in our lives. We revise and twist things in a world where revisions are not allowed.

I want to ask why you gave up on love. Why did you drop your pen and walked away? Is it her still? If that’s the case, then I would understand. Perhaps you were just not able to let go of her. I can’t tell you the right thing to do. Most right decisions that we could make are not necessarily easy and most often, love is more than a choice between what is right and what is wrong. I just wish that you would’ve been able to love again and change the end of your story, not of the Lucas in your works, but you. Because that is what I am trying to do right now. Loving and writing in the hope that when the right person comes, my words would lift me from the floor, not a care on what the end would bring.

I give you thanks for inspiring me. How I wish there’d be still hope for you. I wish you well, Luke.

Always,

. . .

I’m done reading “Para Kay B” by Ricky Lee. I had fun reading it. You might enjoy it too. Let me give a shout out to my friend Steph, the very reliable bookworm who recommended this pink-colored book.