A Love Letter
A Love Letter (Inspired by Bao Phi’s “You Bring out the Vietnamese in Me”)
By. Carley Hoffman
As my eyes settle, find you, singled out from the rest,
you are different, you are new.
Excitement bubbles in me
at what is to come, at what we will find.
Together.
As I open your pages, whispers of a thousand lives,
in a far off world, beckon me to continue.
The crack of a spine, the rustling of pages turning
black inky words drifting up from the thin paper.
A smell of newness, of freshness, wafts up to meet me.
This is why I love you.
You bring out the adventure in me.
I let my fingers glide over your surface, tempting fate
to let me be swallowed up in you.
To dive deep into your recesses and never come up for air.
The breathlessness, tightness in my chest,
the inability to think as my head spins
is what makes me feel most alive.
I immerse myself in you.
In your pages.
In your words.
Because for just a few moments, your world becomes mine.
You become my escape.
And this is why I love you.
You bring out the adventure in me.
Together, we make new friends, meet new people,
paint new faces.
We suffer loss, feel the sting of death and the dull
never ending ache of grief.
And that pain becomes fuel for our revenge
for our quest for justice, for our drive to survive.
Until we realize it is not enough
and what we thought we knew, was only a perception flawed on emotion,
a facade that failed us when faced with true fervor.
And this revelation hits us with such a force
knocks us down, shatters our strength,
shows us our truth.
The truth we fought so hard not to see.
And we break.
And we fall.
And we learn.
We learn to love,
we learn to fight,
we learn to laugh,
we learn to forgive.
We learn through our pain and grow in our suffering.
And this is why I love you.
You bring out the adventure in me.
And then it comes time for me to leave.
We made our memories, shared our struggles,
We fought and we won and we lost and we learned.
Together we grew and now together we part.
Only
You aren’t leaving.
I am.
I’m leaving you behind, forever frozen in victory.
A peace I cannot have,
A world I'll never see outside of my mind.
A place I'll never visit,
People who will never truly be.
And so I leave.
I close your pages.
I set you down.
I remember.
And then I look up.
And my eyes settle, find you, singled out from the rest.
You are different, you are new.
And I start it all again.
