rotterdam
this letter will never find you.
it is a letter that inhabits the imaginary of the things that were supposed to be—a photograph of the missing,
if you will.
note: a letter ought to be communication, perhaps sent by post or messenger.
i restart:
father,
this text is but creation of a memory of the non-existent. one could call it a letter. but as it remains concealed in thick veil, it subsists as desire for reality, perpetuated metaphor for safe attachment.
my memory is never fully mine, i know. but allow me to reminisce about that morning you insisted on walking me to the bus stop. that morning i had risen as complete shape, but your insistence felt dysmorphic, disorienting. like that time we walked that down-going-spiral-feeling path in the grand canyon. i felt so much fear, remember?
i wonder if you think about death too.
that morning when you insisted on walking me to the bus stop, all i could think of was to ask you to hold my hand. as if we still existed in that space of familial myths, in that time of fraudulent imitation of familial ideology.
if this were to be a letter, this would perhaps be the moment when i would be tempted to tell you how much i feel. but once you were done building me, i was formed in ambivalent matter, i had been mere visitor of the family space orchestrating a less temporary permanence. and thus, my temptation to feel love, to write love, would be constructed pictorialism. and you know my gaze well. my gaze resembles your own. she accused us of such resemblance many times. and if my gaze is your gaze, you would know that all my words are empty words, are meaningless words, are phantasmic words and how could you ever produce what you never perceived? father, i wonder if you think about the impossibility of our death too.
i acknowledge: i have been deceptive postcard. i have been the kind of love that is to be available in public spaces only. i have been archive of the stories of a simulated social unit, a feigned realism, a rotten structure hidden behind an immaculate facade. but please allow me to reminisce about the non-existent.
if this is were to be a morning, if this were to be a letter, this would perhaps be the moment when i would be tempted to tell you that to conceal has never been a choice. what i reveal is what the love you taught me allows me to word.
i acknowledge: i am unaddressed postcard archived in a play of pretend.