Lihim, Liham 1: K
Lihim, Liham translates roughly as Secrets, Letters. It was a secret blog that I started keeping several months ago, meant to be a private compilation of still-unsent letters to close friends, unexpectedly intimate acquaintances, and that most profound driving force in my life up till recently: unrequited loves.Dear K,
When you're 18, unrequited love makes you feel alive, spurs you to poetry, and fits really well on your room's wall right next to your signed poster of Boy George. If you're 28 and you still harbour unrequited loves, you're only a few nominations away from a Darwin Award. Love, after all, is less feeling, more decision.
Here's the first letter. I never wrote all the letters I wanted to. I always intended to unearth them one day; I just didn't think I would do it so soon. I'm happy that I did. You can view all the letters here
You cropped up in my dream last night. This is surprising.
It went like this:
~ ~ ~
The apocalypse has happened. Canada is now a totalitarian regime that hunts down and punishes all undocumented immigrants, of which apparently I am one. I am in hiding, living in the many abandoned houses and backyards that litter the suburbs, scrounging for food to eat.The police are looking for me. I am afraid for my physical body. {In waking life, I've experienced the terrors of the mind---the black vortex of recursively annihilatory thought. But this fear for my corporeal body's well-being is new.}
A middle-aged white man is kind and foolish enough to take me into his house, lying to the police in order to protect me. I am grateful.
The scene shifts. I am now in a spacious and actually rather cozy underground bomb shelter. Nuclear war has not only happened, but also prevents me from leaving this bunker, ever. I am hiding with an even greater urgency. For the first time {even in real life} I understand what it is to be truly lonely. Everyone I know is dead or impossible to reach. {I realize that as long as my friends, family, and colleagues are actually still alive, any sort of loneliness I feel is utter bullshit, a made-up fantasy of someone craving attention, because at any point I could actually reach out to them and communicate.But this.. } This is a different kind of solitude, less lonely than it is alone. It is vast and deep and heavy... and incredibly liberating.
At any rate, in this bunker, the conceptual canvas transforms into a blank sheet of paper. A pen appears in my hand. I begin the project I had been wanting to do {in real life}for many months, which is to write letters {like this one}to my friends, using their viewership and our specific relationships as springboards to tell them about things I've always wanted to say, but never did or could. Now, of course, they're all dead or incommunicado, so I hardly have an excuse to hide anything anymore.
I try to decide who to write the first letter to. To my own surprise, in this bunker, in this dream, I find myself writing in clear, dark longhand:
Dear K
~ ~ ~
I still harbour a faint teenage crush on you, thought it grows fainter by the year. Delia once likened love to a leaf in a river: sometimes the leaf rises to the top and goes for tumble along the currents. Other times it quietly skims the bottom of the river. Eventually it will decay and diffuse into simpler things that serve to nourish the river. But once the leaf falls into the water, it stays there.
Just for the record, let me state that you occupy a special place in the pantheon of my objects of affection. You are the first white man---and without a doubt the most gorgeous of them all---that I obsessed over. And my obsession for you ran deep. Obsession, not love, which I thought it was then.. I do not talk about love anymore. Love is far more elusive and complicated than mere obsession. If feelings were served as dessert, love would be fruitcake: it's mature, too eager or too sparing with the brandy, and filled with rather questionable things like candied fruit peel. It also tends to be passed around or passed over. Obsession, on the other hand, is shortbread: simple, monochromatic, never entirely satisfying, but nevertheless requires severe discipline to resist.
In that period of obsession with you (which lasted from that moment in 1999 when you served me dinner at the college, until about the same year Bush finally admitted that there were no WMDs in Iraq), I had thought of compiling letters to you, written but unsent until the day when I am near death, which is when I would finally have them shipped off to you as a final affectionate gesture of goodwill/bitterness/fury. Don't bother trying to figure that one out, because unrequited affection is like dark chocolate: it's not meant to be a food staple, but some people live off that shit forever.
My point is that the first letter of this project, it turns out, is still best written to you. And here it is.
With much affection,
Diego
PS: You and your boyfriend are a beautiful couple. When the two of you are together, it's pretty fucking dazzling.
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