To passersby, she makes a pretty picture, standing alone by the doorway. The afternoon sunlight is the only adornment that she needs. It casually flickers and flutters on her face, giving her skin an almost luminous quality that is almost akin to a child’s. If not for the slight crease on her forehead, she could be mistaken for a student from the nearby university.

She does not notice the friendly stares that the afternoon strollers give her. Her eyes, which are usually intensely animated, are now solemn. They are fixed on the piece of paper that she is holding. She has actually finished reading the contents of the letter. She turns it slowly in her hands then folds it. After a few moments, she decides to unfold it. She reads a few lines out loud, as if she were reading to a child.

The letter is slightly creased, which made her initially think that it was written recently. She reads the date written in ardent loops next to his signature. It was written a year ago- March 25, 2004.

She remembers that day. Not the details, surely, for her memories usually have a way of losing themselves in her mundane concerns. But she remembers that that was the first time she ever saw this house.

She puts the paper close to her nose and sniffs. She tries to guess what the scent was. Apples? Strawberries? Of course the scent is not hers. She was never partial to fruity smells.

But it really doesn’t matter now. How it smells, when it was written, who it was for. He used to chide her for her penchant for curios. Her mother used to say that her hankering for mysteries would be her own undoing.

Let things lie, her mother said. Don’t go looking under rocks if you’re afraid of the dark things that lurk beneath them.

What is she here for, if not to learn? she used to retort, because she was sassier then.

What good would learning do if it would break you? her mother says.

Pain is something that you can never unlearn said her father.You open that box, you face the music.

I opened this box, I’ll face the music, she now whispers to herself.

Some sentences in the letter are familiar. When she read them for the first time, she could not help but remember his beautiful mouth whispering them, as if they were incantations. They were whispered to her. She tries to assess how she feels about being the recipient of rehashed compliments. She suddenly feels the heaviness of her weightlessness.

It is indeed a letter of love. But it obviously wasn’t for her. She did not meet him at the museum that day. She says the date aloud and marvels at the unfamiliarity of the words. Nor did she remember sitting on a pavement a couple of months before the museum visit, sharing thoughts about life while smoking. It is not their seventh year of writing to one another.

It amazes her now, this calmness. She acknowledges the fact that she has seen this coming. Intimacy is, again, just an old piece of twine haphazardly tying the boat she has been sitting on to a rickety pier. It’s one of those circumstances that completely drowns you out with a curious hopelessness.

She arranges the thoughts in her head, like she would daisies on their breakfast table. She chooses the memories she would like to weed out but she realizes it isn’t that easy. She wonders which of those memories really happened. Maybe she has dreamed him up all along. I may have been alone in this house for years and I never even knew it.

She begins to ask herself if he is really coming home. If this was home. Four-letter words are the most ambiguous ones, she thinks. Maybe this was just a halfway house where they were both stuck in because they lost track of all the road signs and didn’t know which direction to push forward to.

She hears a dog barking and this unexpected intrusion breaks her concentration. She looks around and suddenly realizes how bright the world seems, even at four in the afternoon. She observes the people chatting as they pass by her door. No one seems to notice how much she has changed. How light she now feels.

She turns around and shuts the door. She will fix dinner while waiting for him.

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Yes, this is a draft.

I hate sounding mediocre. Still, I decided to publish this so that I can remember to tweak it.