If You Happen to Know Her

You see, I’ve met her before, and if you happen to know her, please tell her. Please tell her that by this time tomorrow I would have already prayed for her a thousand sunny days and the shades from the clouds wherever she might need them. Should the wind hum a melody to where she is, and if by chance she had the time to question its probable cause, please tell her that the confession is mine to make, for I have been singing her name as though it has become the song of my life. And once the January snow has cloaked her city with its unforgiving cold, please tell her that she holds the warmth that can melt winter into spring. She can make one feel so alive like never before.

Sometimes I wish I can speak her language because math has never been my cup of tea. Sometimes I try, and the words would just slip from my mouth, because if she is an angle, someone who can bestow meaning and sense to space and numbers and all the axioms and postulates of mathematics, someone whose life can be plotted by way of two intersecting lines, someone who can validate once and for all that geometry is divine, she would be ninety degrees of pure Euclidean magic — everything about her feels so right.

Everything. So right. She’s not even perfect.

And it’s quite difficult for me to fully understand or explain why it is so, the same way that one might want to turn the implicit algebraic function (x^2 + y^2 - 1)^3 - x^2 y^3 = 0 into something so familiar by using the Matlab command >> ezplot('(0.35)*((x^2 + y^2 - 1)^3) - (1.3)*(x^2)*(y^3)');

I know that it doesn’t make sense as much as it does once you’ve tried it. Trust me, Math is not my cup of tea, but I’d drink it every day if only because of her, if only to make her understand.

May she fall in love to her soul’s desire and content, and if not with the man that I have become then let it still be so. But if the world should singe her heart by its own flames for longing and sadness, and for every unwanted memory mangled like a souvenir in her mind, may the course of life rectify something so decidedly, decisively skewed, because she deserves nothing less than the kind of happiness that roosts in the heart with no intention of leaving. This I know like the back of my hand.

And if I can fold the stars into a thousand origami cranes, if only I can, I’d cast them to the air, like prayers aflutter, and they’d come flying before her sleep, settling on her bed like a pillow and a blanket where she can rest her weary heart and mind, because every tomorrow is another day, one that is eager to reach out to her, like a pair of open hands, offering the promise of a dream ready to bloom at her beck and call.

If you happen to know her, please tell her. Please tell her that the proof of providence also lies in whoever owns the heart she will accept, whose dreams in life she will embrace as her own, treat them like blueprints eager for the miracles that her touch can do, trace them with her fingers as though these dreams are flesh and bones on the cusp of birth, for she will build her world around them, too, and it will be a world she will call Home.

Time is rarely on my side, but should the other months skip their turn on the calendar to give way to a year of twelve Julys starting today, I’d be ready. I’d be ready like a seed anxious for the first drop of light, a leaf thirsty for the mist of daybreak. By then, February will be July. So will December, and any difference will be the same, because the days and nights have always felt quite like this: a lifetime stuck in a moment, she at the heart of it all, the living, breathing cornerstone of all the truths I have ever realized, as timeless and as permanent as an eternity held captive by the blink of her eyes, and the stars alone know how much I yearn to look at her eyes again, gaze at them in utter surrender.

If you happen to know her, please please please tell her. Please tell her that I have written about her for as long as I can remember, day and night and night and day, and yet today I still have a thousand other things left to say, maybe more, waiting, as always, waiting to erupt from my heart to my lips, waiting with this kind of patience that only so few dare to understand, because this forbearance, this forbearance is not for everyone.

You see, I’ve met her before, and if you happen to know her, please tell her. But then again, perhaps there is no more use for my plea. After all, she is you.

You are her.





for Roxanne