Unrequited Pen-Pal

Dear love,

Thanks for being so damn elusive that I searched for twenty-five years with little to no luck and bruises on parts of me that don’t even have skin. Seriously, for an incorporeal, near incomprehensible concept you sure know how to throw a good punch.

Also, thanks for being so complex that I thought I had met you already, when really I’d only met your shadow or befriended some poor impersonation before you showed your true face to me one random afternoon without so much as a ‘hello’.

I so appreciate how difficult you are to talk to, to describe, hell even to spell despite being comprised of four fucking letters. And that is after you wandered into my life.

Oh, and I’m not the only one that struggles with you or your conceptualisation. You are number one on every billboard, chart or podium; crowned reigning monarch in every genre from music and poetry, to admissions of guilt in a murder trials.

I guess I’m writing because I want to know why? Is there a reason to be so aloof? So intangible that people spend a lifetime in search of you like you’re some myth from ancient legend only to turn a street corner and see proof of your existence in the eyes of a stranger. You hold a mirror to failure, a microscope to loneliness and a window to hope but you're afraid of glass? You hide in all the places that eyes are not strong enough to decipher yet somehow stand in a spotlight when we are stuck in the audience, resigning us to watch someone else stand in your light.

You are potentially the most juxtaposed thing to exist, if you can call it existing when your truth is as knowable as the existence of an almighty God. To create the instinct, the drive, for someone to do almost anything to obtain even a hint of you and then still rarely have them be successful or happy when you’ve been caught? You’re the fish every fisherman seeks to have on the hook even though they know you might well be the death of them. Poisoned to taste sweet and end you swiftly, yet every tug on that lure has their heart racing, thinking this might be the one.

But I digress, like all the letters before mine, this will inevitably ‘return to sender’ since I’ve no way to know your address, for if I did I would surely knock on your door for a cup of sugar and a conversation on the art of being an asshole.

Bitterly,

An Acquaintance.