You promised you’ll fly me to Ottawa, the Pacific pulling us miles away while the waves crest and crashed inside me, birthing life, presenting us a single heart that will beat to infinity, with the comfortable doubt of whose infinity will be reached first. Second. Third. And during the fourth of July instead of being out in the placid air that penetrates, we protected our glass heart under the pristine sea of blankets, the booming of fireworks at the other end of the world bearing themselves barely audible, but whispering in the whimper of the billowing winds. That matters not anyway, because they’re all but fleeting images that slips through minds like silk, transient and unfeeling. People oftentimes sees them in a myriad, but who knows maybe deep down, they are just like us both, gradients of black and white, the intensity grey. You mused your longing for a gentle touch that is almost maternal, condensing your grey into a video call, thirty six hours and counting, filled with surrealism as we wandered along Windsor Corridor, all the shoving and bustling momentarily slowed. Was it because you captured me with the archaic Japanese camera you scored at the flea we spontaneously hopped to at Sungei road? What it shows, is that we remain, and have always stayed grounded, to the roots of our past. There is where we began, where our souls belonged, and where nothing, not even the willows will shake our fragile heart apart. I do not proclaim ‘I love you’, for your name is inscribed somewhere in between the lifelines on my right palm. Believe me sweetheart, you’ll cross my mind whenever I hold the pen to fight the battle in my mind, and believe me, I will live on with you on me, in me, forever, till I depart.

Rest in peace, my soulmate.