Reaching out.

SMS, black pixels arranged on a glowing screen, casting cold light across the darkened room. The screen fades as I struggle to compose the perfect message, coming across as dependable but not desperate. What do I want to tell you anyway? How can I forge a hundred million emotions into a 160 character long message? I can’t tell you how you fill my mind in waking and in sleep, how I long to just sit and stare at you. You would just be freaked out. Neither can I tell you how perfect you are, a mixture of intelligence, humility, passion and beauty. To do so would require pages upon pages stacked high enough to reach the heavens. So I stare blankly at the light trapped within a square glass prison, a hundred fireflies slowly winking out of existence one by one. I toss the phone aside, and collapse into a dark, dreamless sleep.


Email, a premeditated message without the restrictions of an SMS. To be able to type out an essay on why you mean the world to me, chiselling away the imperfections, forming an eloquent masterpiece to make you mine. But how do I begin? The keyboard has 50 keys, and I struggle to decipher the combination to unlock your heart. As I type ceaselessly, black figures begin to populate the white expanse of emptiness with ideas and meaning. But soon, every word sounds wrong, each carefully considered phrase too artificial to represent my raw, primal emotions. And so I hold the backspace button, committing mass genocide, eliminating thousands of words within the span of a minute. As I toss the final rows of letters onto the funeral pyre, a tingling sensation permeates my body, and I feel numb and detached from this world. I stare blankly at glowing screen in front of me for awhile, before finally reaching out and turning it off with a tired sigh.

Besides, I must consider the time spent waiting in eager anticipation for your reply. An eternity of bated breath, staring at a glowering screen, willing it to chime with your response. Not to mention that lines upon lines of text, each shaped to perfection and stripped of flaws, would be absolutely impersonal. Maybe a letter would be better.


I withdraw a pristine white sheet of paper from the printer, its razor thing edge nicking my finger accidentally. A tiny crimson stain spreads, slowly being absorbed into the paper’s skin. I give a sigh of frustration, ignoring the dull sting on my finger as I grip a black pen tightly, thinking of how to phrase my greeting. Hey, hi, hello hello. Konichiwa! A million saccharine sweet greetings, each subtly loaded with a different shade of intensity and meaning. My pen hesitates, wavering slightly over the snow white paper. I feel as though a dam is about to crack as soon as my pen touches paper, that I would write and write until I couldn’t, wondering whether the ink or paper would run out first, or if my hand would be the first to surrender. The soft click of the pen cap sliding back to its rightful place is the death knoll of this idea, and I slide open the gray printer tray to return the bloodstained paper.


I remember, as a child, how I used to connect two flimsy cups with a string loaded with tension. We used the rickety contraption as a makeshift telephone, ears cloistered in the plastic shell of a cup as we whispered dark secrets and muttered incoherently to each other. As I pick up the receiver, I imagine hearing your voice, almost as though you were right here whispering softly beside me, your breath tickling the tip of my ear at regular intervals. I dial your number, and send my voice arcing along black wires submerged deep within the dormant earth, traversing the distance separating us within a heartbeat.
But my voice is infinitely too cheery, forced gaiety oozing through the telephone line and out of your receiver. Eloquence turns tail and flees, leaving behind an inept, stuttering fool desperately forming horribly disjointed sentences. I flounder helplessly in a puddle of nervousness, grateful for the silence that follows the end of our conversation. I clutch the phone tightly in my clammy hand, the plastic sticky with my sweat, thinking about all the things I should have said.


Maybe I could throw on some preppy clothes, slip on my Aldos, spray a hint of masculine cologne, and sculpt my hair into a spiky obsidian precipice. Take a cab over to your place and pound on your door with an eager smile plastered across my face.

But your mom will answer my plaintive call, informing me with a polite smile that you’re out with friends / really busy at the moment, and send me off into the unforgiving outside with a feathery apology. I will be left alone with nothing but my brooding thoughts for company, finally falling into their irresistible embrace.


End. Or maybe you’ll hear the call of my heart, and reach out and grasp my outstretched hand. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll finally decide to take my heavy heart, and make it light.
But you didn’t.