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A Spiritually Enlightening Online Magazine. March's Theme: "Action and Inaction"
Volume 7 Issue 3 ISSN# 1708-3265

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 		Letters
by Alegria Imperial

The yellowed string snapped in my hands as I lifted the bunch off the bottom of an old suitcase. The letters slipped and splayed over my lap like a felled stack of cards, but unlike those on a gambler's table for guessing, these bared instead what had once rented my heart for years.

Smeared like a girl's tear-stained cheeks—it was how I received them unopened, giant RETURN TO SENDER scrawled on the top-right corner. Each would make their way back on a transcontinental trip from New York back to Manila a month after I mailed them.

"You're downright stubborn and obstinate aren't you?" Eileen used to chide me when she would peek from my shoulder as soon as the office mail got to my desk. "Stop it, now. He has moved and obviously didn't care to give a forwarding address."

I stayed mute and yes, insisted on mailing another letter or poem or song one more time. I couldn't explain it to Eileen but I knew he waited for it. His last letter hinted at no reason for the silence, the sudden freeze of a silky flow through oceans we pledged to bridge on opposite sides of the hemisphere. After a postgraduate degree at Columbia University, he would come back.

Eileen, would eye me, trailing my every gesture. She would leap from her chair, an arm hooked on my body before I even sense I'd be shaking. I used to wonder what mechanisms the heart had—so powerful it could rip one apart out of sheer sadness with as simple a reason as inaction, unanswered mail for instance.

One day, she dragged me to a planning session for a seminar on the Old City of Manila. "I'm telling you now you've been picked out to interview this architect who knows the stone structure inch by inch and he has a cache of tales about the builders and stonemasons."

I did meet him, expecting a drab interview in one of the ancient gates fronting the ruins of a convent he had restored. He took my hand as we were introduced and pronounced my name as if it were a phrase he read from a musical sheet. He didn't end the romance of violins he played for me from that moment on.

In half a year, his daily calls, our evening drives in his sports car along the bay, the dozen roses delivered at my desk on Valentine's Day, and a multiple of notes he used to insert in books he found in basement book shelves that he laid on the table before dinner on our weekend dates—actions that wove themselves into the habit of living and smothered the winged-sorrow of those RTS letters. Raw Food and Fasting Coaching with Aleesha Stephenson

The office mailman cracked the door of our office one morning, poking his head at me. I shivered a bit expecting yet another returned mail I must have forgotten I sent.

"Someone is looking for you. I just wanted to be sure you're here," he said.

My heart thundered. I rushed out after him but he had disappeared to the entrance. In the lobby where I stood waiting for him to come back, the light pooled and threatened to drown me. I felt like swooning.

"So now we meet. I almost flew back to New York without finding you," her voice drew me out of the haze with its crisp but smooth twang. My words froze as did what must have been a stare at her shaded eyes, flowing but sleek hair, trim black slacks and knitted shirt. I drew the flare of my flowered skirt around me, conscious of the contrast in form we painted as we walked along the marbled corridor to the cafeteria where I had invited her.

"I had long wondered who you are. Your letters kept coming when we were just starting out our partnership. He was traveling most of the time. He hardly had time to make it to dinner. I had to mail your letters back. But he used to rifle through the mail and would ask if any came from Manila."

My heart had since bloated so huge it had overtaken my whole being and I felt numb. But I asked how he was doing. She bent on the rice cake she had hardly eaten. "Honestly, I don't know. He left six months ago. No forwarding address."

I thought I would crumble but I drew in a breath and felt my breast expand—I hadn't wilted as I feared. But she? She began to quiver. I gripped her hands, steadying them as she shook.

"Don't worry," I stammered. "Life has no impasses, you know. No moment ever stays intransigent and immutable. "

She wiped her tears and ruefully smiled at me. "I'm sorry," she said.

"For what?"

"I'm sorry for your unanswered letters. You must have felt devastated."

I couldn't tell Eileen who she was. I kept that revelation in the cafeteria unsaid. I had been widowed when she and I met again and we had moved to other careers. She had asked what I had done to those letters.

I declared, "I've made of them a tomb of memory to action and inaction. One never knows what's behind endings."

She had called me silly then. She wouldn't now that I've bagged the bundle for tossing out in the recycling bin. But I'm giggling at the thought of our next meeting when I would tell her, "He found me anyway and he is flying in from New York for my next birthday."


A seeker of truth and peace after tangled pathways, I have also found a voice in my search. A retired journalist, I have since focused on poetry and fiction. I launched my first book in Manila before migrating to Vancouver last year and recently received two honourable mentions for poetry.

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