Love Letter to M

Dear M,

How are you?

It’s been a long time since you last wrote to me. We used to write to each other a lot — through different mediums, in different languages, from different times and spaces. After your last letter, though, you stopped writing to me. And I know why. You stopped writing to me because I didn’t write back to you. Well, the truth is, I couldn’t. 

I couldn’t write, as my desk lost one leg and two arms. I couldn’t write, as my pen forgot how it used to cry. I couldn’t write, as the blank page seemed to carry truths better than the ink — this dark, cold, yet helplessly eloquent blue that made me a liar when I tried to write a word with it. 

What would you do when what has been lost feels more familiar than all that is there right here in front of you? What would you do when what is not yet here feels more hopeful than any stories that have ever been told? When all you know for sure is silence and absence, what would you do?

In one of many dreams, they told me about the word that was there in the beginning. One morning, that word didn’t wake up. It was slowly rotting away in my bed with the unbearable smell of dead animals. All I could do was witness — witness my lover becoming my past and losing their gravity in the space where I once sought refuge. There was a moment of silence, and my body started to scream instead. It was so loud that it ruptured my ears from within, but seemed inaudible to others. 

M, are you still there?

I’m sorry it has taken me such a long time to write back. But I’ve never forgotten the letters you wrote to me. In fact, these are the very things I clung to on those nights when the void and emptiness felt all too familiar. 

At the time of our last correspondence, we were both struggling to remain grounded in this cruel world. It seemed impossible to answer an otherwise simple question like “How are you?” without really looking away from the state we were in. Like everyone else we knew, we were so exhausted and unhappy — because how could one be otherwise? How can we dream when our siblings have been set on fire while asleep? How can we sing when the lullaby has lost its meaning? How can we pray when drones have burnt God alive? Neither of us knew how to answer these questions properly. Yet, we both knew we simply couldn’t afford to stop trying.

You don’t remember how you fell asleep or if you woke up. Your sister is already up, like she always is: 

– My sister, how are you?

– I’m fine, thanks. How are you?

– I’m fine, I guess — if you’re fine.

– Sister, I don’t think I’m fine, but my English teacher never told me how to answer this question otherwise. 

– Mine neither. In fact, my English teacher never told me how to ask this question otherwise.

– As if you don’t speak English properly, or you’re not a real human being, unless you master the grammar of indifference.

– [Sister chuckles.] But why do you even care? You have such a thick accent anyways. However you try, you always make grammatical mistakes — in the same way I do.

– We can’t even pronounce each other’s name correctly.

– Because you don’t know my true name, or it never existed. 

– Hey, sister, is this a bad dream?

– No, sister. Look, it’s still dark outside, yet you hear birds singing. It’s been a long night, but dawn is near.

“Since 7 October 2023, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to Gaza’s health ministry,” the UN Press reported on 18 December 2024.¹ However, a study published in July of the same year suggests that these figures do not include ‘indirect deaths’ caused by Israel’s decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure; it is estimated that the total death toll could be up to 15 times higher than the number of direct deaths reported.²

M, you and I met last year. We were both queer (and) Asian (and) organizers of mutual aid campaigns for Palestinian families. Working day and night to learn, organize, and talk about mutual aid, we practiced love. We made sure we showed up for each other, exchanged our dreams, validated our pain and loss in each other’s presence. We did so like our sisters sharing their umbrellas with us. We did so like our mothers cutting fruits for us. 

But it never seemed to be enough. Or at least, it was never enough to stop the genocidal war machine of the Western imperial powers, within which we had somewhat found “home” as first-generation migrants — or at least we could afford to do so. An overwhelming sense of guilt marked our skin, a tattoo we paid for with our privilege. 

In August 2024, while dreaming, I lost my sense of direction. I was trapped in my dream for a long time, not knowing how, or when, or why to come back. M, this loss of orientation, or disorientation, was a bodily one. My body refused to return by any means possible — to this world, to this moment, to this disturbing heaviness of reality. I was reminded that oversleeping and overeating are both a form of refusal. My body also bled every now and then, which made me even more confused; when was it disorientation and when was it my periodical madness? 

Or perhaps, there isn’t much difference between the two — living (with) a body that has always been pathologized as “mentally ill,” and living (with) histories of resistance that have always been labelled as a “failure.”

Self-care has been talked about widely in reference to political organizing: in popular discourse, caring for oneself is encouraged to avoid or heal from burnout, with the intention of building sustainable liberatory practice. 

 “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” In her 1998 essay, A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde reminds us of the radical positioning of self-care in thinking about how we inhabit this world that deems some of our bodies less worthy than others. When care is intentionally deprived from us, (re-)centering our bodies as a destination of care itself can be a radical act of alternative world-making.

What we often forget, however, is that burnout, like what Lorde calls self-care, also orients us towards something, somewhere that’s not yet here.

M, I wonder if burnout is really a failure, as some people say. Is burnout a failure to take care of ourselves? To remain “sane” and “productive,” or to arrive at success “on time”? If that’s the case, then what does it mean to heal? Does it mean to return to the state or timeframe that rejected our bodies in the first place — this capitalist hell that steals from us and murders our siblings every second? If so, I refuse to heal. I refuse to return. I remain here — in this ash that’s still warm like your flesh.

I’ve been thinking a lot about letters lately. M, don’t you think it’s fascinating that, once a letter is sent, it’s no longer yours? The moment it’s posted, its original wordings, textures, and feelings are no longer accessible to you. Even when, on a lucky day, the letter arrives at the destination you were hoping to deliver it to, it will exist only as an interpretation or translation in someone else’s imaginaries. It becomes their memories in their archival space. Writing, in this sense, is a practice of building — and you don’t need to know what and why.

When we wrote to each other, your anger became mine; did my anger become yours?
Your pain became mine; did my pain become yours?
Your sorrow became mine; did my sorrow become yours?
Your joy became mine; did my joy become yours?
Your dreams became mine; did my dreams become yours?

Your grief became mine, but did my grief become yours? As I attempted to write about it, my pen led me astray. In fact, grief never left me; it became my new home. I was there for a long time, sleeping day and night, not dreaming. I wasn’t dreaming because to grieve is to dream itself. After all, it’s a form of refusal for one thing and a will for another.

One of those nights of not-dreaming, I wake up and find myself in a small hotel room in Paris. It’s two in the morning, but the orange street light coming through the window is as bright as day. I put on my jacket, leave the hotel, and wander from street to street. After passing several groups of American tourists, intoxicated teenagers, pigeons, marble stairs, taxis, and rubbish bins, I arrive at a river. A river with two banks.³ I can’t recall its name, but I know this river very well. It’s the river you mentioned in your last letter. It’s the river that doesn’t exist on the map.

All of a sudden, a bridge appears in front of me, though the moonlight can’t seem to find it. As I cross the bridge, I find a ghost standing in the middle and realize they’re waiting for me. The ghost smiles at me, so I smile back. The ghost gestures for me to follow them, so I do.

“Do you remember me?” the ghost asks, walking next to me. I shake my head. 

“I don’t remember you, but you seem so familiar,” I say. 

“Well,” the ghost shrugs. “I am familiar to you because we’ve met before, but then you stopped searching for me and disappeared. And did you know, ghosts are not visible unless you are searching for them? Otherwise, how could you tell from afar that I am one of them?” 

There’s no one else on the bridge. Just the ghost and I, and the warm orange lights dotted ahead.

The ghost continues. “Ghosts are desires, memories, and dreams, but we aren’t entirely our own. If you see me, someone else has already written a book about me, a ghost on the bridge — the bridge over the river with two banks.” 

“This is the river you mentioned in your last letter, isn’t it?” I ask the ghost. 

“The letter you didn’t write back to,” the ghost says playfully, so I laugh. 

“I can’t seem to hide anything from you,” I say. 

“This is the river that died,” the ghost says. “The river that lost its mother. The river that only resides in the future tense. This is the river you will come back to. Now, you cross the bridge, and find me again.”

As I walk off the bridge, the ghost disappears. I’m now left in the square alone, and there it says:

6e Arrt.
PLACE
MAHMOUD DARWICH
1941–2008
POETE DE PALESTINE

(Translation: 
6th Arrondissement
Mahmoud Darwish Square
1941–2008
Poet of Palestine)

Mahmoud Darwish was forced to live in exile for most of his life. He was in Paris when he wrote Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982. I recall that he begins this book by writing: “Out of one dream, another dream is born.”

“Out of one dream, another dream is born,” I repeat. As I speak, my body gains gravity again.

It’s two in the morning, and I remember what my grandmother warned me about again and again: “It’s the hour of ‘ushimitsu doki.’ You shouldn’t wander around at this hour because only ghosts are awake.” M, would you believe me if I told you I befriended a ghost?

Here, I’ve included two photographs I took in my mind of that evening.

Later, I crossed the bridge again. This time, I didn’t find the ghost, or the ghost didn’t find me. I walked back to my hotel room and sat down at a small writing desk. I found my pen in my suitcase, and opened up my journal. On a blank, cream yellow page, I started writing this letter with the set of spells you ended your last letter with.

M, this is my love letter to you. I was able to write again because you planted the seeds of those words in me a long time ago, when I was absent.

Our practice of exchanging letters, of building love and trust, is not itself enough to stop a system that divides, steals, and murders. But this connection is a necessary means for us to keep moving and keep trying, or perhaps, to choose hope when it doesn’t seem available to us. After all, wasn’t it the beginning of what we needed — to find each other, to know whom to address our love letter to? Because our dreams are relational; without each other, our dreams are incomplete.

In love and solidarity,
Your friend
A
2 January 2025
Paris, France