To live in the world, to live up to the world, and to see the world are different things, you say. And being able to see the world is the perching lean of resolution I insisted to have own. A regular read of Alice in Wonderland and some silent, civilized turning of pages. A knocking invitation from outside the window lattice. A pleated, if not feigned, corner of smile. Perhaps an unsigned dream to have: the world as a personified presence choreographing our silent conversation. And to your concern, I did wake up from my encounter with the world. Waking up to a memory rattling like a reversed cassette tape. I cannot remember what tangible countenance the world chose to masquerade under. But his arrival is one indelible mark.

You said I am a girl who loves to laugh. That my laughter is riddled with an impenetrable fortress of unknowability. Yet I would like to say that it is no unbreachable scientific theorem nor an unsolved Rosetta stone. A laughter that plasters across a bland tapestry that is stitched directionless. It can mean no more than the yearning for love, or your favorite word that you insisted to have coined in your last life — companionship. A dead phone number companionship is, its desire a mere accessory of adolescence. One end of the phone reeked with an on-beat repository of young happiness so sublime as if recorded. The other end, a gentle, if not slightly nefarious, amalgamation of hushed noises. (Can solitude deserve the word splendid as a modifier?)

To proclaim again to you that I love talking to the characters in books, a habit you named as a flagrant misuse of immortalized literary pieces. The characters and I overlap in a throbbing, immutable space you never seem to reach. We are equals: we meet some people meant to adjust us and never to linger more than an elegant note in the symphony we barely started to compose. Like you, like me. Abiding aspirations comparable to the luminous and settled vision of a street lamp, I draped them neatly across my thin shoulders. To walk along the light. Like we always do. And then to slump the shadows gingerly merging with our steps. Do you still take big strides too confident yet uncondescending enough to bid you to forget what reality speaks of? To armor my passion and hope, I did even in grief. To perpetuate the tender yet defiant belief in love, the belief that love is a positive good destined for a long and pleasant stay: be it loving oneself, loving others, or loving everything.

Is the world itself already personified, I do not know nor claim to know. I still like to open the floor-to-ceiling windows on rainy days and close my eyes to exempt them from the glowering mode of protection they constantly wear. It was my conversation. My conversation with the world with my uninhibited listening and his irregular pitter-patter. The world walks an unhurried walk, and I play an unhurried accompaniment. To encounter the world (or to even meet you!) is but a merry happenstance. Lasting within the occasional monotony of love or the seldom pleasures of loneliness, I lived and am still living. Living up to my story that the world witnesses (and hopefully living into yours as well).