A Haiku for You

“I wrote you a haiku,” I say to you, while I blow off the steam billowing from my cup of caramel macchiato. I see you arch your thick eyebrows until there’s a hill of lines between them, your mouth opening to the shape of bafflement. Unrestrainedly, you say: “What?”

I knew you wouldn’t instantly get it. After all, I’m a writer and you’re an engineer. We are on different planes of existence. And there’s an entire universe between the languages that we speak.

So I repeat what I just said. “A haiku. That’s two five-syllable lines (in the beginning and in the end) and a line of seven syllables in the middle.”

You nod, a lightbulb probably goes on in your head, as you try to recall the literary genres that you breezed through back in high school.

At this instant, I am reminded of Milan Kundera and what he calls the “lightbulb moment”—that instant when some great, unique idea flashes in your head, throwing you off course for a few seconds until the idea gets the amount of attention it thinks it deserves, or until you can push it back to make way for more pressing concerns.

At this point, I think, my haiku—the three-liner that I wrote especially for you—is my more pressing oncern. So I push back Kundera and switch off the lightbulb in my mind so I can pan the focus back to you, to us, and to my haiku.

“Oh, I see. A haiku,” you say finally. It’s a cue that tells me I can now continue because you’re now on the same plane that I’m on. We’re now speaking the same language. The universe between us has condensed into the few inches that lie between my steaming caramel macchiato and your sweating frapuccino.

I pause—the type that they call a “pregnant pause”—as I think about this strange talent that we’ve both developed. How often have we surprised each other by speaking the other’s language in unguarded moments?

“Hello?” you say, knocking me back to reality, and back to my pressing concern. “Oh!” I say. "It goes like this:

I am a River
Meandering to Destiny.
You are Sea to me."

"I am a River
Meandering to Destiny
You are Sea to me."

You say after me, drinking in the words, making pregnant pauses after each line, and relishing the myriad meanings—laced with years of friendship, pains, intimacy and struggles—that the three lines contain.You force a half-smile, but I see that your eyes are drooping sadly, the way they always do when there’s something that you want to tell me but you don’t know where to begin. Or when there’s something that you want to tell me but can’t, because we are no longer together and people who are no longer together can’t just tell each other stuff that they used to tell each other when they were still together.

“What?” I prod. I’ve always been notorious for pushing my limits. How many times have I broken your heart by testing how fast and how well it has healed? “Don’t you find it beautiful?” I ask.

You flash your half-smile again. This time, though, tears begin to well up in your eyes. I know you are trying to hold them back. (We both know the deluge that comes after the breaking of a dam.) But you fail—again—and I see globules of grief rolling down your cheeks.

I look into your eyes and feel the urge to kiss them, like I used to do whenever I would wipe away your tears or coax you out of the blues. But I hold back the urge. I remind myself that we’re no longer together and people who are no longer together can’t just do certain things that they used to do when they were still together.

The urge holds my heart in a tight grip—as tight, perhaps, as the grip of my haiku on your heart. I shake it off but it won’t let go. Its grip tightens ever more until my heart bleeds, until my eyes well up with tears that I, too, am powerless to hold back. So there. In a brightly-lit corner of some coffeeshop, we sit opposite each other, separated only by my hot coffee and your cold coffee on the coffeetable for two, but joined—for some fleeting moments—by three pregnant lines. We are both reduced to silent tears of resignation, frustration, regret, and the faint flicker of hope.

I am a River
Meandering to Destiny.
You are Sea to me.

I want to tell you how much I wish I could just flow straight back to you and not have to hit those rocks and boulders that stood on my path. I want to tell you how difficult all this meandering has been for me, and how tired I am of painful detours. I want to show you my bruises, my cuts—the battlewounds that I sustained when I fought so hard for a love that I ended up losing anyway.

There was a time when I thought I had completely lost my way, that I was on a course that was leading me farther and farther away from my Sea—You. But after the roughest patch, I saw you on the bend again, with bruises of your own, singing your own songs of frustration.

I want to tell you everything I’ve been through, but I know this will only hurt you so much—maybe as much as news of your own meandering has crippled my heart. At this moment, a lightbulb goes on in my mind. If I suggest that we stop all this foolishness and just get back together, pick up the pieces, so to speak, and start again, not necessarily where we left off, would you be keen on the idea?

But I shrug the thought off. I remind myself of the promise that I made once. I shall give you all the space that you need until your world becomes a vast expanse of emptiness, until the loneliness eats you up and you seek me out yourself, until you come to me and tell me your life has been incomplete without me. Or until you acknowledge the stark reality that I am the only River destined to flow to you, my Sea—and fate won’t have it any other way.

“It’s lovely,” you say, nodding your head as Cynthia Alexander’s “Intertwyne” plays in the backgroud. Two words that snap me back to reality. That agonizing reality that your hand lies so close to mine but I can’t even touch it because people who are no longer together cannot just hold each other’s hands the way they did when they were still together.

“You be good,” you tell me while holding my gaze.

“Why do you tell me that?”

“Because you’re my baby. You are precious to me. So precious that I can’t rest until I’m sure that my angel is in good hands,” you say.

It’s a cue that tells me I’m not flowing any further tonight. So I sip the rest of my coffee and dream of the day when I will finally reach my Sea.