I spend my nights in ways that I guess could be called romantic. Turning on only one light in the house after getting the apartment to myself at night. I read outside at the balcony before it gets too cold. I’ve missed reading, I never stopped doing it but granted it wasn’t at the same intensity as when I was young(er). This is where my dead poet boyfriend comes in. He makes me look at words again, and incites fierce yearning to take bits of me out to infest pages & entire chapters.

“My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.” - Rilke

So I won’t go into detail on how I love the nights I spend. I’ll just say my nights are most likely romantic because I still remember how when I was 12, my world was rocked when I found out that ‘romance’ DID NOT have completely Hallmark & Mills-Boon connotations. A creative writing teacher told me this in class after she called me a romantic, & I furiously denied it. Of course I refused to believe her, she never liked what I wrote for class. I was a bitter 12 year-old, thinking why should I trust this woman, accusing me of loving the idea of Love Lurrrrve when every part of me back then had had it with silly behaviour & sillier boys & all her red ink setting fire to my pages.

But at that time I didn’t know, for example, that one of the 12 listed definitions at dictionary.com would say that romance is “a baseless, made-up story, usually full of exaggeration or fanciful invention.” There was nothing about love in that, see? I rejected her definitions Completely & I’m not sure when the truth grew on me. But when it did, it stuck like glue. Now I think she was right all along. She cut past my ‘creative’ writing crust right to the core, & saw me for who I really was; one of the most hopelessly foolish gone-case romantics she ever met. Romance blinded me with literature, romance gave me away to boys who broke & built me, romance made me compartmentalise and it breathed in all the journals I own. Definition after definition strikes true, albeit embarrassingly enough. I started to really like the word. I figured, it was a cynic that tied the concept of Love/Lurrrrve to that word so strongly till today. I’m in good company.

So I am not Hallmark, or Mills & Boon. I was a girl who made bad writing as a punching bag (and I still do, to some extent) & tried so hard to avoid turning romantic that now I am one consummately. Biasala tu. I don’t remember that poor teacher’s name now but if she’s reading this, you were right. I no longer hold grudges against all your smug & aloof laser stares that burnt my notebooks black. Why I scorch entire pages now myself. And it feels good to resign to my fate.

And my beautiful dead poet boyfriend.
I don’t even remember how long he’s been playing with my head.