"Well, you have a melancholy soul, don't you think?"

Strange how that suddenly comes to mind, and the whole deluge of thoughts that follow behind it.

It must be... -six? seven?- years since we last talked- or communicated, to be more precise. You and I have never really spoken to each other. We've never heard each other's voices, and yet we managed to make each other's lives that much more bearable. I still wonder how we did it.

But sometime in JC I was reminded of you when a friend of mine received a phone call from someone she didn't know, who didn't give his name, and who only asked if she had the time to listen.

Too stunned at this strange turn of events, she simply replied, okay. So listen she did, and talk he did.

Not too unexpectedly, it was a story of unhappiness, of feeling somewhat lost. He did sound depressed, she said. And after all was said, he merely sighed, said thanks, and when met with her stammered: "er, you're welcome" and awkward silence, he said goodbye and hung up.

She couldn't call him back; there was no number to do so. And we still think that maybe he just punched in a random number, hoping whoever was on the other end would be a sympathetic ear and nothing more.



Sometimes I think of you and wonder who you really are.

Sometimes, on bad days, I write things like this and put your name in the salutation.

And on days like this, I remember things that we spoke of once.



"Well, you have a melancholy soul, don't you think?
Like all those poets. All the same."

"I tend to think of it as a throwaway soul."

"Same difference.
I bet you only like beautiful things because you're thinking they won't last."

"Insightful of you..."

"Why throwaway? You haven't been discarded yet, have you?
At least not that you've told me."

"'Yet'?? You're *so* optimistic..."

"*shrugs* We all get kicked to the kerb at least once in our lives, I think."



We both had the same strange problem, didn't we? Somehow we felt too little and we felt too much at the same time.

There was something which made us both strangely detached, like we lived in this world but were not of it, which caused so much tension for both of us, made it difficult to comprehend us, to live with us.

And yet the slightest thing which some would never take notice of could make us both mope for days. Weeks. Months, I remember. But lucky for you that turned out to be nothing.

Between then and now, I've been told many things; some of them you've heard before, some of them are new.

I'm cold, detached, have absolutely no EQ. I'm aloof, I'm unbothered, I'm unfeeling, I can't provide emotional support at all. And those are just the ones I think you've heard before. And I think an echo sounds in your head when you read those words.

But I've psychoanalysed myself a ridiculous number of times now and the only explanation I can offer is that I express myself differently.

I don't hug much, I don't smile much, I don't even have physical contact with people much. I don't talk much sometimes, even around people I've known all my life. I don't understand how they want me to be when they say they don't understand how I can be so unfeeling, and I wonder, is some spark missing somewhere...?

I'm not particularly good with my hands; I don't make gifts, and I never know what to make. I don't give out small little nothings to everyone I know on things like Valentine's Day with messages which are all one-liners and all the same. I don't know a whole lot of places where people go to have fun.

Me?

I leave things on people's desks which I think might be useful, tidbits of information I scrounge together from somewhere and save and print because I think they could use it.
I make soup and trot down to the convenience store for medicine when they're sick.
And sometimes an idea for a gift does come to me, and I turn it into one massive undertaking.
I buy things which end up being terribly belated birthday presents because I hadn't thought of it or hadn't happened upon it and thought, hey, that'd be just the thing, before the big day arrived.
Sometimes I iron clothes they need tomorrow.
And sometimes I just sit and watch, thinking of how their lives could be made better.

But that's all just unfeeling, I know.



On days like this, I wonder who you are, where you are, and if you're happy. And I wonder if either of us realises, in the grand scheme of things, how much we gave each other, even if neither of us knows for certain if any of it is real.

Dreams are strange things. At least to me they are.

My subconscious mind has always disturbed me in some way; it's always told me things that somehow or other turn out to be true.

And the most freaky of them so far has to be the time two semesters ago when I was taking that shortcut from AS4 to the space between LTs 9 and 10, that narrow little lane next to the windows of the AS4 staircase, and I just stopped dead in my tracks suddenly because something just felt very wrong.

And the very second I stopped, a penknife blade landed at my feet. Someone'd thrown it out of one of the windows upstairs, I guess. I never looked up to check, just froze for a while there, then quickly went on my way. But it did freak me out.

And my brain seems to be working overtime these past few months-- or at least one part of it is.

The dream of the lady in black recurred again. Just a few nights after Joseph and I broke up. The dream of the lady in black in an empty dark room, lit only by the lights of a city nightscape. Where a man with no face comes to hold her, touch her, kiss her fears away, but in the end he only leaves with one of the gloves off her hand.

The first time I saw it was during the time shortly before Joseph and I got together, and I didn't understand what it could possibly mean then.

But when it revisited, it suddenly occurred to me; maybe that dream was telling me all along not to say yes to you.