A voice from the past

I could not tear myself away from the email. Unlike the other emails by recent lovers that you read again and again; this was an email to be read once intensely, then replied with equal intensity.

Yue, he said in the email. I could hear him murmur with gentleness and crisp, manly tones that only he could. Yue. He picked it up from hearing my best friends call me exactly by that. He knew it was a moniker that he would be the only man privileged to use at that time. Since then, I have tried letting others use it, but the intimacy of the way they said it never likened yours. Yours still sounded the best. We were so good together and even better apart. We were not ready to stop growing, despite promises to speak of vows forever. Since then, I never came close to speaking about forever and not for a couple of years.

They say there are cardinal rules when writing to an ex. Rules so strict, you would be more likely to suffocate in it than in a 14th century corset. The first love. The one boarded in transition. The one which love meant love. Even the one night stand that turned into something but never materialized into anything. Any kind of ex. Always present yourself happier than you were with them. Prove that you are better off without them. No weakness, they say. Why should he be able to gloat? But if I did write in exactly that way, then it would be a betrayal of all the pieces I had left with you about me at those moments. So I cannot. And I end up writing this to account for our years apart and could not resist signing off the way I did.

"Still in shanghai.

Life has been so hectic, sometimes nightmarish, sometimes dreamlike.
I still can't believe I'm living away from home like I talked about last time, in a moment buried in time.
Constantly straddling in between being child-like and adult. I never manage to fully cross that imaginary line. And I hope I never will (but it's never easy).
Maybe I'll stay here another few years, we'll see where everything leads.

How about you? how have you been?

Take care,
yue"


But what I am always trying to say to you is - did you remember? Parts of where these fragments are supposed to fit in somwhere in our past? Please say you do.