this is not a love story. the girl does not get the girl in the end. there are no cotton-candy skies, no rainbow colored flags or dances in the rain. there is rain, but not the sad kind. it's the kind of rain that makes you think. it took me a few years to understand that rain and tears are both water. there is coming out and coming out and coming out. i'm not sure if i’ve ever been let in. sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night to write love letters. i dream in love letters. every now and then the love letters come back with a nightmare, a postage stamp and my address on the front. it says to sarah. in my dreams a crow brings me the letters. if crows are such bad luck, why are they bringing me treasures? gwendolyn brooks wrote Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring. i feel like rain-sprinkled spring, an october spring, no flowers and no green for graves. the rain finds its way into the love letter. ink of rain runs and becomes my fingertips. now my veins are words. if you ask me my blood type, i’ll tell you a poem. can you become a living poem? this is a love letter pretending to be a poem. a life letter. it starts with your elbows, your eyelashes, your blurry face in a train station window. it ends with you, and you, and you, a couple of years later. love letters are easy but poems are harder. even harder is love. if love is the trying and the reaching and the failing, then this is a love poem. the girl does get the girl in the end. the girl is in the envelope, in the love letter from the crow. it says to sarah.
credits:
“To the Young Who Want to Die” by Gwendolyn Brooks
The Half of It written and directed by Alice Wu
Rosario Santiago (she/they) is a queer Boricua writer from Philadelphia. She enjoys writing about time-travel, beautiful mundane things, and girls falling in love.