You by Keamogetswe Malebane

Your name is the strongest. Positive and negative connotation in any language. It lights me up or leaves me aching for days.

My name, my name is the most mediocre sense of identity I've ever come across; yes it is positive, but it also reflects negatively.

Every time you smoke a cigarette I want to rip it from your mouth. I don't know how to say this really, except that it really breaks my heart. It breaks my heart to think that anything could ever take you from me even a moment before it has to. Sometimes I shiver. I shiver at the thought that you might walk away from my words, words that I don't even mean, resentful of the things that you'd do.

But to you I write this letter, to you my dearest treasure. I crave you in the most innocent form. I crave to say good night and give you forehead kisses and to say that I adore you when you feel at your worst. I crave you in the way where I wish I were next to you, nothing more or less.

When you first saw me you didn't call me "beautiful", you called me "exquisite". When I first saw you, I told you not to waste your time. You said you'd love me better than any man can. You pleaded for me to let you in but I am only an abandoned house occupied by ghosts of people that once claimed that they'd not leave. You thought you could save me , that you could be my salvation. Truth be told, I didn't really care to be rescued. My solitude is a lover I'd always return to.

The letter I'd left you had one line written, "Don't fall in love with someone like me".

The letter you left for in response was, "I love you, je taime, te amo, yo te quiero my lover, so long till the night creeps in."

K.B.M