to time travel and sleep with jack kerouac

A Fearful Foretelling

2010-03-31T20:51:00.000-07:00

Dearest J,

Her mobile phone lighted up as she was trying to negotiate her trusty old blue sedan between a black car overlaid with a layer of gray dust and a pink one whose bumper was jutting out of the lane. Mommy, what's taking you so long at work? You're already late for lunch. And it's Saturday ü, the message read.

She let out a small laugh as she turned off the engine and grabbed her purse. It was her 12-year-old daughter, who, like her son and husband, never tired of sweetly taunting her about her compulsion to work all the time on one or several of the small Web sites she writes for and manages. She has grown used to working constantly for the last 13 years. Even at home at night or on weekends, she would steal moments to check the blogs, read up on the news, see her email. During vacati

ons, her family makes sure to strip her luggage of any gadget but they stop at taking away her notebook and pen, and with these she scribbles whenever she feels like it.

She put on her dark, round shades as she got off the car and gently closed the door. She stood under the shade as she waited to cross the street. She looked up and saw, through the swaying leaves of the coconut tree, a hazy sun, as white as her sundress. Her husband likes to point out that she still dresses the same way she did when she was in her 20s in dresses with the blazing colors of wild summer sunsets and monochromatic shade of fogged up, empty nights in the city.

She stepped into the hot March sun as traffic ground to a halt. A gust of wind gently lifted her long and wavy tresses as she made her way across two lanes of vehicles waiting impatiently for a green light. She did not see her family in the corner table under the trellised archway; the heat at this time of year drove them to the air-cooled indoor dining area. It was their favorite weekend restaurant because, as her son would say, its food was almost as comforting as her own cooking.

The doorman greeted her cheerfully, Hi ma'am, they've been waiting for you, same table. He tells her the same line, in varying degrees of chirpiness, as frequently as she arrives late for meals with her family at the restaurant. She always answers with a nod and a smile.

She saw them at the usual table closest to the farthest wall from the door, where a wood-framed mirror hung and through which they watched other diners and made commentaries about their food and lives. They were huddled close together, which they do when they are trying to devise a new prank or learn a card trick from their father. The head of her 10-year-old boy was the first to bob up. He was laughing so hard, holding his stomach, while his sister clamped her right hand over her mouth as she tousled her brother's thick hair with her left.

Her husband was arranging a deck of cards when he looked up and saw her coming toward them. He smiled and mouthed, Finally. The children turned and, upon seeing her, cried. Mommy!

Her son frowned as she bent down to kiss his forehead. Daddy wouldn't let me have ice cream for appetizer, he complained. You're acting like a big baby again just like daddy, she murmured against her son's cherubic cheeks, which elicited giggles from her daughter. She turned to the girl, rubbed her nose against hers and teased, You have not stopped sending me messages since you woke up.

If you came earlier, I would have stopped sending messages, she said with a pout.

She laughed at her adorable impertinence. Then, she kissed her husband softly. He smiled with his eyes. They just missed you at breakfast. They were carving boats and animals out of the fruits you brought home to make your salad more interesting.

But I bet you already ate all of them, she told her children as she settled into her favorite wing-backed old country chair.

The waiter appeared behind her and asked, The usual, ma'am? to which she gave her customary reply, Yes, please.

They continue the affectionate familial chatter as they munch on nuts and cheese while waiting for their food to be served. It would not take long; they come to the restaurant every Saturday at brunch without fail and order the almost the same fare of shredded buttered corn, four cheese pizza with an extra serving of bacon, buffalo wings with blue cheese dip and mashed potatoes on the side. They take turns picking the dessert, all of which they have tried. Sometimes they ask for a pasta dish, but they would always say it was never as good as their mother's.

It was a genuinely charmed domestic life. They did everything together with joy, from cooking and cleaning the house, to driving around town and going on vacation. They are always seen laughing and doting on each other. The couple still seemed in love after 13 years. Their children were healthy, active and bright both took after their mother's nose and thick, dark hair, and their father's mellow brown eyes and timid smile. They were cheerful, grounded, patient, just like their father. And just like him, they smothered her with attention.

Their world revolved around her, simply put. They have grown accustomed to her incurable workaholism and do not question it as the only abnormality in their domestic bliss, only an unexplainable oddity of an enigmatic woman. And in spite her obsessiveness to keep busy and thinking, they never wanted for time and attention from her. She cooks all their meals at home and packs their lunch to school and work. She buys them curious books and knickknacks. She and her husband never miss a school activity, and together they tuck the children to sleep every night.

Their life was what people fancied as perfect. But the mere concept of bliss, more so its actuality, was completely alien to her. Having grown up seeing unhappy homes and dysfunctional relationships, she had firmly concluded that bliss was not only unattainable, but also a cruel fantasy.

But her loving husband arranged for their family life to be such: solid, secure, safe. He infected the children with his optimism and devotion, and if she had passed her moodiness or temper to any of them, they never exhibited anything close to the fits of rage or melancholia that marked most of her youth.

She could not complain she felt shamefully ungrateful when even a flicker of doubt crosses her mind. She avoids brooding over lost dreams and her strange life by immersing herself in new projects or the week's menu. She has learned to fall back into various routines with them, and realized that these were not threatening to a stimulating life or the despicable hallmark of ennui predictability protected her from the darkness that engulfed her most of her life.

People, friends and strangers alike, often ask them the token, clichéd question, What's your secret? She never answers except to say, Ask my husband, for she sincerely does not know an appropriate response that would not dampen their misplaced sanguineness or mortify her husband's good intentions. All she had to do was follow his family's lead and life played out unimaginably blissful.

She often feels a mere role-player in a bizarre scheme of happiness she does not merit to live. It was an enviable life by all appearances, but one she remains uncertain if she ever wanted, at least with them.

Her husband's warm hand touching her knuckles broke her ungracious reverie. She realized she was unmindfully sipping an empty cup of tea. She looked away from a painting of a stormy sea with crashing waves and glinting stars against a gloomy night that had her transfixed, and turned to look at her children by each of her elbows. They held out in their hands yellow origami roses.

Count them, her husband prodded her. Her son and daughter held twenty each. Happy birthday, Mommy, they said in unison. She took the delicate flowers in her hands and kissed them all over their face.

Her husband was settling the bill while the children scrapped leftover chocolate off their plates. She held the roses close to her bosom and stroked them while staring at the mirror as has been her habit at this time, when the noonday sun tried to find its way through the cracks of the window shutter.

Her gaze was finding its way back to their table when she caught a familiar figure, two tables from them, that perturbed her fragile core. She turned around and was shocked into absolute silence.

She had not seen him, not even his shadow, in the last 13 years. Through a combination of will, though faltering, and cooperative fate, she was able to banish him from memory 13 years ago. She buried who she had been from birth until she was 27 along with their brief, stolen time together in inaccessible recesses of her memory, one no one had the slightest clue existed. She would always dream of him, which roused her from a restless slumber typically between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., her personal witching hour, and kept her from returning to sleep beside her husband.

He would be 57 then, and the closely cropped silver hair and deeper lines on his forehead were telltale signs of long years gone by. His thin lips, though, remained as pink as ever, defying aging and separation. A man in his early 20s who looked uncannily like him in his younger days sat beside him while a woman sat across them.

She wanted to dismiss it as a fluke, a callous deal of cards in an otherwise largely lucky hand. But he saw her too, and was looking at her in a way she could only recognize as longing.

Her husband stroked her cheek and gestured it was time to leave. Fortunately her children were already running toward the door and they did not see tears gushing down her face.

What's wrong? her husband bent down in alarm. Nothing, was all she could say. He helped her up and held her close while they walked to the door, past him. She was shaking violently, more so inside than out.

She could not afford to resurrect her self that died all those years ago. She had since lived in her family's lives, for them. She knew no other way to survive the long, dark years ahead.

She was walking back to her apartment after seeing her mother. She moved out a year ago, the biggest hurrah of independence in her adult life. She celebrated her 27th birthday the day before in the apartment she was renting by cooking for a handful of friends and family whom she asked to drop by, and just returned her mother's dinnerware that she borrowed for the occasion.

She only wanted to be preoccupied on her birthday and cooking for friends and family seemed a satisfying diversion. Frankly, she found no reason for revelry. She grew older by the year but lonelier by the day. She cherished the people she invited but has grown to become a stranger to them. She preferred, as time passed, to keep to herself. She knew many people, but no one really knew her, not anymore. Reticence enabled her to shield her miserable life from casual scrutiny. She kept up appearances for her sake, not theirs, for she loathed explaining her thoughts and feelings to people who could never grasp her sorrow.

She climbed the footbridge and stopped midway to look out at glaring headlights light up the darkened street. She looked down she held no fear of heights and calculated what jumping over would cause her. She wondered if it would be fatal, if it would be painful and abrupt, if it would hurt more than dying inside, slowly, in silence.

Contemplating more years like this one piling up terrified her to immobility. She could no longer believe in the fundamental values indispensable to a sound survival - hope, love, dreams, possibilities - after he could not choose her because the die has been cast for him, not even when another vowed to devote his life to making these come true for her. He was perfect but he was not who she had given up her soul for. She would, for ever, mourn a lost love, and because of which, she would never be worthy again.

She, simply, had died. And she found that an unacceptable way to live the rest of her existence.

Always,

damning heartbeat

2009-07-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

Dear S,

I tend to tune out rainy days in New York. You wouldn’t hear me complain about the wetness licking through my hair, highlighting its jagged ends and the sickly-octopus-like shape it morphed into after I had gotten carried away with a pair of dog-grooming shears almost four months ago. Neither would you hear me sulk over soaking my socks and thin-soled sneakers in the unfeeling East Coast rain (I’ve always- note the unbiased tone- thought that the Philippine rain has more pizzazz, is sultrier with its tropical genes). I have a retrievable vision in my head that depicts rain as a mere prelude to tie-dyed days, to the vast canvass of Central Park matted with rows and rows of golden and pink-cheeked flower kids, their braided hair, their linen shirts, their acid-induced words. Spring is hippy season through and through, but I don’t mind sharing it with free-spirited scribblers who bleed their thoughts onto a blank page, unperturbed by anything, or to talented punks who doodle on their Chuck Taylors and witness the everyday through their thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

I will not, however, rule out summer, regardless of the airless cauldron that it is, or should I say much more like Sylvia Plath’s unventilated bell jar, minus the manic-depressiveness. Summers in New York are worth enduring as long as you do it with good friends (am waiting for you). I remember the summer Karol was here, it was in June 2007. We would wander around midtown and find ourselves lost in the labyrinthine nooks of Central Park. Good thing Karol was infatuated with maps, we never stayed lost for more than 10 minutes, and would resume our trek, discovering every now and then an iconic portion that we had only come across in movies or in Catcher in the Rye—the carousel, the skating rink, the pond with the ducks.

So there we were crisscrossing through, taking photos every five minutes or so, getting dumbfounded by the somewhat homogeneity of a massive park, then enlightening ourselves with the common realization that there’s a reason behind such homogeneity, because parks were designed to be green, to be a chunk of nature within an urban mess, thus the uniformed greenness and brownness, the splattering of ducks and water, the speckles of sensible activity-causing carousels, skating rinks, soccer fields, and bridges. Then we would be back on track in no time, sweaty and shiny, but proud of ourselves that we could still analyze and philosophize amidst the gagging humidity. It was through this same taxing method of hunting down famous spots that we stumbled upon the core, the Mecca of the city’s center (at least for us): Strawberry Fields. You should have seen the look on Karol’s face when her eyes beheld the marbleized Imagine memorabilia, a perfect circle majestically ingrained in the burning ground, cradling roses from tourists who had consummated their pilgrimage to John Lennon’s side of town-- then and forever.

And the joke I’ve always had in my head? The look on Karol’s face that day was that of a sinless soul who has finally met her creator.

July has given me a tight hug and kissed me on the cheek. It has set up its tent right in front of me, despite the non-stop flashing of the “I’m not ready” neon sign on my forehead. But it almost feels like the rains would disappear for a while. It’s also been a year since I received that paralyzing text message from my dad. I’ve realized that my resilience is an inescapable fact. How normal this journey is. Usually people move on. I know I am doing so, but why am frightened that I would forget-- completely?

I once knew a girl who wouldn’t, couldn’t sleep because she was afraid that Death would cheat on her, snatch her soul during a customary slumber, a normal human task. She was 14 when she convinced herself that indeed she would die that night if she closed her eyes and gave in to sleep. She lay still in bed and could hear her heart beating so hard and fast she thought it would rip her chest. She ran to her mother in the next room and told her she was scared, Oh Mama, she was so scared, she would die, she was sure she would die. Her mother held her and told her reassuringly, “No, you won’t. It’s just heart palpitations.” But the girl could tell through the way her mother held her that she was somewhat scared as well.

Her mother decided to take her to a doctor, but she refused. They had been through this before, when her heart raced like a stallion gone berserk after a 10-hour roundtrip drive to Pangasinan with the entire family to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Manaoag. The doctor took her blood pressure and shook her head and smiled a mocking smile mainly because she was the silliest kid she had ever met. “Don’t you have faith?” the doctor asked. She felt like God Himself was judging her. It was as if she didn’t have the right to be afraid of her own unusual heartbeat because she was a kid, because she had just been on a holy journey, and it was downright sacrilegious to think that you would die of an inexplicable heart defect after seeing a miraculous version of the Virgin Mother. The girl vowed never to see this doctor again.

The mother instead seated the girl at her study table and gave her a Bible. “Open it to the Psalms,” she said. “Read on, it will lighten your heart.” It was like a scene from a movie, the girl thought. But she had to admit that the luscious words of the Psalms made her feel better, like God was sitting right beside her.

Later that night her grandmother came and looked at her in a way one could call sympathetic. Still she thought it was the gentlest look she had gotten from anyone. The girl wanted to ask her grandmother if she too was scared of dying. But she never found the courage to open her mouth.

The heart palpitations would go on for years to come, mostly in the middle of the night, but later on even during the day when she’s at work. She would have a name for them-- panic attacks-- but would learn never to dwell on them as their circular nature leaves one helpless and immobile. Too many people dying and in pain. She’s not ready to be selfish. Not yet.

Her grandmother would die one scorching day in July while she was thousands of miles away. She would light a tiny red candle in her room that night and would sob and throw up, sickeningly drunk on her grief. Though that same night she would not think of death highly, she would not be scared if it did snatch her soul-- sound asleep or wide awake. She would not dare question a god or anything she could not see. She would not give a damn.

She couldn’t care less if her heart was beating like a raving drum set bent on tearing her chest to shreds.

Yours,
J

A Girl You Knew

2009-06-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

Dear J,

There was a once a girl who was lost in a whirlwind of dreams she has long stopped believing in. She wore the dulling greys of her woes and danced under the amber moonbeams of long gone nights. She, like innumerable souls, yearned for a pulsating body to warm her rigid repose lying in a cold bed with the soothing rhythm of constant breathing.

A man loved her, and she loved him deeply. He pursued her with the sweetest cajolery that reminded her how delicious it felt to be wanted. But he could only promise her moments for he already had a life before she even claimed hers. She sold what was left of her soul to purloin those moments.

A boy was in love with her, and maybe she could be in love with him. He followed her into the dark streets when she wandered off alone and offered to take her back to shelter. He longed to save her from the melancholia that seeped through her every pore. He sold his soul without flinching to be with her.

The girl and the man were engulfed with a consuming passion that brought them to dizzying heights of joy. She proclaimed her dreams to him, whispered her fears and what she saw before her were not clueless eyes and disbelieving ears. But affinity could not conceal the chasm of history that separated their lives. They inevitably lost each other to the years once more. She simply came too late.

The girl and the boy slid down the abyss of uncertainty unknowingly, unhurriedly. But it could not disguise the thievery of time only in which taking comfort in each other’s company could exist. He stumbled into a space she warped with a look to make raining fire pebbles metamorphose into tawny and vermillion blooms. He simply arrived too late.

The man held her with passion. He pulled her against him, wordlessly seeking indulgence for unintended neglect, soundlessly expressing he missed her more than she could know. He knew her every curve and traced them with hungry kisses. She vanished between his stars and waves.

The boy touched her with tenderness. His eyes pleaded permission to come breathlessly near, vowing to brave her presence though transfixed by her mocking smile, enraptured by her gaze that stripped him one thin layer at a time. His fingers hesitated, leaving lingering trails on her skin. He fell into the universe in her eyes.

The girl did not have to choose between the man and the boy. There was no choice to begin with. She had stopped wanting, what she has, what she has not. She felt no more than an experiment of their confusion, a secret stashed in an unseen crevice within their imagined desires. She no longer possessed hope to be anything more.

She has had too many dreams rise into a rainbow that exploded into a hundred million hues then burn into black soot that fell on her like a hushed drizzle – quietly, chillingly, unendingly.

Always,
S

aftermath

2009-04-12T23:37:00.000-07:00

Dear S,

As the wind howls outside, as it blows sadly, determinedly towards the coated, beat-up bodies of New Yorkers, I find myself thinking about love. Has it ever found me in all these years of staggering search? Or has it always been just lurking nearby, whistling at me, urging me to turn around and be still so it could seep in, drench my soul in its rare beauty, light up the parts within me that have been dead and gray a long time?

Or have I merely been indifferent to everything that’s beautiful and alive, for my soul has constantly been fed on isolating sadness, on a deeply rooted allegiance to loneliness?

And while I am here confined within the four walls of this poorly lit room in Brooklyn, I realize I know nothing about love. Not a bit about its complicacies, its multi-layered nature of lies and truths, of heartaches and passionate kisses, of sleeping in with someone whose skin feels good and right on yours, of blushing faces and twinkling eyes, of tears that will go on long after the giggles, the snatched minutes of bliss, the sweet murmurs of two strangers who, after a moment of lust, start sharing their dreams and secret hopes.

I know nothing-- if you ask me what I think it is, what it looks like, if it truly shrivels at the slightest touch of surrender. I can only say what it can resemble, illustrate it through those days on which I became invincible, through the people that have dropped in and surveyed my lonely life, through those that my heart still holds dear but have passed on without so much as a word or a smile.

If I did find it, I will never know, I can only hope that I did, because it sure is more reassuring to discover that I bumped into it for a second or two of my poor life, but that it simply was not destined to survive in my somber world.

I have often asked myself if I found it in the faces of two old schoolmates who decided to hook up one long weekend marking Valentine’s Day. Separated by two states, but connected by a childhood that was not purely easy and idyllic, they sought out each other in D.C. Holed up in his room for three days-- laughing and teasing, kissing and sleeping, snuggling and staring at the ceiling—they both achieved their goal: share a bed with another warm body, receive wet kisses, and see sparks just for the occasion. Just once in this cold, cold country.

Three days later, the girl boarded a bus bound for New York; coldness reigned the boy’s heart just as soon. They never spoke to each other again.

Did I find it in the muted sobs on the phone of a boy that some restless girl left home three years ago? A boy who would have married her without hesitation, had she given herself the chance to love him back with the same fervor?

Did I find it in the calculated moves of an easy-going hipster that some lost girl met in a bar in the East Village? I overheard him asking her to crash at his apartment just because it was winter and they were both solitary souls, hoping for a drastic change in the dry weather: he was wishing for more snow, the mighty kind that could cover every crevice of the city with gleaming white; she was wishing for any hint of spring.

Or did I find it eleven years ago in the eyes of a 15-year-old boy who told me that he would love me forever, even if we were oceans, continents, planets away from each other?

I remember texting a friend during one of my bouts with the blues: “Someday I am going to write about this anomalous crap called love and reintroduce my guts to tequila.” How can I refer to something as crap when I don’t even know what it is? But can you blame me, S? For someone who has hoped and hoped, tried and tried, the least this world can do is let her call love crap. It’s not too much to ask for.

Though I can never define love exactly-- not for anyone, not in this lifetime, maybe, just maybe, I have it in me. I have love to hand out to somebody who will not dare ask why, who will open his hand gratefully and happily because it is my hand that’s casting a shadow on his, and not anybody else’s.

Yet with all my cluelessness about love, New York has taught me a good deal about living and bleeding. About carrying on even if everything that crosses your path seems to be at risk of slipping off your hands. Even if the future seems to be harsh on girls that know nothing but dream and get hurt.

Tonight as the polar wind peers through my window, as glacial drafts that I have learned to live with sneak in smoothly like thieves on familiar territory, I remember my first night at Motti’s when he brought up that topic about love, the familial kind that we all tend to, not really take for granted, but more of not notice. He said something about love being the ultimate reason to fight for your dreams. That as long as you are surrounded by love, you will get on with life, you will be okay.

Now I realize how much of it is true. Looking back on it now, love was probably the reason why I ended up staying for a month in that 140-year-old brownstone house owned by a funky, adorably weird Israeli family. That place exuded all the love any exhausted soul needs. That’s why I never felt sorry for myself even if I had nothing but the clothes on my back.

God, I so miss them. I so miss the inviting smell of coffee that Motti makes every morning; the way Michal daintily eats her avocado sandwich as if it's the most delectable piece of meal on earth.

Maybe I found love at their dinner table where we would have endless discussions on various cultures, on the psychotically tangled mess called Philippine politics, on the on-going Palestine-Israel conflict, on Obama, on thought-provoking films and poignant novels, on my romantic affiliations (or my lack of them), on their colorful love story, on their Jewishness and un-Jewishness, on their son’s genius.

Maybe I found love just watching Motti eagerly prepare dinner for his family. How in those moments I realized that he could as well have been my father. Only we don’t share the same DNA, we don’t have the same hair and skin color. To be taken in by a complete stranger, to be welcomed into his home and be taken care of as if you were kin, to be taught and patted as if you were his young daughter—and to finally believe that you are worth all these and much more is definitely not something falling short of love. Whenever I see him now I never cease to feel thankful and honored that I’ve been alive to meet and talk to one of the kindest human beings that have ever lived. Perhaps, this is even proof that people directed by kindness will always thrive on love.

Maybe I tasted love for a full month and did not completely realize it until I moved out of that wondrous brownstone and tried to live on my own again. I have gotten back on my feet, but my heart aches for another day with a real family. I may take pride in moving out of my parents’ house when I was 17 and being quite independent since, but now I am opening my eyes to that bit of truth that 26-year-old girls/women (whichever you are) are still inclined to take refuge in the arms of a family, seek the warm embrace of a mother and a father.

It’s 1 AM and the wind’s high-strung cries have subsided, but the chilly limbs of the night have yet to collapse. What do I feel now, you might ask. I only feel at peace with the fact that I am still alive. That I am living, even if the horizon still has vestiges of the dark I have left behind.

Love. It is here, isn’t it? It caught up with me as soon as I set foot in this wonderland of bright lights and shooting, somersaulting dreams conceived in various parts of the world, of thousands of hearts beating, pumping-- on and on. Never stopping. Never getting tired.

Or giving up.

Yours,
J

Vignette

2009-04-12T01:16:00.000-07:00

Dear J,

I saw a girl who reminded me of myself. In a long flowered skirt and a deep green tank top with her hair held back loosely sitting by the towering fountain, she appeared to be at the cusp of spring. Huge dark shades concealed traces of winter’s loneliness in her eyes.

She was looking out to the distance as you would in anticipation of a familiar shadow. Her face brightened and I followed the direction of her gaze. A man was making his way toward her through the crowd. He kissed her tenderly and apologized for making her wait. She smiled to reassure him that everything was fine.

He was holding something in his hand which she couldn’t resist stealing a glance at. Her eyes wandered subtly while he told her how lovely she looked sitting by the fountain looking as crisp as spring.

Aware perhaps of her controlled eagerness, he handed her a small box that resembled an important present. She looked into his eyes as he placed it on her hand. Her heart skipped a beat.

“What is…” she trailed, appearing unable to pose the question or bear the answer. But the moment’s vacillation seemed a trick of light, gone in a flicker of a smile. It beamed on him.

“I wish it were an engagement ring,” he said with a solemn smile. Her laugh rang high and clear.

He continued, “I’m sure you wish that too.” Her laughter sounded like peals of bells crying at twilight. When the last of the chimes faded, she looked at him with a bright smile and heartbroken eyes that said, “Yes, I do.”

How long a bond is supposed to last, I’m not certain. But I believe I saw them vow soundlessly by the sunlit fountain to make it last for as long as they can. When you don’t have the luxury to make promises of forever, you indulge in snatches of today.

I know how it is. I live on the periphery of his life, in the shadows, rarely in the light. We have an hour here and there, in out-of-way cafes and rented rooms. He sneaks out for five minutes then comes back for another five. For when you believe it to be doomed you don’t waste any moment. You give your all to every moment.

Their lips touched so softly, reminding me of a delicate breeze caressing sleeping blooms to wakefulness. Then, they held hands and walked away.

I wondered where they were going, where they came from before they brought in spring. I wondered if they will remember the day I saw them make a promise.

Love,
S