Photo by Chewie2008 over at Flickr, All credits to him

Dear Future Love: It is raining tonight, like this that when you think about the rain you imagine a warm bed; you imagine me; and you imagine yourself neatly folding the pair of socks you used on that day to work. There is nothing grand nor magnificent about tonight’s rain, except only that I wish you were here.

You would tell me about water. The way leaves outside your window would glisten with dew drops spangling on the blade. The way the roof sounds even in these late hours a dragging and dancing of tiny feet, as tiny as pine tree needles which comb the metal roof. I would tell you about all the anatomy lessons I learned by staring at the strangers on the train. (There was a man sitting by the door, he had the softest looking goatee, I thought it was you. I wanted to say hello.) The prettiest girls are almost always those who were standing up, pensively counting the train posts. Those who were sitting down, with an old lady beside them, are always the ugliest. We would talk about the way I would fold my fists and tuck it in your arm at the promise of spending time with you at 2 in the morning. I would sit beside you, by the flicker of the television; the room would smell like coffee or tea or even something as uninviting as toasted garlic and lugaw or even Jolly Spaghetti. Anything to warm us on a night like this one.

Dear future love, it is raining tonight like this that I imagined you. I imagined only some parts of you. I suppose, in time, it can happen to anyone: a desire to walk out into the rain and look for that promise that someday a You will be here soon.

Dear future love, it is raining tonight. Let us stop being merciless to ourselves and so please show up on the office’s front door. You know where to find me.

Dear Future Love: the order is simple, never tall, please be as brilliant and efficient and romantic as my current iTunes library.

My current iTunes music library is at 50-ish GB of music. This does not include bands which I refuse to listen to anymore (Crystal Castles!). I currently have an 8gb iPod and I obviously can not fit all of them in there. I have always been wondering how my friends would sync their music to their iPods considering that creating playlists would be the only way for them to get songs in my iPod. I wonder what they do assuming we share the exact same problem: a music library with too many songs and an iPod which can not hold all of it.

I know what you might think, future love: that these are middle-class woes and I need to stop thinking about it and proceed to worry about other things instead. Believe me, I have those other things covered. So just shut up and listen to me when I ask you to be like my current iTunes library.

So let me proceed on comparing my desired traits in a future love to my current iTunes library.

Dear Future Love, I want you to be efficient. I have recently discovered that iTunes let me pick not only playlists to be synced to my iPod but as well as artists and genres. How very efficient as I could just proceed on putting songs in my library without having to make playlists as I can just tick that tickbox to sync the new artist. I want you to be as efficient as this. I am the type of person which problems find attractive; roofs fall over my head, our house gets leaks among many other random things which happens to me. It is not that I am asking you to solve all of my problems, but just little ones. Find ways to make it easier for me to stop frustrating myself.

Dear Future Love, I want you to be brilliant. Currently, iTunes has what they call Genius Mixes. I currently have 4 Genius Mixes. Indie Rock Playlist, Lo-Fi Playlist, Pop Playlist, Electronic Playlist. What a genius this iTunes, no? iTunes also has iTunes U. I can learn about the world, or about varying topics in the world because of iTunes.  Future love, I want you to be more brilliant than I am. Brilliance is attractive and do not let other people tell you otherwise. Surprise people by it: be witty, offer quips, explain to me why words are used differently, beat me (sorely) in Words With Friends. I will like you more for it. Dazzle me with your wit.

Dear Future Love, I want you to be romantic. My iTunes library is filled with the sappiest of songs. Some of them I classify as Music for Mopey Romantics. It is just the way I am, future love. I am not particularly needy, all I want is a little love and attention, maybe some quality time. So please be romantic. Take me out on romantic dates, remember me on my birthday, tell me you love me through song, hold my hand and do not leave me when shit starts to happen (someone did and that is another story).

Dear Future Love, please be as efficient, brilliant, and romantic as my iTunes library.

With much love and patience to wait for you here (just here),

DK

image from Danes96 on Flickr. All credits and rights belong to him.

The seats inside the LRT-A are one of my most favorite places in Metro Manila. This one you must know; this one you must remember. You never really know whether the train is noisy or quiet. You sit inside and watch as it drags on from station to station to station. I try to listen intently wondering what the noises were about-one time there was this girl who was holding her lover’s hand talking loudly by the train door. It made me wonder about all the elaborate possibilities of you and me on the train.

Dear Future Lover, let us ride the train; let us call it a date. The trains sounds like this: contented, midway between a flight and a quick sprint as it carries the weight of the wishes of all the passengers and the heaviness in their sighs. It drags from the Santolan station to Katipunan. There is a tunnel there. This one you must know; this one you must remember. It makes all the difference. The train, as it enters this tunnel, makes whirr sounds like dashes–the way you drag your pen on a page, or check marks you used to do on quiz papers of the boy who sat beside you when were 9, back in elementary school.

Dear Future Lover, let us ride the train; let us call it a date. Let us do it on a Sunday morning when everyone else could not be bothered to drag their bodies out of bed. We will be half-drunk from the night before. We would play Bloc Party’s Sunday on my iPod. We will think of it as a secret: everyone else intends to move from point a to point b, we are just in it for the ride-the happiness and the privacy it affords as we hold hands like school children laughing at the stickers in the train coach.

We will take random trips to Quiapo-I will have my future told: of you and me when we are 80-we will go down the Recto station. We will take a trip to this church, St. Jude, I will tell you stories of my walking around Legarda, you will tell me stories about your college year. We will go to the National Bookstore in Cubao-the one beside Gateway-we will talk about paperclips, and glue, and all the books you read when you were little.

Dear Future Lover, let us ride the train; let us call it a date. We will take trips at noon. I’ll find you first I guess. I hope I see you soon.