Compared to your boisterous world, mine was a colorless void. I leave and return to an empty house to the point it was not home anymore. We have different paths, ones that would never coincide even if we wished so. I did not have a say in it, and if I fought to salvage it, I might have lost it faster.

You can never hold on to what you want. I wanted to tell you, but I did not. As always, you would find me hunched over my mysteries, spilling all I am into pages which would never see the daylight for what it was. And as always, you would pull my hood off my head, smile at my bewildered expression, and tell me you looked forward to this brief hour with me.

And I knew why.

When I brought it up, your face flickered with traces of fear and hostility, but eventually, you sighed and faced me. For once, I saw you not as the saint my mind painted you to be but as the soul chipped by the scarcity of life and the reality you kept running from. I saw you then, and I wonder—did you see me as well?

Did you see enough wretchedness in my eyes for you to lean back and spill your life as if it was not that big of a deal anymore? As if you did not spend more than half of our time chasing away the darkness in your eyes and the scowl from your lips? Until that day on the fire escape landing, with such a faraway look in your cracked gaze, you were fighting. You prayed for me to never see you anything less than the heavenly silhouette I knew you as.

But like the rest of us, you were just as broken and just as lost.

Your brother left you to be the dreamer he believed he was. He left you inside a house slowly descending into the fiery pits of hell. For what? He had to chase his dreams while he could. You did not blame him. Rather, you could not blame him. But your parents did. They did nothing but hound you for the things your brother did, what he did not, and what they would rather have him do. And you took it all because you believed yourself to be the saint you were not.

I should have told you to stop, but I did not. Why? Because my words should never outlive me, and I knew—you wanted theirs to do so.

Your parents have found what they wanted to do, and you were not included in it. Like me who did not fight for my home, you did not get to say where you wanted to go. They did not ask because, perhaps, they could not handle what you were going to say. They did not want to see your words outlive the time it took for them to destroy what they built.

It hurt, and would continue to. You blamed yourself for that destruction. You took it upon yourself to suffer in case your family was not suffering enough. And even as I reached out and touched you, your mind was a thousand miles away and my words were a million ages past.

You did not hear me. It was your choice. I never held it against you. Rather, I could not hold it against you. It was who you were. I cannot change people, and it was a truth I still have to accept as I write letters you will never read.

"Do you play the piano?" I asked instead. It was easier to talk about what made you live than what killed you.

A little spark returned in your eyes. "I do," you replied, tilting your head so that the ends of your hair caught the stray streams of sunlight. Without effort, you became who everyone saw you as again. "What about you? Do you sing?"

I snorted. Memories would tell you I laughed a little too hard. "No," I answered, hiding behind the shadows casted by the higher steps and the tree shooting between the swirl of the fire escape's stairs. It was what I was good at, anyway. "I wrote songs before though. They would never be sung, if that's what you're going for."

You looked at me with the gears in your head turning. You could be like the devil if you wish to be, and knowing what I do now, you really did become one. "Tell you what," you said, brushing your knuckles against my shoulder in a light punch. Were you holding back, or were you playing with the space between us, to see how far you could push without shattering me or breaking yourself? "What if you say those words out loud? You're always writing, writing, writing, but never speaking. What do you think would happen if you speak?"

Then, we would have gone back to the first time we talked, the first time you caught me with my heart open and my life dripping from the pages. And if I followed you then and told you the words that would someday outlast me, I wonder—would you have outlasted them too?

"Just go home," I remember saying, walking out of the conversation like how you would your life. And my memories never betrayed what face you wore after I said that. Had I pushed you away with such a cold heart, shoving you into the place you wished you have never been born in? Did you think so? You never told me. Because if you did, perhaps you would still be here to hear what my reply would have been.

You never told me, and now, you took those words to where you needed to. Somewhere I can never reach. It was your mystery—one I can never see even though I wish to.