Love Letter

The Atlantic Sea along New Jersey shore is beautiful. The color of the waves changes constantly depending on the sunlight and the color of your sunglasses. Because of the cloud, the temperature is not very high and the beach is quiet and relaxed. In mid of June, the water is still cold but refreshing. The long waves desperately wish to come back to the seashore. They push forward and pull back again, dancing in a repeated way. The sound of the waves is incredibly loud, like a naughty boy roaring all the way.

The beach gives one endless space to reflect one's life. The super power of nature makes it possible to open one's mind. I walked for two miles on the wet beach, tried to reconcile my feeling and my thought. The book I am reading bothers me a lot, Kundera's Identity. What is a love letter? Kundera makes a joke of love letter by imitating Cyrano de Bergerac, letting Jean-Marc sent love letter to his lover Chantel under a fake name. The more he sent those letters the more he observed how she changed and rejuvenated. The love letters, speaking the unspoken desire of a stranger, convey a sense of intimacy and admiration which is long lost in their relationship. In those letters, you have no practical purpose but communicating your most secret passion. The freedom one gains in those letters usually goes beyond their daily language and reaches the divine stage of spirituality. The murmuring of the spiritual trees in the back of our mind echo our love language and makes it so strong that the desire its self becomes a dwarf. The love letters are not about the person you love, but about the figure you wish to love or love to love. The writing creates an idle, a pure being without any touch of the mundane world, a bluebird in everyone’s dream. Like Cyrano, sometimes we can not speak our love, so we write for others. But the love is true, as virtuous as anyone else. Deeply inside us, there is a longing for companionship, for sharing and afraid of death alone. Those letters remind us of our youth, the days before our falling. Remembering the swallowtail butterflies in Shunji Iwai’s movie? The unsatisfied love and lust in Yen Town? I envision one’s life as two stages, the innocent youth and the hopeless adulthood. We fall from our divine being as we grow up, in an irreversible way. Everyone of us is the leading figure of this tragedy, we are the producers, directors and actors. Only when we write the love letters, we regain our power of imagination, of boundless freedom to express ourselves, of worship the paradise lost.