welcome.

This is a collection of letters unsent and words unsaid to a love unrequited. Any resemblances to real life events are purely fictional, as always. Enjoy the ride!

week one.

In the name of feverish dreams.

week two.

You're sick. I like to think it was my fever that you caught. I bring dead birds and rodents to your doorstep.

week three.

Half-melted into concrete, cigarette burns on my hands. I examine the subtleties of human behavior under a microscope, study you down to the way your lab coat folds itself in at your elbows. The fact that I'm the only one who you seem to remember warms my heart, the only name on the roster odd enough to stick in your mind. Is it a painful memory? Does it make your heart skip every time you write it down? Does it make you shudder in fear? At this point I'd take anything, anything over your politeness and professionalism.

week four.

I sharpen my teeth and feel every ounce of your rage. I want to devour you, to strip you bare and dissect you piece by piece, to understand what lies beneath the carefully cultivated persona you constructed. This week's solace comes in the form of you acknowledging my existence not being a burden (quite the opposite, in fact!). My hunger grows and grows, I sharpen myself on the edge of your anger and feast on raw meat.

week five.

In the name of stars and trying to find flaws. I study you, from your self-appointed divinity down to the lengths of your fingernails. From you to eternity. Stars shimmer in my hands. Arbitrary. It's all arbitrary, I declare. That night, I swallowed my lucky stars. Dancing around making a fool of myself as you get swept off your feet by someone who's not me. Rossz csillag alatt született. Born underneath a bad star, it seems. It's as if the numbers rule was once again working against me. Has there ever been a 23rd October in my life where I didn't feel horrible?

week six.

Dread, shame. Biting and eating away at me. Hours and hours of conversation rehearsed. The more I make myself invisible, the bigger mess I end up making. Like a nervous dog. Deciding I believe in god again. I'm the version of me that believes. And the stars turn in my favor! In her favor. Laid bare before you in ties and knots. Bark and growl at your beck and call. And that Wednesday, that fated day, for a moment - just for a moment - amid talks of documents and matrices and incidences - I feel your gaze soften with a warmth that I could've sworn wasn't there before.

And there it is, finally. The next day you invite me upstairs under the guise of explaining graphs or charts or whatever. I sit in your office, awestruck, reading too much between the lines of your academic explanations. I keep my polite distance, you're the one to close the door first. Close the distance between us, let on more than you did before. You and me, we're both the same, both nervous dogs at our core. Please, please tell me that I'm not imagining what you just implied - that if we weren't contractually bound to be coworkers until the end of your term, you'd reciprocate.

week seven.

Disappointingly unremarkable. We go about our daily lives, I try to maintain that normalcy I promised you last week. Pretending that I don't want you as desperately as I do, as if I wouldn't break every rule and code of conduct to be near you. I dress up just for you, to throw you off your balance, and it works.

This week you're tangled up in loops of words, you're endlessly distracted. I'm tripping and falling and tumbling straight down. I walk by the highway to your house and choke on air, picturing a winter affair to soothe myself. Huddled together, frostbitten hands snuggling for warmth, footsteps in the snow. Please, please let me get what I want.

week eight.

Biding my time. Hoping that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

week nine.

Week 9. I kneel before you. You talk of gods and masters and mock other people's misfortune. Your afterimage is burned into my retinas against the backdrop of an evening sky, painted in a suffocating blue. The air in your office feels different now - heavy with something I can't place. Disdain? Restraint?

There it is again: that autumn sun under which your eyes show their true colors. Once again trying to search for meaning in them, searching for any ounce of feeling. Acting up just to get a reaction out of you. I'm your personal disaster, I'm your hurricane leaving destruction and accidental DDoS attacks in my wake. Talk about making a good impression.

Once again I proved to myself that I still got have it in me. Still know the perfect cadence of your steps, still know exactly how many minutes it takes you to leave an event, still knowing how to time every journey to bump into you (accidentally, I-).

I don't know why this week's meeting was so special to me, really. Maybe it's because it was my first time seeing you after the sun had gone down? You're so beautiful under the glow of these neon lights, so pretty wrapped up in your winter clothes. God, help me.

week ten.

Counting down the days til I see you again. The loneliness is suffocating. Kept alive by the thought that you might be just around the corner. My own desire is suffocating. It's not even desire now, it's a need, it's pure want, it's hunger. I could stare at your face for hours. I can't remember the last time I let love consume me this much. it's unbearable. I can't stop thinking about your face there in the lamplight. Stop. You're beautiful. Stop. You're beautiful. And I need to make you mine.

Breathe out cigarette smoke into the fog. Stuck in a laurel hell of my own making. Crowned lovefool of the year. Finally left alone with you. We sit together and laugh over menial shit like old friends. You're so incredibly cute when you laugh. You share things I promise not to tell anyone about. I'm haunted by visions of deadly accidents, disasters, tripping and falling and breaking my neck. Realizing I'd throw anyone under the bus for five more minutes of your attention.

week eleven.

Are you avoiding my gaze? Are you at least trying to, before something pulls you instinctively toward me? You pick up on an offhand remark I made. Another spark of hope that you might genuinely care about what I have to say. I know your stride the way nobody else does. The way your steps are always rhythmic and self-assured, the way you always walk hunched forward, with a sense of purpose.

I can walk that way, too. I adopt your mannerisms and you adopt mine. You speak to inanimate objects. I read your mind. Always two steps aheads. I find solace in knowing they refer to me as yours (his right hand, his favourite student, his.). Lovingly study the corners of your mouth, always turned upward in a catlike grin. Feeling another chance slip away from me. Water through my hands ad infinitum (to be or not to be). Another day of making a fool of myself. Of being your right hand. Though not as handsome or caring as you seem to want, I'd gladly walk you home. Floating on cloud nine the whole way. I start wearing my hair the same way you do to always carry a piece of you with me. Our hands touch -- briefly, cordially. On accident on your part, on purpose on mine. Will you pull away the next time I reach for you again?

week twelve.

Painfully unremarkable yet again. Choking on my words, painfully aware of my presence. You're on the verge of a breakthrough, I'm on the verge of a breakdown. Bathed in red light and ringing the bells of apocalypse, you let on more than you initially wanted. We're more alike than I initially thought.

Together, we await doomsday.

final(s) week.

T minus zero. No caffeine, occupy my mind, don't keep my gaze pointed toward the door all evening. And even then, when you finally walk in, you ignore me all the same. Paper airplanes with almost-confessions thrown your way, all efforts in vain.

That day, you almost walk me home. Why? You say it's for the thrill of the adventure. Would it be any more thrilling if reached out to hold your hand on the way home?

Drunk, lamenting in dogwhistles. Is it even worth it? Aren't my efforts all in vain? Should I even keep trying? January can't come any faster. Everything takes on the shape of you (oh, another one of our endless jokes). The way passersby walk, the letters scribbled on facades defaced. They all spell out your initials—RM, RM.

Told my colleague all about how it's eating me alive, how I put on disguises and change the way I look just to get any sort of reaction out of you. And she ended up making a great point — what do you expect him to say? Walk into the boardroom and say: woah, Hana, you look simply stunning today, I can't not fuck you, I will now put my career on the line for you. And it was somewhat sobering, all the while adding fuel to the fire of delusion that you secretly want me. Your reactions to how I look and observations of how I act would suggest so. I refuse to believe you'd do this with any other colleague.

We'll give it thirteen more weeks.