Love letters, Blake decides, belong to the literary. Not to say that they are the only ones who can write them, spanning words of romance and adornment across endless pages, but rather to say that those who write love letters are the literary themselves, no matter who they may be. There is no cut off point, no minimum requirement; all that is needed is love, seeping into the pages like tea leaves steeping in water, staining the world in sepia and nostalgia, comforting and warm.
To the literary, Blake decides, she belongs – but not to the world of love letters, not to the world of endless scratchings devoted to noting the passion, the people who bring light and love to ones around them. Blake does not see herself as the romantic among them; her books foretell stories of love so strong that it spans deserts and feuds, ignores pasts and heritages and connects all without fail, but she does not believe in the stories.
She reads, and understands that the words on the pages are fiction, are fantasy – and is sympathetic when Ruby speaks of fairy tales, as though they come true, remembering a time when she too believed in the words she read. But years of hurt have made Blake bitter, and she no longer follows the stories she reads like writings of the prophets; she sees the stories for what they are – tales of a religion, whose followers are few, lost in the daze of promises.
Blake does not believe in writing love letters; she does not condemn those who do, understanding the need to scrawl penmanship after a name, but never desiring to do so herself. She does not believe she ever will, does not dare to dream that one day she will find someone who fills her own veins with the same desperate longing to write everything down, someone who makes her heart pump words instead of blood, stringing together sentences in her limbs, in her chest.
She cannot find it within herself to hate nor envy those who wait for the desire to write page after page in the name that is engraved on their bones; it is a hope she denied herself years ago, but does not despise for it. Love letters, she believes, belong to the poets and the dreamers – and she does not count herself among either. Lines of text, punctuated by rhymes and line breaks, do not spill from her fingertips; her dreams were replaced by reality years ago.
Love letters belong to the literary and the lovers, and Blake does not count herself amongst the latter.
It is why she does not understand, cannot fathom the feeling that soars through her veins when she meets a girl with golden hair, with bronze skin and deep set lilac eyes that glimmer with the promise of laughter and light. Blake is not a poet, not a dreamer, but for Yang she feels like she could be – and feels the words fill her veins in the way she believed was impossible, the way she never allowed herself to hope for.
Blake is made up of darkness, believes herself to be formed of the shadows that pool in corners, filling up places out of sight, out of the light. She is darkness, the stain of midnight as it fills the sky, speckled with stars that stand against the black backdrop. She is the ink that lines the pages of her novels, writing stories in printed letters, careful and meticulous. Blake is darkness, both in soul and appearance, and has never understood people's draw towards the light, content in her own patch of shadow.
But with Yang, she understands – Yang, who is the light, flooding the dark expanses of her life and chasing the darkness out of the corners, letting her glow warm Blake's limbs, filling her chest with a warmth that comforts and cares. With Yang, she is drawn to the light, drawn to the blonde like a moth to the flame, and can feel the darkness in her soul rising up to meet the woman who shines like the sun – they do not match; they counteract, darkness to brightness, shadow to light. They fill the spaces in each other; make up in one another what they do not have in themselves.
And with Yang, with the light, Blake begins to write love letters. She feels the words in her veins as her stories foretold, the prophets' lines coming to life in her soul, chapters spilling from her fingertips as she speaks of the woman who illuminates the dark. She feels the ink in her soul become the words that slip from her pen, patterning her papers as she scrawls line after line of love, unable to stop writing, never able to say enough.
She writes in journals, on loose sheets of paper, in the corners of textbooks and the backs of notepads. She lets inscriptions say what her voice cannot, sharing her passion with the papers that pile up around her, hiding them away from the woman they are all about. Yang, for her part, asks teasingly what Blake is always writing in that journal of hers – but the blonde, for all her jokes and jovial threats, never crosses into her privacy.
Blake sometimes wishes she would, wishes that she could read the words she could never say aloud, the tomes of emotion scrawled out every day. But the rest of her knows better, knows that the lines of love are to be kept away, known only by the sheets she shares them with. In the secrecy of her journals, Blake continues to write, the desire she had so long chased off as a childish dream growing within her chest, a fire in her heart that warms her bones, fills her lungs, spreads through her veins with the letters that poured out from her soul. Yang is her muse, and gives Blake no lack of inspiration.
Love letters, Blake decides, belong to the literary and the lovers, to the poets and the dreamers. She still does not believe herself to fit into the latters, but with the literary she belongs, in the world of authors and creators and those who scrawl letters in the secrecy of dark rooms, classrooms in the fading evening light. She does not write lines of rhymes, nor dares to dream for things too far out of her reach – but as she writes chapter after chapter in the name of the woman who shines like the sun, Blake decides that love letters belong to everyone, even herself.
Love letters, Yang believes, belong to the lovers, to the enthralled, to those in the rapture of romance. She does not count herself among them; for years she has loved those around her, but her heart has never sang with a single name, her love spread in platonic ways, in maternal ways, given to heal and comfort, never expected to be returned.
Lovers, Yang decides, is a category she will never fit into; her life is filled with people she looks after, but none who make her flame soar, none who singlehandedly light her bonfire heart. Love is a funny, fickle thing to the blonde, something she does not count herself lucky enough to every have – not the love that spurs her to hug her sister every chance she gets, nor the love that watches over her friends with pride and care, but the love her father had, the love that never ceased to leave him.
From her father Yang has inherited many things – her blonde hair, her fiery temper, and a heart so big it can't be contained within her chest, but rather must be shared amongst those souls that gather around her, seeking the warmth of the pyre that sits in her heart. She loves without qualms, but does not seek the love that spreads through her soul, ignites the passion in her bones, sets aflame the kindling of her spirit. Dry wood and tinder rest in her heart, but she does not seek out anyone to light it, does not go looking for a match amongst the candles already aglow around her.
She has seen love, and has seen what it can do – what it can give, what it can take away. She has lived an early childhood filled with endless love, can recall the sound of her father in his study, writing love letter after love letter in Summer's name. She can remember how their home felt when love filled it to the brim, flooding the hallways and rooms with an ethereal warmth, one that cascaded down the stairs like patches of sunlight.
She can remember the home lit aflame by love, and the chill that set in when the fire had gone out, tamped down by loss and pain, like a wind that swirled in the corners of the rooms and cooled the embers into submission. Yang remembers love, and remembers the way her father fell to pieces when it left him, the love letters that covered the surface of his desk now without a muse. He never recovers, never loves the same again – and the young blonde learns that both loves of his life have been lost, his veins filled with words that cannot be written any longer.
Yang fills her home instead, using the small fire in her heart to warm the room – she cannot heat the entire home, but does her best to keep alight the most important places, letting darkness make their home in empty bedrooms and abandoned studies. She grows, and the pyre in her heart does as well, chasing the away the last of the darkness that dwells in the corners of her home.
But love is forever lost to Yang – the promise of love so bold, so strong that it cannot be contained is something she does not let herself believe in; she knows it exists, but she also knows what the loss of it can bring. She lets her love pass to those around her, never asking for it in return, never seeking out the words that could fill her soul, never chasing down the chance to write love letters after a name.
It is why she does not understand, cannot fathom why the bonfire in her chest flares even higher when a girl with dark hair crosses her path, a girl with amber eyes that look right through her and a ribbon that hides her past. Yang knows what love is, and knows how it looks when it fills the soul, but never expected to see it in herself, reflected back in the mirror. Blake holds the match to the kindling that replaces the marrow in her bones, and lights it aflame without qualm, letting the heat spread to her fingertips, across her ribcage, wrapping her heart in a prison of warmth and light.
There are worse things to be imprisoned in, she realizes, and for the first time in her life she lets the love in, lets the words spread through her soul. As a child, she could not understand why her father let himself love again after the first time he lost his muse. Now she understands – love does not grow slowly, does not let itself be contained. It is a flame that consumes, and Yang, like her father before her, lets herself be taken by it, consequences be damned.
Yang doesn't write love letters the same way Blake does – she's never been much of an author, never fond of literature or the way words meshed together to form lines of allegory and meaning. Her words speak quieter than her actions, her form of letters found in the bruises that span her knuckles, knicks and scars her punctuation. Yang's words are not written, but felt – her chapters are hugs, her paragraphs are arms slung across shoulders.
She lets her love letters be sung in the form of gentle touches and actions – she does not write page after page in Blake's name, instead letting her emotions show through her careful ministrations: tea steeped and stirred to perfection, blankets on the cooler nights, words of care and concern laced with undertones of comfort. She lets her touches say what her words cannot, one armed hugs and clasped hands speaking volumes without saying anything at all.
Her letters come in the format of contact, and lets her warmth cascade from her fingertips, leaving invisible brands along Blake's skin. Yang gives her love away without qualms, and for the first time in a long time it makes its way back to her, in the form of a girl with hair as dark as the ink on the letters she scrawls, letters Yang pretends not to notice, letters that her soul thrives upon.
Love letters become the fuel for her pyre, the scraps of paper that give life to the bonfire roaring in her soul. For the first time in her life, Yang lets herself be consumed by the flame that demands to be fed, follows in the footsteps she grew up watching, the ones her father laid out for her. She understands, now, the need to write love letters – and while her father wrote his on paper, she inscribes hers onto skin with invisible ink, letting her words sink through the surface in the form of warmth and compassion.
Love letters, Yang decides, belong to the lovers, the enthralled, those found in the rapture of love. She still cannot believe herself to count among them – she does not seek out love, but it finds her anyways, fills her heart with words and sentences of emotion. She does not look for the passion that she watched slip away from her father, fearing losing it herself, but it still appears in her life. And as her hands say what her words cannot, her love letters spilling from her fingertips without ever being written, Yang finally believes that love can light a pyre forever, even her own.