Love Letters in the Sand

I read them all again, the letters that you had written to me;
Today, over a cup of lukewarm tea;
They sounded inane, soulless, staring at me through dark, empty sockets;
Your declarations of love stood, tarnished, forlorn and cold in Delhi November;
A splash of coffee marked a tissue you had written on impromptu at a long-forgotten cafe;
It had a cute face at the end that mocked me innocently;
I thought perhaps that unknown to me, it had always known why it was there.
Another one had a bit of lasagna sauce on it;
It was the one you gave me on a Valentine's Day in an Italian restaurant;
I smelled it. It smelled of dead leaves and autumn, not love.
Then, there was the card on my birthday that promised that you'll be there to watch me grow old;
The words a reminder of how they were just words, ornate and impersonal like the cold golden cover of the card.
I also found today, the book with the caricatures that you had made of me;
They were all very flattering, but I missed me in them;
Did you ever see me for who I was? Or was I just someone you had conjured up in your imagination?
I rummaged through the reminder of our lives together without the overwhelming urge to catch any feelings;
The trinkets and gifts looked like they belonged perhaps to another me now lost in time and space.
I read the fragments with songs that you used to put under my pillow and in my purse from time to time;
They read like they were words borrowed from someone else's life.
Later, I found the frame with a picture of you and me grinning. Happy.
I remembered the day at the beach where a photographer had taken a few bucks and shot the Polaroid;
It reminded me of the other pictures, now lost in the hard disk of a crashed laptop like our lives together.
A gust of icy wind made me reach out for the tea cup but, it had turned stone cold, just like our love.