Unsent Letter, #1

You make me uncomfortable.

You know it.

You met me at a party where I was happy drunk and dancing, somehow sitting on the couch next to the keg; you soberly confided that you have leukemia, and only a handful of days were left.

If there is any reason in my ardor, it lies in the idea that you might actually perish beside me in bed, too sick to fight. I’ve assumed that you are cowardly, a condition created by your philosophy degree. Openly jaded, antisocial, you hated being at there, not knowing us drunk and happy dancers. Not being able to dance. Pragmatist.

But oh you are sweet. You and those noises you make just before you cum, I have never heard anything half as honest. Like watching some one have their heart broken, gasping sobs, like sleep talking or intervalled airport greetings.

I want you to love me like you love the girls in New York City, who are independent, small and devious. My body doesn’t know how to be small and devious, but it tries to slide up next to yours like it has always been so. It wonders if you can tell how small and devious it is pretending to be, if, when your hands fall across my stomach, they are worried by the secrets I have to hide.

I want you to watch me when I sleep, to admire my fingers silently wrapped around yours, to touch my feet gently, so that I do not mind. To kiss my back and sigh. Pieces have always made me uncomfortable.

Neither of us knows why you called me after that party, I still don’t remember giving you my number. Introduced yourself as Dust, childish and rude; Daniel. I invited you to another party, and neither of us knows why you went. I wanted to be embarrassed by your small stature and wounded posture, but you held out your arms, and the strange new way you smelled forced me to forgive you for coming. Later that night there was a fight, some one was stabbed, and we were kicked out.

You carried my beer, walked my bike, and covered me while I peed on someone’s stoop. Asking if I was alright, telling me about knife fights in Philly and The City, even in Arizona. Cave Creek, Arizona. I knew a man from Cave Creek who asked me to marry him. He had a three legged dog,he needed to take care of me. You remind me of him.

If when we have Indian food at my favorite place, the same place he proposed to me at, you decide you want to marry me, I will play along for a while. We will talk about getting a dog, sleep through the rain, sculpt autonomously with recycled junk, and take a tango class.

But you’ll want to go to The City, because you are in love with that small woman on your phone.
I’ll let you go too.

Telling myself that your white blood cells had dropped, the cancer took you from that studio apartment in your sleep. And then I’ll write about it.

In Response to a Carson McCullers Excerpt.

Excerpt -
"The time has come to speak about love. For Miss Amelia loved Cousin Lymon. So much was clear to everyone. They lived in the same house together and were never seen apart. Therefore, according to Mrs. MacPhail, a warty-nosed old busybody who is continually moving her sticks of furniture from one part of the front room to another; according to her and to certain others, these two were living in sin. If they were related, they were only a cross between first and second cousins, and even that could in no way be proved. Now, of course, Miss Amelia was a powerful blunderbuss of a person, more than six feet tall -- and Cousin Lymon a weakly little hunchback reaching only to her waist. But so much the better for Mrs. Stumpy MacPhail and her cronies, for they and their kind glory in conjunctions which are ill-matched and pitiful. So let them be. The good people thought that if those two had found some satisfaction of the flesh between themselves, then it was a matter concerning them and God alone. All sensible people agreed in their opinion about this conjecture -- and their answer was a plain, flat top. What sort of thing, then, was this love?First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world -- a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring -- this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as dearly as anyone else -- but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being be loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain." - Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Cafe (25)


Response -

If you think it’s a bunch of bullshit when Carson McCullers declared that the heart is a lonely hunter, it is only because you are that greasy headed heavy handed beloved of all the world. Their hands lay on your shoulders like dusted bricks fallen from the ruins of a mausoleum. Temples built in front of you, stopping the motion of the city for the miles you can see as you topple over the rooftops of each one, by one.

We run to place our trembling limbs below your stride when you walk away from us, protecting you from the cold concrete of the side walk, the wounded belly of the earth. You skirt forward like a dog with its tail between its legs, confused and teeth bared snarling and drooling, mad dog. There is no vacant doorway for you to collapse at, no sleek alleyways that love cannot find.

Crashing thunderous waves of feet, hands, knees and lips parade through these streets calling your name, an inaudible name, a constant ring you’ve known from the womb and are now numb to.

Georgia

That night we slept on the screened porch

stained couch bed

and skins melted together.

We rolled away from each other

naked bookends of night

curled in to crescents

cicadas sing

and peach pit morning

comes.

Edit!

Hokay,
So themed blog? Not working out so well. I am no journalist. However, I am trying to write more.
So from here on out, I will narcissistically post all of my writing. Even if it is the shittiest shit there ever was, just so that I'm not hording in my journal. I won't write if I'm hording.

Feel free to comment, and tell me when things are horrible. I probably already know that they are so. Or feel free to tell me when you like something, because I probably think it is horrible.
Brutally honest, please.
Feel free to never read anything I post, if it so pleases you. After all, I am posting on behalf of myself.

Here we go!