Epistolary

Dear My Darling.

I am here again, which I suppose is not a surprise, because I never really know any other destination than un-skinning you like a plum and living inside of you.

How long has it been? Too long, not long enough, I think.

I've been reading, lately. A lot. Something unknown, something rotten and horrible and utterly self destructive has compelled me to pick up a pen and write this letter and I feel, undoubtedly, as if I am scrawling it in my own blood. I could take teeth to wrist and gash open an inkwell in the crook of my palm. I know you'd like that. You always took too much, and I always wanted you to.

There was a passage that I read, from the Symposium - do you recall when we watched Maurice? A slow Sunday with your hand in mine and my mouth full of your hair, pre-wash day. The sun is sinking 5pm gold rush right now and I wish you could see it, and I cannot stop thinking about what Aristophanes said, that we were split in half and we will always wander looking for our other part. Our other heart. And I feel like I have stopped looking, now. Now that I remember the feeling of your collarbone against mine and your knees to the back of my own, how we never needed any inch of space between us because inside and out we were irrevocably one. How I could not ever hold you close enough, how I wanted to make a home for myself inside your rabbit cage heart.

The bloody Symposium could've told me, it was less like a half cut wound and more like I’d never been born knowing anything else other than loving you, and for the first time in my life I realised what it had been like to be a fool. Love saves absolutely nobody.

I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm telling you everything before I've even told you how I've been, and what I've been doing. I've been abroad - it feels strange, the warmth on my face and apricot juice in the mornings, gentle swims in the lake and nursing midge bites with a cigarette lip-to-teeth. I've stayed away from the big cities and the big towns, like I knew you would if you were here. I've been watching summer fall through my fingers like sand, really, and reading and drawing and writing and simply being.

How strange it is to be, without you by my side.

I will most likely never send this letter to you. I know for now I will fold it up like folding a lock of hair or a shred of skin or something profane and ugly and unbeatable, and I will push it down with my memories in my bedside table. With broken lighters and empty cigarette packets and degraded film photos.

I suppose that’s what we’ve become.

Oh, how I miss you.

AUGUST

August has dawned like a great cresting thing, like a God trampling over the hills and putting his great shoes into the back of my head. I sit and watch the world go by - do you remember when we promised we would do that together? I suppose there’s a lot of things we promised each other, isn’t there? I dangle my legs over the end - mine were always much longer than yours - and my laces briefly point down towards the people milling on the street below, directing me, saying, look at all these lives. Look at all these people living their hopes trapped between their teeth and their dreams and everything they never did and everything they still want to do, and all I am doing now is listening to Goo Goo Muck on the radio and watching the sun rise like a starbust in between the carving building lines, and thinking about you. Hopelessly, irrevocably, thinking about you.

Time went on without you. How strange is that?

LATE AUGUST

Hello again. I had to leave the letter for a while - I felt something rotten growing in my chest and I was scared it would spill onto the page, and I have given you so much that is rotten over the years. I’d like to give you something sweet, something that reads like a promise or a confessional. But sometimes I don’t know if I even have the luxury of getting to decide what goes into this letter. I think I’m just reaching inside my chest and pulling my heart out and slopping it down on the table and paper here, all tendrils and soaking wet meat. Ventricles spelling why did you leave, aortas spelling I know you had no choice, my darling, my dear.

You are always leaving. That is this story. There is no other way to tell it, no other way I can wrap the childish crookedness of my broken and juvenile teeth around it.

SEPTEMBER

It’s 9PM and September is approaching like an unsure thing. It’s the time of day where I can’t bear to think about anything other than the sunburn on my nose and the pain welling somewhere deep in my manubriam, like a carrion beetle. I’m eating a sugared grapefruit right now, so I apologise if there’s juice on the paper. Do you remember when my mam used to make them for us when we were younger, on Sunday mornings? Maybe I’m eating them to remember you. Healing some inner child or some drastic and broken part of myself. Perhaps I just like the grains of white cane stuck in the corners of my mouth. Who knows - I certainly don’t.

I’ve started smoking Benson and Hedges’ again. I know I said I was going to quit, and then when I couldn’t, said I was going to switch to Strikes or LnB’s, but we both know why I didn’t. If I remember anything about you, my darling, it’s the smell of Lucky’s in your fringe and the browning in between your index fingers. Yesterday I worked a 12 hour shift and some bastard tourist was sick on the steps outside work, and then I spent three hours in the shower drawing profane doodles in the steam, and then I read myself to sleep. This morning I dropped a coffee mug without meaning to. Life goes on, further than I ever thought it would. Life goes on without you here, believe it or not.

Maybe that is the worst part of all.

NOVEMBER

It's been a while, hasn't it? For some months now I let myself keep on going, still waking and talking and taking my vitamins, eating fruit and smoking and watching the birds circle me (like they know something I don't). I'm thinking of you now that the weather is getting colder, now that it is chillier, because that means December is fast approaching - and, more pressingly - it means your birthday is around the corner.

The sky gets darker earlier now, and oh, how I ache for summer, for gentle breeze and sunscreen stickiness, fruit juice dripping down my chin and my hair seasalt thick. I've moved on from my summer wines into the deep dark reds, a bit of Shiraz, a spot of Merlot every now and then, sometimes even aged Sangiovese, mainly because I'm still in Europe and this is the land of it, the land of cherry-dried pith hearts and endless longing, of washing lines and twinkling lights and the trickle of rain down the drainpipes first thing in the morning. It is awfully grey here now, and it feels like pathetic fallacy, if I'm being totally honest.

I miss you. In a simple, ugly way. I miss you every day, more and more, I miss you like I miss an arm or a leg and all the other things the non-poets of us would say, but the poet in me cannot even fathom the magnitude of the hole you have left in my life. I hate you and I still love you every day, as if I was born to do it. I think I was born to do it.

DECEMBER

I cannot write it or say it or even think it, but I know you feel it.

FEBRUARY

Happy Valentines Day, my darling.

APRIL

Spring is fast approaching, and god bless it. To dance in the April rain is to say, I have lived. It is to say: I have loved, and I will continue to do so until the end of time, or maybe just until next April. Whichever comes first.

MAY

May was always your favourite month, and the 1st was always your favourite day, and you were always my favourite person.

It's the 3rd now, and I'm still recovering from the Mayday celebrations here, which involved basking in the cold bright sun that sits just above the hills, drinking fruit wine and picking daisies and, it seems, aching and aching and aching.

Oh, to have loved you in vain.

AUGUST

This is the last entry I will write in this letter, and that thought is more terrifying, bone and ankle deep terrifying, than the thought of losing you forever. But I suppose they really are the same thing, aren't they? Because when I seal this - and I will finish pen to paper and seal this up - you and I will be finished.

That's what I'd like to think. But the reality runs far, far deeper, and the reality is you are the wound that keeps on giving. You are the wind in my eyes sending salty tears down the side of my nose, past the place you used to kiss. You are cold lemonade and picnic blankets and bitter fights and smashed glass, you are a face full of gravel and you are the last bit of myself and the last bit of everything I loved.

I suppose, if this is the last we will see of one another, I have one thing I want to ask. Why did you leave?

Maybe I have two things to ask. Do you still love me?

That's one thing I know for sure. I still love you. Quite desperately, in fact.

Was any moment of it true? Were the nights we spent together and the mornings we woke, wrapped around one another like plants infecting walls or cream in coffee - were they real? I hope to God, and anything bigger and more beyond than God, that they were, because I cannot even begin to explain what it feels like to have given you every last part of myself and to watch you turn away, always turn away.

I think I am afraid, maybe, that you will come back. I don't know if I can survive it again. If I can continue to wake up feeling skinned raw, like you saw every last nerve ending of me and still chose to leave it there, moonlit and alone on the twisted sheets of our years, our should-have-been's and everything-we-never-got-the-chance-to-do's still tangled up, irrevocable and utterly undeniable.

Why did you leave, and why will you never come back?

I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Yours forever.