A Found Letter, Unsent

Dear ____________,

I miss you. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me. Why I stopped living once you died, why everything around me just… stopped, on that day. I tried to move on, to love and live more as I think know you’d have wanted me to. But I couldn’t. I just… XXXXX XXXX X XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXX I don’t know.

Some part of me must feel guilty, for all those things I never did or said. For that matter, I must feel guilty for half of the things I DID do and say. XXX XXXXX XXX XXXXX XX XXX XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXX X XXX XX XXXX XXX XXXXXXXX XX XXXXX  XX XXXXX XXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XX XXXX XXX XXXXX XXX XX XX XXXXXXXXX XXXX XX XXXX XXX XX XXXXX XXX XXXXXXX XXXX X XXX XXXXX XX XX XXXX XXXX XXX XXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XX XXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX  You deserved so much more, and yet… now there’s no way to give it to you.

It’s unfair, considering everything that you did for me.

With you gone… I don’t know that I’ll never have that love again. That unequivocal, unconditional, unrestrained kind of love you gave. I’ve known its greatness, and I’m afraid that I’ll never feel it again. Which is horrible, because I don’t think I appreciated it when I could. I did everything within my power to push you away, to thwart your feelings for me, and you never once budged. You were patient, and kind, and were always there waiting for me like some silent lighthouse flickering in the distance. You gave, and you did so without considering the price or the return.

I never knew it at the time, but while you were alive you completed me. X XXXX XXXX XXX XXXX XX XXXXXXXXXXX XXX XXX XX XXXXX XXX XXXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXX XX XXXX X XXXXX XXXX XXXXXX XXXX XXXXXX XXXX  XXXXX XXXXXXX XXX XXXX XX XXXXXX XXXX XXXX X XXXX XXXXXX  Now I feel hollowed out, adrift with no purpose beyond floating with the current. I’m completely and horribly lost.

Nothing will ever compare. Nothing could take your place, because nothing else could possibly measure up to you. And so I don’t love. I don’t love anything, and I don’t let anything love me.

It hasn’t been for lack of trying. I’ve taught myself many things, and read many books. I’ve listened to music from all eras, all styles, and every country. I’ve kissed and had sex, I’ve held hands and shared secrets with people in the dark spaces between sleep and wakefulness, between the sheets and the hollows between two sets of skin. There have been films and children, new technologies and pets, food, clothing, ideas, religions, homes, friends, and everything else. But I don’t love any of them. I can’t.

Even now, I know what you would say. You would tell me that everything deserves love. You would tell me that love gives, rather than takes. XXX XX XXXX XX XXXX XXX XXXXX XXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXXX XX XXXX  But I just want to feel it again, if only for a moment. I want to feel that love pouring into me and running over, so much that gravity is swept away and I’m swimming in it.

And maybe I could have it with someone else, even something else. Some faith or goal or dream. But I don’t think that I will, and so I shy away from anything that might produce the barest semblance of love. XX XXXXXX  A trickle wouldn’t do, because I would only want more… and the thirst for it would only make me drink the well dry before it could give anything else.

So here I am, starving myself.

X XXXX XXXX X XXX XXXXX XXX XXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXX XXXX  I want nothing more than to wrap my arms around you one more time. I want to hear you speak to me, even if it’s a whisper. I miss you and it hurts.

And I’m going to kill myself.

Signed, ___________

Versus

Nobody Nowhere
Everybody Somewhere
Here or there, in betweens and
Above or belows
We are all inside and outside together,
Within and without
The ability to do nothing
Even when it looks as though that
Is exactly what we are doing

And still
Each and every person here
Is led to believe that we are
Always Nowhere
Special, good, interesting or truly dark
Because our lives are less interesting
Than fabricated situations
In comedies, tragedies, melodramas
Cartoons
When instead they are more
Because they are real

It doesn’t seem so,
Saturated as we are with the
Photoshopped coloring of
Ads and entertainments
And it feels like
Sex is less satisfying,
Pain less meaningful,
Love less illuminating.

But if everyone stopped stopping
To compare what we see
Feel, taste, touch, are
With everything that isn’t
Never was, never will be
Would we know the truth for what it is –
Much more engaging in its complexity
Without being exaggerated
Into caricature,
Fixed in many shades and flaws,
Not all bright and powerful
But real and so each little
Defect deserving of respect?

Once Bitten, Bitter

Don’t pay any attention to what Hollywood would have you think of love. Don’t put stock in greeting cards, or trite, outdated religious sentiments. Each and every bullshit description from these sources is not only flawed, but a product. A lie meant to push hope in the form of movies, cosmetics, pills for erectile dysfunction, clothing, expensive cars and gym memberships.

He knows the truth: love is a monster.

Or maybe it is many monsters, and call it what you will: the succubus, a vampire, a ghost, the boogeyman. It’s a seducing, consuming, haunting, frightening thing – and for good reason. Love will, in the immortal words of Ian Curtis, tear us apart.

That warm, hazy feeling you get when you’re next to someone you believe you love? That’s a dangerous drug coursing its way through your veins. When other substances produce similar effects they are eschewed, even reviled. Doctors and psychologists treat patients with addictions to heroin, alcohol, even marijuana of all things. But if someone OD’s on love, they’re thought of not as a degenerate, but as a Romantic - a kind of tragic, poetic figure to be pitied or saddened over. They’re hardly someone to be disgusted by.

But, take a dozen shots of tequila. Feel how it warms you, makes the room spin around.  Make note of the stupid things it makes you say.  Commit that feeling to memory.

When next you’re in love, you’ll see how they are the same. That illusion of happiness will eventually part, the same way a buzz fades.  Sobriety will reveal the cold, empty truth.  Don’t look away.  It will scare the fuck out of you.

He remembers feeling drugged, lazy and spinning about wildly at once – all orientation lost in a cloud of hormones and the rush of post-coital endorphins. It enticed him. It made him feel young again, and without a single, reasonable concern. He fucking devolved, is what happened.

Then, the pangs started. The first one, he recalls, was after a long weekend spent at her house.  He was no further than a half mile away before he felt like something small and sharp had hooked itself into his chest and was tugging on him. They were mild tugs, if insistent. Come back, they spelled in Morse code. Come back to me. Lay down with me for just one more night. Damn the consequences.

He’d shaken them off at first, but they grew stronger with each week.  With every experience shared with her, it became more and more difficult for him to leave - to attend to his own life, his own business.  He sank more of his time into her, the jaws of love clenching tight around his chest, constricting the flow of blood to his brain.  It was slowly killing him, the most dangerous part being that the sensation was exquisite.

He began to feel adrift without her daily presence. Without her voice over the phone, her fingers against his neck, the smell of her that penetrated his clothes and hair… without those things he was a zombie, tripping over his own decaying limbs. Lovefool.

The teeth sank further into his flesh.

You can imagine, perhaps, what happens next in the Hollywood version of this story. Boy and Girl encounter problems. They argue, refusing to compromise. Tensions mount, and they take time apart from one another. Then, wham! Boy has an epiphany, purchases flowers or crafts a mix-tape, and runs through the streets to find her. Girl will have reservations, but he will appease her worries. They embrace, kiss, and are together forever. The End.

Bullshit Description.

Product.

False hope.

He would’ve run to the other side of the earth if he could have. In Tibet, he might’ve collected his thoughts, came to his senses, and joined a Buddhist monastery. As it was, he couldn’t or wouldn’t escape. The monster’s teeth had caught him too neatly.  It had seduced him with skin and song and sex.  He wanted more, and so he took it into himself.

Soon, plans were made.  He would move in with her, or she with him.  They talked, seriously despite whimsical tones, of getting married. They would have children one day – how would they raise them? Which one of them would be the disciplinarian, and which one would provide the fun?  They would get a dog first. If things got stale in the bedroom they would bring in a third, maybe even a fourth.

Meanwhile, an infection of fear had settled in his fang-wrought wounds.

Something was wrong, he convinced himself. Or perhaps there really was something wrong to begin with.  Either way, he had no evidence. He didn’t even have the faintest idea of what could be awry at all. But it hanged there, over his feelings like a cloud or a wet blanket.

Before, when she didn’t call, it was because she was busy; he was happy to wait for her.  Now, he wondered if she didn’t love him anymore, if perhaps she was unfaithful. He imagined her with another man, his lips on hers, his arms pulling her legs apart, him lying on top of her.  In his visions, she would moan and whisper things to this stranger – the same sort of things she whispered to him, when they fucked between her sheets.

He worried that he was an idiot, that maybe she had been someone else the entire time he knew her. That she’d led him on for some twisted, and yet completely unfathomable reason. Or, it could have been that she had many different selves – he would’ve known only a small piece of who she was, because she didn’t trust him. Because he was too stupid or sick with love to see things clearly.  

For that matter, he wondered if he loved her. Wasn’t it supposed to feel… different? When you met the One, didn’t it turn your world inside out and make everything right again? Wasn’t it supposed to make you feel complete? “When you meet the One, you’ll know,” he’d heard people say. That itched in his mind like an earworm, some top 40 song that he couldn’t shake off no matter what else he tried to think about.  He wondered if he was making a mistake, in being with her. He was afraid it wasn’t real.

It could’ve ended in many ways.

One or the other could have been caught cheating, and feeling their pride shatter, erupted in anger or despair to End Things. They could have grown bored with one another, or realized that they weren’t meant to be – and parted ways amicably in search of their Ones. Maybe, they could have grown old together – become a married couple comfortable with each other, only to wake up one morning and find that they weren’t in love any longer and unable to do anything about it.

But none of those were how it happened.

After she died, the Beast fed on his heart for what seemed like weeks. Its teeth gnashed on and crushed his chest, his heart, his stomach.  The music stopped. Every color faded into a dull, tinted gray. And so he died too, in a way.

He was wracked with questions, and guilt. Every small flaw between them drained away like dirty water, and he was left only with the good memories. In a way, it was worse. He wondered how he could have doubted her, questioned the validity of their relationship.  Of course he loved her, he decided. He was all the worse for coming to that conclusion.

It only provided a bigger meal.

Now, decades later, he realizes that it was real. Only, it was too immense for him to see clearly. The monstrous size of it frightened him away, made him feel powerless and preyed upon. So he attempted to hide from it, to deny it in some fool’s notion of reasserting control over his life. In the end though, he supposes that it doesn’t really matter whether or not his feelings were real.

Love still chewed him up, and spit him out.

The next time you wake up with a hangover – sweating alcohol and reeking of cigarettes from the bar, unable to keep anything on your stomach, remember. Think on how that warm feeling was too much for you, how you didn’t want it to end and so let it consume you.  Take note of the way your world spun out of control and left you sick and stumbling. How you swear you’ll never touch the drink again.

The next time love has torn you apart, you’ll see how they are the same.

Heart in a plastic cage.

He likes the skeletal silhouette of winter trees against the ochre-colored sunrise. He misses his own breath, its quiet and steady rhythm, as much as he misses the feel of someone else breathing sleepily against his neck. He yearns for the quiet and still moments, those fleeting times when he felt at peace and comfortable in his skin, while the night was breaking into day.

He loves poetry, and the lyrics of songs that sound fragile. When he was alive and others would lay open their heart to him, abandoning their armor in momentary lapses of vanity or pride… only then did he feel real, and not so alone in a cold world.

He was haunted even then, of course, though what ghosted through his inner corridors was different. Now, it is more that he cannot have an actual relationship with himself. He won’t allow it. There is a barrier between what he wants to be and who he is, and so everything his mind or heart touches on is a bare and insubstantial surface.

It wasn’t always so, though he remembers the day the change occurred. It is still, despite the years, a vivid memory.

She’d had a fearless vulnerability to her, as long as he’d known her. They’d spent every summer together since the age of twelve, and he was quite in love with her. The summer of 1985 was no different, and they spent it as they always had.  Too much of their time was wasted in idle moments: of television, wandering the malls, swimming lazily, drinking beer and talking about nothing. So much could have been shared between them, if it weren’t for those mundane fascinations. If they had only spoken more, truly opened up to one another, perhaps he would have told her how he felt. If only that, maybe she would have stayed with him as he knew she wanted to. He didn’t. She didn’t. That August they parted ways and upon returning to her abusive mother’s home in rural Tennessee, she swallowed a entire bottle of painkillers. She was found dead later that evening.

It happened so suddenly, as though in the exhale of a single breath. It wasn’t a long struggle for him, or in any way violent. One moment his world had her in its lungs, and the next - she had escaped like a sigh.

He knew he could have protected her better, if he’d been allowed the chance, and in guarding her he might have saved himself. But what was, was - he understood that he could change nothing. The knowledge only made everything worse though, as something of himself was ripped out that night, and flung aside so casually by the people around him. None of them much cared - he was the one that mattered, as far as they were concerned. They told him that there wasn’t anything he could have done, as though he didn’t know it already. He was alive. She was dead, and besides which they didn’t know her anyhow.

When the ache finally began to subside, that sharp pain in his chest that felt like a nail made of cold and loneliness and the knowledge that he would never see her again, he convinced himself that he was left a numb and empty shell and always would be. He couldn’t bear to feel, not anything at all. He left.

Later he made friends that weren’t ever friends to him, drawn in by superficial things like taste in music or alcohol so that he would never have to make a real connection.  He dated again, but only for a few months at a time - ending each affair before there was a risk of love. Magazines and posters became his life - he even made a glossy ad of himself to fight off the sensitive and delicate truth of who he was.

For years his life was consumed with such inconsequential things. He put on each new fad as though donning armor, went to the gym and ran or lifted weights while staring thoughtlessly at his own reflection in the tall mirrors that made a shrine of all the walls. He stopped doing most of the things he once loved, and became a machine that existed only to create a barrier of beauty and popularity between himself and the rest of the world. It never made him feel any degree of happiness. It couldn’t - it wasn’t who he was, only who he wanted to be in the fear of being crushed again because of his nature.

When some years afterward he finally realized that beneath the plastic cage he had built around himself, he still felt and hurt and thought in lines of poetry, he followed her example and killed himself with alcohol and drugs. His overdose didn’t come until after four months of black celebration.

He still exists in that apartment, pale and invisible as he always wanted to be.

That some part of him cries to sappy love stories, that he wants to hold and be held despite his screen of cynicism, that he listens to the sound of the wind through the trees and imagines that she is trying to speak to him… All these things and more he will still never admit to anyone alive or dead.  Only tenatively will he admit them to himself, and those confessions are always in the silent times when night breaks into day.