The night misses you, so I am sending this message along. It misses the way the hairs on the back of your neck stood up in its mint-leave-magical cool. It misses the moon multiplying itself in your irises, and it misses the dusting of street lamp light on your shoulders like settled sawdust. It asks over and over, spelled out in the stars, “Wasn’t that you lying in the middle of the football field in the darkness?”. It wants you out on the stone steps again — the ones that appear to ripple out from the mouth of the library’s giant doors in the night. It wants you out where you watch all the shadow-shapes turn into the fear itself. It wants you out where it can envelope you and introduce you to your own heartbeat again — it wants you to learn to love it both when it is speeding up and slowing down. So come out longer past the daylight hours. The night misses you.
July 2011
8 posts
It’s amazing to me that my blog could be something that someone else would be willing to read repeatedly. Thank you for loving what I write. I’m so honoured that you are able to find inspiration in my words.
Would you call it love if she would have loved any other man in the same circumstance the same way?
This is not writer’s block, nor was it ever. I am not a clogged up pipe in the drainage system that is simply backed up with too much garbage to bring forth the gush of words. And I am not a large swirling body of water limited by a dam. My problem is not one of dead ends; they are such obvious obstacles. I am held back by something more subtle, and perhaps stronger. My whole body is stiff-petrified and unmoving — nothing seems to move me anymore. I used to be some violent force that could stir my own seas, but lately I have been only a long-forgotten medical marvel stored floating in a jar of stagnant liquid. Everything is still, and I have to learn how to make art from stillness if I would ever like to move again.
I remember the way your face looked when you told me. It was opened up in a way I had never seen it before, and I felt you churning yourself into a blackhole as you said it. Your eyes grew wide and grew sad like the eyes of lovers when they have seen the stain on the back of a collar or the center of the heart before it is announced. “But it will destroy you, M,” you said, sounding only the part of my name you had broken off for yourself to keep. You used to love to tell me that ‘M’ was a more beautiful name for me than any other because when you hummed it to yourself you could feel it resonate in every part of your body. Your bones rang with my M and I wonder if they still do sometimes — I wonder if you say my name out loud at all any longer.
I say yours all the time, but only as a whisper in late night streets and early morning darkness. I leave it suspended in places like a ghost, and I am afraid that’s what you have become to me. A ghost that asked me once, lying on his back on a see-saw, “M, let’s fall in love. Let’s fall absolutely madly in love and come home to tell each other about it. Let’s fall in love with our whole bodies and souls.” I was sixteen and already in love with everything, so this did not sound difficult until you added, “But not with our minds. Leave me your mind, and I will leave you mine. Find someone to love and give him your body and soul, but never your mind.”
You have my mind, and yes, you’re right, it will destroy me. It will bring me down like a curtain falling from its runners along a stage because you can’t really love anyone when your thoughts race to a boy who is more like an enchantment than a person. You can’t really love anyone when he is sleeping in the back of your mind talking in his sleep on occasion when you let yourself slip too far inside anyone else. You can’t really love anyone without your mind.
While I am arranging refrigerator magnets, there are girls up on their roofs and out on their patios doing any number of fascinating things. They are painting pictures or dancing riddles into the pavement under clear skies. There are girls on trams and streetcars waiting to go places, waiting to go home — wanting to go home. There are girls sitting in lecture halls at Sarah Lawrence and girls washing dishes, girls sending letters and receiving letters sometimes typewritten and sometimes scrawled out by hand. There are girls getting their first haircuts, meeting their first loves, and holding their own newborn baby girls against their chests. All the girls are growing into women, and I am arranging refrigerator magnets not noticing my own burgeoning womanhood splashing up against the kitchen windows trying to catch my attention.
learning to
love you
again
like I knew to
love myself
once more
living
liquid
longing
anew
