Notes from the underground

I live with a man to whom I have pledged my troth, until the sun supernovas, the stars fade away.

During the first month of our courtship, I flew away to Nova Scotia for two weeks, and during this time we wrote to each every day; back and forth we went, feverish, all firing synapses and tricky fingers – and often times very late at night (or early in the morning), so our typos, like our emotions, were plentiful.

I would love to share with you something he wrote to me – something that will forever make me laugh, something that will forever live in my heart.

An excerpt – Monday, August 25, 2003, 00:17:34:

As the evening progressed I began to feel more and more that I was part of some macabre Dostoevskian dinner party, wherein a carnivalesque ambiance lies so heavily upon the evening that I expect at any moment to have one of us drop down dead, or for Inspector Porfiry to burst through the door and proclaim me a student and a criminal in equal measure. 

Finally we began to watch the Anniversary Party with director’s commentary.  This was good because it allowed a dimming of lights so the rest of the party could no loner sit around awkwardly as my face watched my mind build and destroy lines of compassion and comradeship, leaving me on a sober island alone, being the only member of the melodramatic depressed monkey stock. 

Finally I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and announced I was retiring for the evening. 

Many sad farewells were exchanged, and then my door was closed and at last the misanthrope was safe, and glad that his room was devoid of mirrors and the curtains were pulled.  Then I turned off the one light by my bed, and sat, and in the darkness.

I wrote, since I could not speak, and my fingers were the tongues of my mind, and true for once for they were too long steeped in the deception of my company.

Last Night:
Because I spent an hour untwisting my phone cord, so I could lie where you lay that first night though miles apart; your heat a weir around my slippery heart; electric pulses shaping the darkness with the phosphorescent paintings of your words.  And today I am order in my sock drawer, pairing and pressing, thinking of the arch of your strong feet trembling beneath my touch.  You make me believe in a symmetrical world beyond my usual preoccupation with chaos; the gyre widens not forever – the hawk will tire, and bank, and glide in a descending inscription to the face of the world.  To live forever in the heights of my mind is a beauteous peril, and folly.  It is the loose loam between my toes, the touch of another, a lover, you who unquakes my weakness and fear of uncertainty.

Tonight I will sleep deeply; I may not dream.

But when I wake, I live a life of magical reality – this man and I, sewn up in a sea of soliloquies and stardust; tulips and tea.

The nose-less sphinx, straight roman roads under pumice and ash – I could have been a statue if I hadn’t met you.

I wish you all beauty and brilliance, this windswept day, and always.