Ten Love Letters and One of Despair

hello my dear,

I know this is only a first blush but I can already feel your color feather across my skin. A tender warmth that plumps my lips and catches my breath, each wisp and turn a tease of deeper mystery and lush possibility.

I am barely holding back a gush of curiosity. I want to know the flavors of your childhood, the texture of your dreams, all the ways your heart surged and broke. And other questions I can’t ask but only discover, how the first rain of autumn lights in your hair, the shape of your body when you fall asleep in the grass with the sun dappling your bare arms, the wetness of your eyes when you see your lover cross a crowded room, walking toward you.

Is it too soon to reveal so much? Is it too soon to say that I want to see you again? That I already miss your laugh? Is it too soon to say I can hear your voice like a song I’ve never heard before but always known?

I like the way my body feels when I think about the last time I saw you, when I think about the next time I might get to see you.

I can still smell your scent now, it lingers and disappears and returns stronger. An evergreen orchid, impossible to forget.

yours-

hello my dear,

When you dress in the morning, it’s like watching a present being rewrapped. Hours before, I peeled away the layers to reveal you there, vulnerable, beautiful. And even unclothed, the unwrapping continues with arms and legs uncrossing, heart unclosing, your mouth wetlipped parting into the softness of a kiss, the violent tensile arc of your body in electric orgasm leaving you glazed with sweat and intensely, powerfully open. And when you dress to go, preparing your body for the other bodies you will meet, shrouding all that you are in protection, necessity, expression, I want to undress you again before you pass out the door and away, and sometimes I do, grieving just a little that it might be the very last time. I still taste the possibility of unwrapping you again and again, there is always more to open, to undress, to reveal secret places and tenderest skin I've yet to touch.

I could put you in my mouth.

All of you. Your wet breath, the electricity of your eyes, the brightest radiance of your spirit, the sheer, direct power of your desire. Every lick of skin. You who can handle desire like a poet handles words. Your fearlessness and your taut, curling energy. A beauty that could be both wild and still devoted. I see so clearly your strengths and desires, and also all the things I do not know, mysteries still hidden, that only love and time and trust could reveal, like watching a jasmine blossom pearl open slowly under the wet heat of water, mixing with the flower to become a tea you let you flow into your mouth, its heat and fragrance suffusing a body.

yours -

A few things I've been gathering for you

Here is a giant pink seashell waterfalling milk off its iridescent lip into a cavern of carved pearl. Here is a flock of cackling night birds in moon wet trees. Here is a bouquet of flames, of crystals, of feathers.

Here are all of the flowers, daisy-chained and vined, wreathed and wild, heaped into hillsides of pure color, patterned like Persian carpets in ancient arrays, the perfumes of a thousand petals like caresses, to bury our faces into, to crown ourselves, to toss in fights until we collapse into each other's arms with contented sighs, eyes crinkled with exhausted joy.

Here are all the sunsets for you.

Here are a few words. I scribbled most of them in a long evening wandering the city, running from party to party, flirting with the possibilities of night, wishing you were with me. It's true, that when you are near but untouchable it makes my thoughts ache and shiver with desire. I've grown to need you. So here, instead of searching fingers and wet mouths, I have to make do with words. I try to imagine visions that would delight you, summoning them with words.

Here are ice cream castles and the keys to the pillow factory. Here is a bathtub full of dandelion wishes. Past all these spells and charms, I know that the only thing I really have to offer is me, with all my awkward exuberance and accidental graces, a face and body and soul full of scars and poetry. It is a second-hand heart, ripped and dented, but I want you to have it.

love-

hello my dear,

When I bury my face deep into your neck, I'm breathing in your true scent, the animal in me finding the animal in you. It is unmistakably yours and all of my body knows it. On a moonless night, in lightless caverns, blind, I can find you in the dark. I do not yet have words for the whole of its shape and depth, its curve and angle, even as my body's memorized every last shiver. I'll try to describe it, but I know I won't get it right.

Your scent is flared denim worn soft, the right front pocket full of chamomile. It is a picnic next to a pond, lily pads and lotus flowers flirting on muddy water under a sudden spring rainstorm, the cattails whispering in the cool wind. It's the feeling of sticking your finger into melted wax when it's no longer molten but still pliably soft and warm. It is the taste of a lightning bolt passing through your mouth, circuiting through and beyond without a frazzled hair. (To me, you will always be that point when the lightning bolt kisses the earth, energy meeting solidity, a power that can animate stone. In my chest, this is one of your secret names.)

I tried but I know they're incomplete. I need a thousand mornings to bury my face in your hair, a thousand evenings and afternoons tasting your mouth, countless hours of my cheeks pressed against your thighs to even begin to understand its depth and nuance. This scent, your scent, is something I can take from you but that takes nothing from you. I leave you each time full of your perfume, and you go on with all of its force and power, subtlety and beauty undiminished.

Joy all over from the closeness of your body, the need I have for your voice, but it’s your scent that salves my spirit most. These words are my face against your neck, can you feel it?

love,

hello lover,

I write this and your spit is still wet on my skin. You just left and I felt this tumble of words, so I’m writing them now while they still pulse with urgency, while they and you still taste fresh in my mouth, laying here in bed, my legs still tangled in sheets. My yearning for you is sharpest after you leave, that moment before I get caught up in the day and all its demands and distractions. Somewhere in the middle of it all, you return, and I feel the sweet soreness of fucking and that first lick of desire of wanting to fuck you again. The sunset, the darkening caress of evening and all its possibilities make me taste you again. And should I not see you, once more before I sleep, stretching my limbs into a bed that might still have the crush of our sweat, still perhaps unmade from the way we left it as we rushed headfirst into life outside. My body folds to accommodate your absence as I fall asleep.

I think about you sometimes when you leave the room and always right before you appear to meet me. I think about you when you sink with sickness, sadness, distress. My concern like a pulse. I think about you when you piss me off, my frustration as hot as lust. It never lasts but a flicker, but has its own twist, different than all the rest. I think about you for reasons I’ll never understand, but there you are, as my hands fondle a sponge to scrub the dishes or ordering coffee or catching some scent like clove or jasmine or burning wood that I do not understand how but I know belongs to you.

And when you read this, I want you to feel my weight on top of you, I want you to hear my voice, the grip of my hand, the heat of my breath on your neck. I want you to taste my tears. They are all here, each word an indelible kiss, a tattooed teardrop, these lines are the trace of my tongue along your nipple and then the bite of my teeth. Can you feel them there? I’ll bite harder.

xoxoxo

Hello my dear,

A sunny afternoon. Loose fabric wrapped the taut force of your naked body as you bend and move. A cool breeze, the lightest rustle, the warm sun a welcome to bare skin, the clouds drifting across the metallic blue as if they had no place to go and neither did we. A rarest moment, nowhere else I had or wanted to be but there. Neither held back nor pushed forward, a moment of perfect stillness in a long and frantic life. One of the finest of my life, a moment I'll pull out as a postcard of earth, a time when I was truly and purely alive because of you.

I read in a book years ago a traveler watching beauties bathe naked in a secret golden grotto whilst musicians strummed ancient instruments in unearthly ways. The traveler thought, "Always remember this. Always remember though agony and fear crouch at the door." I've had a few moments like this, too few maybe, but I know that many live without having even one. When I'm despairing I take them out, and polish them like a serenity stone and they help me to endure, the promise that will be another of these moments worth living for, that life is worth continuing if only to remember those times.

Our hour in the sun is one of them. A weightless moment. Precious in a long life.

yours -

Lover, every time is the first time.

You're gone and I cannot find you, My hand brushed your skin as you passed by, your scent whipped around me, like undulating smoke, ghostly fingers luminous in the mossy twilight, and then too was gone

It's all of you I love, the baroque interiors rarely sunned, your soft folds and hard angles, the way fields of flowers might brush against your legs, the petite mortes of your orgasms, your enthusiasms and silences, your hands gripped in mine, even the silent place you go to gather yourself. All your movements and idiosyncrasies, the rituals that make you possible.

I want to wrap you in gossamer, both covered and uncovered, a translucent, autumnal fabric woven by spiders, bespoke for you alone, that can dissolve with a single hungry breath or snare a prey in its inescapable weave.

When you leave, how long will my caresses linger on your skin? Will I disappear, become an arrogant stranger, an annoying fluttering crow of your forgettable past, a short chapter in your memoir? Have I gotten too close to the forbidden territory of a closed heart? Is it arrogance to even think so, only ever a minor character, a dalliance, a bus stop? Will you continue to love me, will our distance draw us closer?

I almost cannot even say your name when I see you, sometimes only a casual pronoun, again and again like a prayer. Your name has a magic that I almost don't want to defame with quotidian use. When I whisper I love you, I never want it to be something cheap and easy, I feel it so powerfully. If I'm going to spoil it, I want it ruined in the ritual of our fucking, dancing through days wearing only songs. Instead of saying it, I try to touch you with love, speak it with my eyes, but my fumbling fingers and nervous glances can never truly embrace all of you and carry you away as much as I want it too, as much as I want gossamer to enfold you. Like green lace dripping from ancient trees, my fingers draw through the shafts of light and you disappear in a mist.

Lover, every time is the last time.

Tonight I love you and the window is open. I love you and the nightwinds breeze the curtains just so and the sound of distant traffic is muffled enough. Tonight I love you and the cats claw and howl and I want to believe it’s for love. Tonight I love you and there’s traces of moonlight and starlight with the streetlights and headlights that make seeing like a haze rather than an epiphany, and all of it casting shadows along my bedroom wall. Tonight I love you without the despair of desperation or the carelessness of complacency. Tonight I love you like a window open to the night breeze where the window needs to be open for the night breeze to come, and the curtains need the breeze to move them and the room needs the sounds of howling cats and muffled traffic and the shift of shadows or it would otherwise be empty.

Tonight I love you and I’m not sure where you are, where you’re going, where you’re sleeping, who hears your laugh, with which bodies you dance or eat or talk. Tonight I love you and I don’t care much about tomorrow or yesterday, both so far away, one stained with regret and the other splashed with fear. And the night grows louder with silence, and the room grows more frantic with stillness, and the hours fill up like ashtrays. And the window stays open, deliberately, persistently, stubbornly. This window, my window is open.

love,

dear one,

To put into words feelings is to make them irrevocably real. A spell cast cannot be uncast.

I could melt into you so easily. Pressing my body against yours, every part of me against every part of you, naked and without friction, for time that disappears as time. I've never felt such joy with a lover.

When I look at you, I can almost imagine moments, places, experiences that would be made more delicious if only because you were there, and the bravery of that feeling to take me beyond myself, to make me richer and better, for you to discover the mysteries in me, the part of my body I did not even know existed till you touched it. I taste on my tongue that I could do the same for you. Just a fleeting flavor, one that I let gust through me without trying to swallow, letting it blow over and away, beyond that horizon line we'll never meet.

I can even now feel with the tenderness of time without caresses and kisses, words or gestures, just time between time, those seconds between sentences, the time between couplings filled with both satisfaction and yearning. I want to hide in one of those moments, in the air we shared, each breathing, quietly in love, and maybe right now I am. Feeling the way you fill a room, the way I walk from our bed knowing your eyes run themselves shamelessly over me. I can’t find two thoughts without you between them so I linger here between thoughts, lost in time, a waking dream.

And here between everywhere and nowhere, I weave all these words. This song, a spell for you.

love,

I'm sad to have missed hearing your voice today. It's 1am and I hope you’re having good dreams. It feels so strange to be apart tonight. I vacillate between thinking you were a dream and feeling that some large and undefinably important feature of the landscape has been sucked away, the downtown skyline and its noisy light suddenly disappearing, all the lines vanishing from the roads, ancient mountains blinking away, to pass a night to only realize in the morning that the moon had disappeared, all the waves refusing to crash, the ocean still as death. Even when you don't know the moon’s missing, you still miss it. The whole tilt of the world seems to be off.

I want to smell you right now. This is strangely my way of making sure you're real when you're here, it connects to my whole body and mind. When I breathe it in, it's as if I’m breathing in the whole of you. I inhale and all of our experiences come with it, every night and day of lovemaking, every joke and whisper, every silence and every laugh.

I should clean my sheets but I'm reluctant to rid them of your scent. I try to pass each hour without too much ceremony but the implication is that you are really gone. But you're not really gone are you, you're just somewhere else, receiving this letter. Reading it aloud even in your voice that I'm sad to have missed tonight. And your bright eyes are flickering across the words as you scan the lines, looking for a part of me in them that will make me real to you.

love,

hello dear one,

I can see you clearly and beautifully, what lies ahead even. I know that I would lie flowers on your pillow on every continent, that I would fuck you till you felt yourself dissolving like vanilla in warm milk, that your electricity could give me more joy than I ever imagined I deserved.

I know that if we could, we would be each other's completely, in anyway the other most desired, lovers with arms and beds open whichever shape fit our bodies best. I know, along with all this, that I will never meet another like you again, that you will never meet another like me.

When I walk down the street, I want to flash every stranger my broken heart, as if there eyes will somehow disappear the pain. We had to part, so we parted. Every word here and the moment it takes to utter it feels very precious, I spent an hour in torment for each. But precious maybe like the rain is precious, each word is valuable not because it can be hoarded but because it is so free.

I forgive you everything and hope you forgive me everything, I hurt. Badly. Heaving with sorrow but love at its inception is already a forgiveness. I know we had to split but you can always find me in any wilderness with friendship and care should you need it. I understand that both of us need to wander long and far through lonely places where the other can’t follow. I don't understand all of it but that I'm trying hard to do so and maybe one day will.

I think I'm trying to understand most what is the nature of love over time, that even though a romance might end that our care for each other shouldn't.

so long,