Choice
I am a simple man. I have always lived a simple life. Things are pat, you know. Just so. I didn't want not one thing more. Content.
You mixed me up, of course. I saw that coming. What I didn't see was how much fun you'd be.
I'm a simple man. I didn't expect no extravagant love.
[I found this in the rolling desk and snitched it when he wasn't looking]
Dear Choice.
Your letter to me was in the mailbox with the bills and the monthly catalog but I could see it through the pile and through the tin and through the wall and through the field over near the pump where i was working and I run there so fast that mailman hadn't hardly closed the thing afore I had my hand on it. You know, I'm excited. I am. I'm excited by you and dad blame it if that don't feel more like dipping your toes in spring water then I don't know.
I kept that picture you sent me. Tucked it back of the bible so you'd fall out when I was having devotions and I'd remember to pray for you. I still remember you without the picture, but it's nice to see your face.
Here's the truth about us that you haven't known for a while now but I've been talking to your folks for a while. You remember last week after church when your father stopped me in the pew and let me have a ripping - well that's what it was about. I have found that they won't consider me unless I have a powerfully good reason for them to do so, and they don't want any no-account farm hand for their daughter. They do love you so.
I'm going back to the field now. I've got to prepare it so's McHartney won't have reason to bile at me.
Of course,
Roger K Beck
March 1937
Dear Choice.
You have asked why I type my letters. Well it is simple. I have no handwriting. Remember that scar on my hand, between the thumb and my digits well that makes it mighty sore to be holding a pen. My teacher always tried to make me write anyway and never said nothing good on my penmanship. I would ruther you didn't see it, so I'll just borrow McHartney's wife's typing machine and I can manage on that.
Of course,
Roger K Beck
June 1937
Dear Choice.
You have seen my leg and how I can't work no more. I am tapping this out with my left hand, even, because of the damage but the doctor says that's alright. The arm will be much better inside of a month. My uncle has written from Rushsylvania. I might have a future there. Don't forget me, please. I still pray for you.
Of course,
Roger K Beck
June 1937
Dear Choice.
I have a job in Rushsylvania in the store. I'm not the man I was but I hope you still think of me. I know it's been a powerful long time since the last we saw of each other
of course you know the time because of what you said to me
I remember because when you leaned in, the shade played tricks with your face and you looked awful pretty when you said it. You blushed right down to your roots and danced off between them cottonwoods up on the north end of your property. And I said Choice Titus I Intend to Make Good. That swallerd you up, and no mistake. You hid behind that camera of yours and didn't come out.
This ten dollars is for a new dress for your Mother and a picture show for your Father and a train ticket for you. I want to see you awful bad. Them photos don't cut it.
Of course,
Roger K Beck
April 1938
Dear Choice.
You know I hate to put this on you, but I can't decide for you. I never meant to come between you and yours. I never meant to pull you away. I always pictured you and I and the Titus clan thick as thieves, but that can't be how it's gonna be. I'll ask you one last time:
Ohio and me
Pennsylvania
It's your decision and I prayed you make a good one. I knowed what I would pick but I ain't you.
Choice Titus, I pick you.
Of course,
Roger K Beck
September 1938
Dearest Choice.
I am none too good with words so I will be brief.
Today I am more than I was yesterday. I can't explain that none. But I needed you to know. Don't forget this date, Choice Beck. It's today I found a life.
April 1939
[This is my seven hundredth post. Daily blog + three and a half years = two years' worth of posts]
Friday, March 29, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
3.16
You're there, just there. We're not two feet from each other, but the intervening space might as well be two galaxies, two millennia, two realities apart.
Can't you feel me wanting to hold you? I'm honestly amazed that you can't. My desire seems to have taken physical form in the room and now looms large over me like a monster of need. Teratoid, my wants are. Or maybe you have noticed and you've chosen to ignore the feeling, despite the hair and the spittle and the forlorn eyes and the stench.
When you leave, I feel like you ripped out a huge chunk of the insides of me and used it like Gretel to leave a trail of crumbs. I should follow the bits of me to get to you.
This is too dramatic. Simply: I miss you.
Can't you feel me wanting to hold you? I'm honestly amazed that you can't. My desire seems to have taken physical form in the room and now looms large over me like a monster of need. Teratoid, my wants are. Or maybe you have noticed and you've chosen to ignore the feeling, despite the hair and the spittle and the forlorn eyes and the stench.
When you leave, I feel like you ripped out a huge chunk of the insides of me and used it like Gretel to leave a trail of crumbs. I should follow the bits of me to get to you.
This is too dramatic. Simply: I miss you.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
3.14
There is something to be said for a woman who has class. Let me be paint a picture in a gilt frame that hangs in the parlor of your mother's house. The light is shining through the bay windows and she shakes her hair out in front of you. When she smiles, she outdoes the brilliance of the lake behind her. Her neck cranes to look around your cousin Susan to meet your eye, the gaze of which she drinks in a single draught. She's at the end of a seven year dry spell and she is ready to wash away her withdrawal with you. You can sense the muscles in her straining and taut. You can remember her arching into you when you kissed in the kitchen, sneaking ice in the summer heat when you were young enough to not care. But you went to university, remember, and you got married to Anne because it was a good idea, not because you wanted to.
There is much to be said for a woman who has fire. Let me tell you a story you'd hear in the night, one that would climb up with the smoke and join with the treetops. The crackle of the fire joins the sounds of the night, but you can't hear it for the sound of your ears in your head. You've been playing your guitar, but she got up to dance. In the half-lived light of the aging fire you can see the curves and the flow of her dance, the lines. I want to shout. It's welling up in me--the memory of the purity and the joy. Fire. Life. Her arms slip out and snap back. She spins and her hair whips out and around. You can't feel the joy of it. Can I stress this enough without reaching out and shaking you? I can wish for tremors in me to be the truth of it still, but I would lie. My shaking is only the fear that I'll die without ever again having her all to myself. All this is compounded by the knowledge that she came here with you alone because she's that sort of girl. You're out camping in the middle of the night trying to impress her by playing the guitar. You're the one chasing, but she caught you with her dance, tarantula-bitten in the night, fragile and febrile with desire. do you feel it? A woman destroyed by her men, torn apart by her memories, drunk on your admiration: you want her, can't you feel it? The ash and the heat and the light are hers and you quit feebly stroking the guitar and just watch her dancing to the music inside. You can't bring yourself to want her anymore, not after having seen her set apart and sacred. She isn't yours. She belongs to this night and all you have of her is the still fading flashing glimpse of the most woman you'll ever see.
There is much to be said for a woman who has fire. Let me tell you a story you'd hear in the night, one that would climb up with the smoke and join with the treetops. The crackle of the fire joins the sounds of the night, but you can't hear it for the sound of your ears in your head. You've been playing your guitar, but she got up to dance. In the half-lived light of the aging fire you can see the curves and the flow of her dance, the lines. I want to shout. It's welling up in me--the memory of the purity and the joy. Fire. Life. Her arms slip out and snap back. She spins and her hair whips out and around. You can't feel the joy of it. Can I stress this enough without reaching out and shaking you? I can wish for tremors in me to be the truth of it still, but I would lie. My shaking is only the fear that I'll die without ever again having her all to myself. All this is compounded by the knowledge that she came here with you alone because she's that sort of girl. You're out camping in the middle of the night trying to impress her by playing the guitar. You're the one chasing, but she caught you with her dance, tarantula-bitten in the night, fragile and febrile with desire. do you feel it? A woman destroyed by her men, torn apart by her memories, drunk on your admiration: you want her, can't you feel it? The ash and the heat and the light are hers and you quit feebly stroking the guitar and just watch her dancing to the music inside. You can't bring yourself to want her anymore, not after having seen her set apart and sacred. She isn't yours. She belongs to this night and all you have of her is the still fading flashing glimpse of the most woman you'll ever see.
Monday, March 11, 2013
3.11
[If you've noticed, I've taken a brief sabbatical from the blog. It was an unintentional side effect of taking a photography class and three upper-division English classes simultaneously. I have literally no creative desire. I have no ideas and no thoughts. I've been sucked dry for the very first time by my classes. So if you want to read something, may I suggest Ghosty Men. It's short, sweet, and ever so interesting. If that strikes your fancy, strike away at it.]
I light a cigarette and roll it slowly between my fingers. The soft, papery white muzzle dances lazily on my thumb and forefinger. I can't look away from it, but I am still aware. I can hear the silence of the hall, smell the lights, feel the fear of the crowd.
Rewind.
I have just walked onstage, and I float on the murmuring turns of the audience as they wait for something to amaze them. I am myself, but I am larger than life. The carton in my pocket burns a rectangle into my side, awkward and unfamiliar but eminently mine. It feels right. The tidal swell of a heartbeat crashes in my ears. Did you know that if you put a conch against your ear, you can hear the sea? Well, only if you're standing near the sea. In an auditorium, you can only hear the sound of
thump thump
thump thump
when you're standing in the spotlight on an old, creaky floor just a few feet from where the hoarde is waiting for you to fascinate.
I pull up just short of the microphone stand and taste the iron of blood on my tongue. I wasn't aware I had bitten myself. Nervous, or penitent. For the two seconds it takes for my tongue to explore my mouth, there is silence, and I stare off into the middle distance. A man (I think) says WELL with an impertinent uptic. People laugh. I smile, but nobody can see the blood on my teeth.
Well, I say, You've come a long way to see me, some of you. Let's hope it's worth it.
I pull the paper box from my suit jacket. As its form is fully lit, the hall goes roadkill silent. All that's left is the bluebottle whine of the electric lights. My mouth has gone dry and snaps as I move my tongue. I awkwardly peel at the paper seal until it gives way. I try to tap the box like the Woman in the movies, but all that comes out is laughter. I give it a go the old-fashioned way. When I get the thing out,
I light the cigarette and roll it slowly between my fingers. The soft, papery white muzzle dances lazily on my thumb and forefinger. The symbol of it has always scared me, for some reason, and now I hold it just so. The flames on the end crawl, infection, poison, the slow replay of a cannon snot spreading and expanding until the sound of it hits your ears and you can't see anything for all the sound.
I can't see anything because the hall is so silent.
Look at the Christians all afraid of what must come next.
I explain You know I'm excited by being a cigarette smoker. I'm unique in this age--a man who smokes despite it isn't cool anymore. Everybody knows it's bad bad bad. I can't smoke anywhere but outside, and that hardly. Cigs have a prohibitive cost--at least, the good ones. It's not a thing that draws people together anymore, like it was. Now that's coffee. Movies. Running in the park. Yesterday on the bus, I met a man wrinkled like the end of the earth and he smokes. He saw my box when I put it in my pocket and he sneered and pulled away like I was gonna breathe on him.
The cigarette is burning closer to my fingers, the ash on the end waiting to blow away at a touch like an orgasm: a nuclear bomb. I tap it with my thumb and the collected debris falls slow to the ground but nobody watches it.
I clear my throat We smokers aren't a popular breed anymore.
I drop the thing just as my fingers get hot, and it falls too slow to the floor, where I grind it out and look back up at the black and the spotlight and the blinding silence.
I smile. I continue Still, I've never smoked a cigarette. I just like the idea.
I walk off stage and the blindness dissipates behind me.
Clamor.
Fear.
Pity.
Loathing.
But I've beaten them all at their own metaphor.
Strange, but I can't taste the blood anymore.
I light a cigarette and roll it slowly between my fingers. The soft, papery white muzzle dances lazily on my thumb and forefinger. I can't look away from it, but I am still aware. I can hear the silence of the hall, smell the lights, feel the fear of the crowd.
Rewind.
I have just walked onstage, and I float on the murmuring turns of the audience as they wait for something to amaze them. I am myself, but I am larger than life. The carton in my pocket burns a rectangle into my side, awkward and unfamiliar but eminently mine. It feels right. The tidal swell of a heartbeat crashes in my ears. Did you know that if you put a conch against your ear, you can hear the sea? Well, only if you're standing near the sea. In an auditorium, you can only hear the sound of
thump thump
thump thump
when you're standing in the spotlight on an old, creaky floor just a few feet from where the hoarde is waiting for you to fascinate.
I pull up just short of the microphone stand and taste the iron of blood on my tongue. I wasn't aware I had bitten myself. Nervous, or penitent. For the two seconds it takes for my tongue to explore my mouth, there is silence, and I stare off into the middle distance. A man (I think) says WELL with an impertinent uptic. People laugh. I smile, but nobody can see the blood on my teeth.
Well, I say, You've come a long way to see me, some of you. Let's hope it's worth it.
I pull the paper box from my suit jacket. As its form is fully lit, the hall goes roadkill silent. All that's left is the bluebottle whine of the electric lights. My mouth has gone dry and snaps as I move my tongue. I awkwardly peel at the paper seal until it gives way. I try to tap the box like the Woman in the movies, but all that comes out is laughter. I give it a go the old-fashioned way. When I get the thing out,
I light the cigarette and roll it slowly between my fingers. The soft, papery white muzzle dances lazily on my thumb and forefinger. The symbol of it has always scared me, for some reason, and now I hold it just so. The flames on the end crawl, infection, poison, the slow replay of a cannon snot spreading and expanding until the sound of it hits your ears and you can't see anything for all the sound.
I can't see anything because the hall is so silent.
Look at the Christians all afraid of what must come next.
I explain You know I'm excited by being a cigarette smoker. I'm unique in this age--a man who smokes despite it isn't cool anymore. Everybody knows it's bad bad bad. I can't smoke anywhere but outside, and that hardly. Cigs have a prohibitive cost--at least, the good ones. It's not a thing that draws people together anymore, like it was. Now that's coffee. Movies. Running in the park. Yesterday on the bus, I met a man wrinkled like the end of the earth and he smokes. He saw my box when I put it in my pocket and he sneered and pulled away like I was gonna breathe on him.
The cigarette is burning closer to my fingers, the ash on the end waiting to blow away at a touch like an orgasm: a nuclear bomb. I tap it with my thumb and the collected debris falls slow to the ground but nobody watches it.
I clear my throat We smokers aren't a popular breed anymore.
I drop the thing just as my fingers get hot, and it falls too slow to the floor, where I grind it out and look back up at the black and the spotlight and the blinding silence.
I smile. I continue Still, I've never smoked a cigarette. I just like the idea.
I walk off stage and the blindness dissipates behind me.
Clamor.
Fear.
Pity.
Loathing.
But I've beaten them all at their own metaphor.
Strange, but I can't taste the blood anymore.
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