2.22

I flinched when your fingertips brushed my skin. I don't find you repulsive; I'm sorry. You're just so like me. I know I'm supposed to say you're foreign and exotic and alien because then, at least, I would have to chase you. But you're not hot to my cold, brazen to my shy, fast to my slow. If opposites attract, you make me flinch instead. I don't mean to dissect, but at the Christmas party at Ned's place, when you picked up the hors d'oeuvre with your fingers and knocked it back and laughed with a loud horse laugh at a joke I made and I laughed, myself, at my own joke. We talked about the stupid mistakes we'd made with pride and we ranted about past lovers. We're too similar.

You know that people say when you meet your unknown twin self from an alternate reality, you really only have two options if you want to truly take advantage of that moment. You only have two choices you can make that are once-in-reality possibilities. You've got to kill or sleep with yourself. It's the only way you can truly live. Well, that's why I flinched. You're too like me. I'm still deciding.

2.19

Fingers twisted through hair, pulling away from the roundling skull: sensuous slow is what I want. The heady rush of two hips aligned untouching, magnetic, suspended. The hot, dry heat of skin close upon skin upon skin, folded rolling pinched up skin in a tortuous disaster of desire, longed for long before I knew you true. Why this assonance of souls, a tonal resonance that mocks its owners with surety long before the words reach truth of meaning? We feel in love, surely, but it's the baby love of children. Touch, primal, the first and king of all senses, which yet infants feel keen. What is our distinction from these? We are circumspect eclectic derelicts, circling each anon abed, unable to love consummately, unwilling to leave consequently.

2.18

----turn, we, in the night of a snapping black hoarfrost----
The rime of our skin we shake off, it crackling of sugarsweet memory. The impression I have of your hands in my sun-stripped skin sinks deeper before falling away. The trees around me groan under your weight as I stretch and shake. Their branches snap and weep; I imitate them and myself, breaking each quarter inch further toward nakedness and despair. When did this weight fall on me when I drifted among the clouds? I spent so long within you that when the chill fear lifted from me, I couldn't remember when I was so rooted to the ground. Clairvoyance and premonition fail. Memory and constitution despair. I cast my mind to earth, expecting a shatter, yet I hear only my arms flex within their icy expectation, confined, retrained to silence and composure.
The winter around me is still. The forest is silent. The last sound I heard grows to infinity, greys, retiring and modest, aged, ancient, dead. I miss the sound of your voice, and all I have is the silent fall of powdery ice, solid prison of self harm, into the snow that remains.

2.17

He's so small. Normally, don't you wish to protect things that are smaller than you? Where's that paternal feeling that I'm digging so desperately for, or do I even have it? No, for this tiny troglodyte, all I feel is rage. I wish I could lift him by his lapels and thrust him against a wall hard enough to loosen his teeth. I wish I could knock him down and set a foot on his chest and sneer. I wish I could slap him right across the cheek so hard the welts would last for days. I could do it. I'm enormous; consequent of eating my vegetables and having good genes. I'm too tall.
But I don't. I save my wrath for a different solution and I let him insult me and lie to me and disrespect me again and again. I use the tools I have and I make his life increasingly strictured and constrained until he realizes, suddenly, sitting in the corner with a single pencil and piece of paper.

2.16

I find myself constantly to be a new Sennacherib, a builder of means and stature whose hypothetical mind palaces soar graceful, swirling minarets and towers in a bloom of stone and woodwork. I paint the lines of a fairer sort of future. Art and mind meet and meeting, nice distinctions between word and meaning a fete of undiscovered promise. The country I rule loves me, and I it, because the grandeur I promise is the hubris they crave, to reach for the stars and pull them down to strike our foes with.
Yet I am filled to fat with the taste of boasting, of courtiers who froth at statue and monolith and fresco and column. I desire an older, more moribund ochre to my day. I wish not for victory and ardor, but for death. Cease the building of palatial accoutrement; I wish for tombs.

2.14b

[Haven't had cause for a letter for a long time.]

I submitted Scarmarella a long time ago to the Legacy, the annual publication of the English department at Southern. It didn't get in, not least of which reasons was that my best friend, the editor, didn't like it at all. I didn't submit my heart-strings because I needed them massaged. I expected and deserved to be turned down. I think I did it to feed my persecution complex, but I do know this: if Scarmarella had been committed to paper, left in the unforgiving reality of ink or toner or oil paints or balsamic reduction or whatever marks make permanent stains, I don't think she would have fared as well as she did in my heart. It's a half-poem, at best. The imagery is muddled and the rhythm owes more than half its weight to Gerard Manley Hopkins, but I love it. Spin, Scarmarella, and don't stay too long. You were always better when I couldn't see you well.

2.14

[Once, I wrote a post about crying in a stairwell.]
That was inspired by a girl who broke up with me nine months after I asked her out, accidentally, on valentines day. I suppose the accident was asking her out at all, but at the time the accident was not the girl, but the date. She broke up with me in a formal nine-month stillbirth, our relationship dead though we carried it so well for so long. Why do I still mourn that day? Not for her, the mother of a could-have-been sentiment that lives in my past, but for the boy. I mourn for the boy she left, who couldn't see his dependence on having a someone was actually an addiction of the highest order that drove him to push his boundaries aside, to deal in dalliances after good folks were asleep, to consider extreme destructive cataclysm for a chance at one-more-time. I mourn his loss, because his shambling corpse still roams, moaning its broken memories and half-remembered nightmares, seeking a fix. That boy can't seem to live, but he's just too tough to die.

2.3

I always wanted to be famous, to have my letters bound in books and poured over by future historians who were only curious to see exactly what my life was like as they wrote my biography (a national phenomenon and on top of the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks). So we bought journals and wrote back and forth, passing the letterbook to each other every two days or so, always with a new letter inside.

january 23

Today, I skipped homework to hang with Jordan and some other friends. I hope you don’t mind that your boyfriend is a slacker who will never get into college.

february 8

Whenever I go to lunch, I’m always looking for a new group of people to sit with. I’m not sure why you always seem to get there late, but its fun watching you walk in circles like a nervous dog. And somehow, you always find me.

march 16

It’s so nice outside and you’re right next to me, but you still deserve a letter. I’m looking at the shades of your hair as they fall over your face. I think you’re asleep, but every now and again a bug will land on your skin and you’ll twitch.

april 30

Oh, My Gosh. One weekend away and you’re like a totally changed man. Where did this spicy hispanic lover come from with a rose in his teeth? I’m in shock! Did you really miss me that much?

may 14

I wish you would stay in town this summer. Your grandma seems really dope, but she’s not as cool as me. For example, I can make pies too. I can knit, badly. I own at least three ceramic angel figurines. But you’re going away, and you left the book for me to write in while you’re gone. I’m not sure what the point is, but you said you’d read it like a desert survivor drinks water.

june 2

So you’ll be thrilled to learn that when Chuck came by to do his brother-in-law magic on me, I did not die. The boat he put me in (against my will, mind you) did not rebel, as I assumed it would. Instead, it was Chuck who behaved unexpectedly. Chuck cried. In the middle of the lake, totally silent, just a wet face and a soft, huffy breathing. He didn’t talk, and I didn’t talk either. Not for a long time. I was just thinking of you, and I’m sure he was thinking of Melli. In the end, I think I worked more magic on him.

july 22

You haven’t told me whether I should mail this to you so you can write in it every once in a while. It’s really starting to fill up with me blathering on. Soon there won’t be much space for you to respond at all! I’ll have to start using — gasp! Economy of words. That’s unlike me.

august 16

You called today. You didn’t stay on the line for long enough. I’m really getting pissed, but I’m not saying it anywhere but here. Why did you say you love me?

september 28

I’ve been holding on to a lot of emotion for a really long time, but I’m ready to just explode. I came home today and just sort of melted into the carpet. I cried, you know? Like big sobs, uncontrollable, and just yesterday you said you loved me. People who’ve got love don’t sob until their whole face is a swollen mask so puffy as to be useless for facial expressions like rage or fear, which are what they’re feeling, of course. That’s me, there, on the ground, trying to think of reasons to keep going without even a visit from you, or a call, or anything. But I love you, and I want this to work, so I keep pounding away like a clockwork man, hoping against hope to get a heart out of the effort. I just want your heart. I just want your heart. I’m tired of my own; I just want your heart.

You never came back to finish the book. What would people think?