Dear K,
Are these even ourselves up here? I can't be all of myself at one time, I am too many contradictions. I pull myself apart. I'm writing something now. It is about the search for redemption, but why does that matter in the end? If god doesn't exist then we're all just corpses in the ground, and if Jesus was right then we're already forgiven by the time we die. Why is it important to redeem yourself?
What have I done. Where am I going. Why am I anywhere.
I read your latest letter, and it was so beautiful. My eyes watered as I read it and I held my breath, and then I read the poems you wrote down for me out loud to my empty apartment. I don't think I pronounced everything right, but it was beautiful anyway.
I'm going to buy some envelopes and stamps. I'll start physically sending things to you.
If we're in a play who is the audience and who is the author? Do you believe in reincarnation? Of course not, it is a very silly notion. How about this, instead of reincarnation there are great cycles that run through all things. There are even cycles of types of people, we're all variations on a theme. I think I might be a variation on Edgar Allen Poe.
If you do believe in reincarnation, then you'll understand that I am ready for nirvana.
How long until I can escape?
I feel trapped at every turn.
-K
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
heart consumption
Dear K-
You’re an interesting case. It seems you want to be close and you want to be intimate-you need those relationships in your life that make you feel worthwhile. But at the same instant there also exists a dismissive trait, one that pushes away and fears that close attachment can only bring disappointment and regret.
Sometimes I read your letters and wonder if you’re still writing as me, or if you’re writing as you. Do you understand what I mean? Sometimes I feel so similar. As if we’re both portraying this painful and delicate theatre performance, and right now you’re in the middle of Act Two, at your character’s lowest point. I’m in the background for now, merely moving about the scenery. And for now I am content there; I’ve been distancing myself from family and friends again, as I periodically do. But your character, desperately fishing about for his heart among the sewer muck, is at an all-time low. He’s moaning and dreaming of something better, but the dream is blank and white like a bank of new fallen snow.
What of Act Three? Where is the redemption? Will it come? How long is this miserable second act going to draw out before we finally break for intermission?
I’m sending you scraps of my life, in the hopes that it will make you smile. I want you to pick up the broken pieces of my days and fill your nights, finally finding sleep among the bits of me you find in them. I’m not sure what else to do. I wish I could send you pages upon pages of letters and drawings, but I feel like that would be a less accurate portrayal of what my life is truly like right now. It’s not flowing or flourishing. It’s flaking off, like rust from oxidized metal, and I’m sweeping up those little bits and sending them to you. Hopefully it doesn’t make you angry. You can just toss them away if you’d rather.
Warmer weather brings lighter hearts,
-K
You’re an interesting case. It seems you want to be close and you want to be intimate-you need those relationships in your life that make you feel worthwhile. But at the same instant there also exists a dismissive trait, one that pushes away and fears that close attachment can only bring disappointment and regret.
Sometimes I read your letters and wonder if you’re still writing as me, or if you’re writing as you. Do you understand what I mean? Sometimes I feel so similar. As if we’re both portraying this painful and delicate theatre performance, and right now you’re in the middle of Act Two, at your character’s lowest point. I’m in the background for now, merely moving about the scenery. And for now I am content there; I’ve been distancing myself from family and friends again, as I periodically do. But your character, desperately fishing about for his heart among the sewer muck, is at an all-time low. He’s moaning and dreaming of something better, but the dream is blank and white like a bank of new fallen snow.
What of Act Three? Where is the redemption? Will it come? How long is this miserable second act going to draw out before we finally break for intermission?
I’m sending you scraps of my life, in the hopes that it will make you smile. I want you to pick up the broken pieces of my days and fill your nights, finally finding sleep among the bits of me you find in them. I’m not sure what else to do. I wish I could send you pages upon pages of letters and drawings, but I feel like that would be a less accurate portrayal of what my life is truly like right now. It’s not flowing or flourishing. It’s flaking off, like rust from oxidized metal, and I’m sweeping up those little bits and sending them to you. Hopefully it doesn’t make you angry. You can just toss them away if you’d rather.
Warmer weather brings lighter hearts,
-K
Monday, February 14, 2011
Untitled
Dear K,
Why am I so lonely? I have friends and relatives. What is so important about having a physical relationship? Remember that person I talked about? The one that came back into my life. Well I cut her out again because it was too painful otherwise.
We were caught in a cycle of pain, and I wanted out. I still want out. I want out of this plan I have for my life. I want out of everyone's plan for my life. I want to be able to write for days and weeks at a time without feeling exhausted by every line and every scene. I want to be thin and beautiful. But mostly I'm tired.
Spring is around the corner, maybe I'll be happier then.
Every year feels worse than the last.
Regrets and wishes keep me up at night,
I wish I had someone to soothe me to sleep,
K
Why am I so lonely? I have friends and relatives. What is so important about having a physical relationship? Remember that person I talked about? The one that came back into my life. Well I cut her out again because it was too painful otherwise.
We were caught in a cycle of pain, and I wanted out. I still want out. I want out of this plan I have for my life. I want out of everyone's plan for my life. I want to be able to write for days and weeks at a time without feeling exhausted by every line and every scene. I want to be thin and beautiful. But mostly I'm tired.
Spring is around the corner, maybe I'll be happier then.
Every year feels worse than the last.
Regrets and wishes keep me up at night,
I wish I had someone to soothe me to sleep,
K
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Continuity Of Self
Dear K,
That is the way I have always been. I've never felt a continuity of identity. I'm not the same person I was yesterday or a couple of hours ago. I wake up several times each week wondering who I am and have to spend the first hour or two of my day reminding myself of my name and how that person acts. My mornings are filled with panic when ever I'm interacting with someone I think I know, after every action I ask myself "Is that something that 'I' would do?"
It is like waking up without a mask, only to find out that the face underneath is blank and featureless.
I am constantly amazed by the assertion of identity by others, because mine is actually so frail and thin. I have journals filled with things I've done and the way I felt about them at that moment, and all of it is useless when I wake up.
I think my greatest fear is that I'll wake up one day and not be able to know who I am ever again.
I want to look forward to your warm linoleum floors.
Waiting,
K
That is the way I have always been. I've never felt a continuity of identity. I'm not the same person I was yesterday or a couple of hours ago. I wake up several times each week wondering who I am and have to spend the first hour or two of my day reminding myself of my name and how that person acts. My mornings are filled with panic when ever I'm interacting with someone I think I know, after every action I ask myself "Is that something that 'I' would do?"
It is like waking up without a mask, only to find out that the face underneath is blank and featureless.
I am constantly amazed by the assertion of identity by others, because mine is actually so frail and thin. I have journals filled with things I've done and the way I felt about them at that moment, and all of it is useless when I wake up.
I think my greatest fear is that I'll wake up one day and not be able to know who I am ever again.
I want to look forward to your warm linoleum floors.
Waiting,
K
Monday, February 7, 2011
magnum plots
Dear K,
When I was young my teachers used to always tell me to write about what I know. They discouraged me from stretching into any topic area that was beyond my knowledge. I could not write about being a 32 year old man in a struggling marriage. Nor could I write about being a sea monster trying to find acceptance in the cruel dark cold of the bottom of the ocean. All I could write about was being an angst-filled teenage girl stuck in a small Midwestern town.
So that’s what I wrote about, because that’s what my teachers wanted. I wrote about the endless cups of bitter coffee in cafes and unrequited high school love and basketball. But I still dreamed of living a more interesting life, one that would permit me to write about war or true heartbreak or all the big-hitter topics of literature. Maybe I’d hunt a great white whale or go to the bull fights in Spain.
Eventually, I escaped the misconception that I could only write about what I know in terms of my own life. The narrators shifted to become the 32 year old man, or the soldier, or the spoiled, hopelessly bored rich girl. Even though it wasn’t exactly me, it was still me. I was still hidden within those characters. Even if I tried to eliminate myself completely from the text, I’d still find my finger tickling through the letters, my hair weaved between the paragraphs, or my eyes set dark and sad in the background. And that’s when I realized that I was still writing about what I know. Always. And in a way it became a peculiar game that I played with myself. How much could I morph, how deeply could I hide my true self within the pages?
It allows you to escape a bit, to be that different person for the days or months that you are writing as a character. But it fucks up your reality. When you set down the pen or stop typing the keys you still have to return to the standard personality, the person who comes and goes to work each day and interacts with society. Sometimes it isn’t as easy as I’d like. Sometimes I show up for a coffee date still bending like an alcoholic businessman, or show up for an appointment speaking like a disappointed weatherman. It’s not so easy to shake the lives I create on the page, and sometimes those lives are more interesting than mine and I don’t exactly want to set them aside right away. It’s almost as if maybe I can eek out a little more creativity, find a little more inspiration for the text, if I can just persist in that mindset for only a little longer.
I hope you don’t get trapped in characters like I do, but perhaps we are possibly alike in this idea.
Are the sun’s rays looking longer to you? I swear they are stretching further every day, coating another twenty minutes more or so with every passing week. The day approaches when we will be able to soak in their warmth, laying on the linoleum floor in front of the kitchen windows and smiling at the ceiling fan.
Soon,
-K
When I was young my teachers used to always tell me to write about what I know. They discouraged me from stretching into any topic area that was beyond my knowledge. I could not write about being a 32 year old man in a struggling marriage. Nor could I write about being a sea monster trying to find acceptance in the cruel dark cold of the bottom of the ocean. All I could write about was being an angst-filled teenage girl stuck in a small Midwestern town.
So that’s what I wrote about, because that’s what my teachers wanted. I wrote about the endless cups of bitter coffee in cafes and unrequited high school love and basketball. But I still dreamed of living a more interesting life, one that would permit me to write about war or true heartbreak or all the big-hitter topics of literature. Maybe I’d hunt a great white whale or go to the bull fights in Spain.
Eventually, I escaped the misconception that I could only write about what I know in terms of my own life. The narrators shifted to become the 32 year old man, or the soldier, or the spoiled, hopelessly bored rich girl. Even though it wasn’t exactly me, it was still me. I was still hidden within those characters. Even if I tried to eliminate myself completely from the text, I’d still find my finger tickling through the letters, my hair weaved between the paragraphs, or my eyes set dark and sad in the background. And that’s when I realized that I was still writing about what I know. Always. And in a way it became a peculiar game that I played with myself. How much could I morph, how deeply could I hide my true self within the pages?
It allows you to escape a bit, to be that different person for the days or months that you are writing as a character. But it fucks up your reality. When you set down the pen or stop typing the keys you still have to return to the standard personality, the person who comes and goes to work each day and interacts with society. Sometimes it isn’t as easy as I’d like. Sometimes I show up for a coffee date still bending like an alcoholic businessman, or show up for an appointment speaking like a disappointed weatherman. It’s not so easy to shake the lives I create on the page, and sometimes those lives are more interesting than mine and I don’t exactly want to set them aside right away. It’s almost as if maybe I can eek out a little more creativity, find a little more inspiration for the text, if I can just persist in that mindset for only a little longer.
I hope you don’t get trapped in characters like I do, but perhaps we are possibly alike in this idea.
Are the sun’s rays looking longer to you? I swear they are stretching further every day, coating another twenty minutes more or so with every passing week. The day approaches when we will be able to soak in their warmth, laying on the linoleum floor in front of the kitchen windows and smiling at the ceiling fan.
Soon,
-K
To Sleep
Dear K,
I'm still in the grips of this low tide. I can't sleep. I eat and it tastes like ashes. I drink but I am still thirsty, and when I bend towards the earth I find it farther down than when I started.
I went and danced this weekend, and I drank whiskey like tomorrow was the second coming and Jesus had just said there wouldn't be any whiskey in New Jerusalem.
Send me everything you want.
I think I might want to be Kurt Vonnegut. I wish my youth hadn't been ruined by not going to war and seeing that profound demise and misery, but that's missing the whole point isn't it?
I'm not sure that I can do anything right. I feel my mind slipping away, and I'm losing my edges. I'm dying so slowly it just looks like living, and isn't that the real tragedy?
Nobody can save us. I'm not really sure there's anything to be saved. I wish we were all just dreams.
When?
K
I'm still in the grips of this low tide. I can't sleep. I eat and it tastes like ashes. I drink but I am still thirsty, and when I bend towards the earth I find it farther down than when I started.
I went and danced this weekend, and I drank whiskey like tomorrow was the second coming and Jesus had just said there wouldn't be any whiskey in New Jerusalem.
Send me everything you want.
I think I might want to be Kurt Vonnegut. I wish my youth hadn't been ruined by not going to war and seeing that profound demise and misery, but that's missing the whole point isn't it?
I'm not sure that I can do anything right. I feel my mind slipping away, and I'm losing my edges. I'm dying so slowly it just looks like living, and isn't that the real tragedy?
Nobody can save us. I'm not really sure there's anything to be saved. I wish we were all just dreams.
When?
K
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
romance to the grave
Dear K-
I wondered how long the bout of euphoria would last. You and me, we’re meant for crumbling. We dream and aspire and build build build our beautiful cities, carved from stone and forests and earth, but in the end our lovely spires will come tumbling down. Our foundation is weak. We can try to build our hopes as many times as we’d like, and maybe those glittering pinnacles will stand erect and admirable for some period of time, but eventually that foundation will give way (just as it has always and will always give way) and we will crumble.
I’ve been watching weathermen on the television sputter into icy microphones, with fogged over glasses and frostbitten peachy cheeks. The snow gusts in horizontal waves, like a wintry white wall that pulls at their furry hoods and makes them brace their feet like an awkwardly posed statue. This miserable weather allowed me to leave work early, mostly because all our patients scheduled for the afternoon decided to reschedule in light of the predicted climate. I spent the free afternoon shoveling the parking lot, because I get paid to do so. Unfortunately, it was truly a Sisyphean effort. Within minutes of moving on to a new section, the previously cleared section would be filled with two to three inches of new snow blowing in from the North. I still labored away for two hours, gaining the glittering adornment of an ice headband across my scalp where my hood and earmuffs failed to overlap. I felt no cold. It was a matter of continuing to move, feeling the muscles burn in my back as I bent to lift a shovel-full and toss it over the curb. By the end of it all, my cheeks were red like cherries and my eyes were smeared with a coal-like lining. Apparently Sephora isn’t blizzard-proof.
Hold on tight. We’ll get through this lull. The current is very strong, and I want you to stay with me a little while. Even if it means I need to start sending you things in the mail. I’ll send you whatever comes to hand. Letters, cocktail napkins with scribbled notes, conte crayon sketches, receipts for things I bought that reminded me of you. It doesn’t matter. I just want you to feel loved. I’ll send you fireworks, city asphalt, a rosary, children’s laughter, shooting stars, green chewy twigs, circuit boards, church chimes, old currency, sweater vests, blades of grass, ocean shells, whispered secrets, fears, dreams, regrets. It’s yours. It’s all yours, if you want it. It’s all that keeps my veins pumping blood to and fro in the cold nights.
Someday the sunlight will return, and maybe then I can stop running in circles. Maybe then I can run through the streets again and beat a path through the forest like I used to in Ljubljana.
Weary in the winter,
-K
I wondered how long the bout of euphoria would last. You and me, we’re meant for crumbling. We dream and aspire and build build build our beautiful cities, carved from stone and forests and earth, but in the end our lovely spires will come tumbling down. Our foundation is weak. We can try to build our hopes as many times as we’d like, and maybe those glittering pinnacles will stand erect and admirable for some period of time, but eventually that foundation will give way (just as it has always and will always give way) and we will crumble.
I’ve been watching weathermen on the television sputter into icy microphones, with fogged over glasses and frostbitten peachy cheeks. The snow gusts in horizontal waves, like a wintry white wall that pulls at their furry hoods and makes them brace their feet like an awkwardly posed statue. This miserable weather allowed me to leave work early, mostly because all our patients scheduled for the afternoon decided to reschedule in light of the predicted climate. I spent the free afternoon shoveling the parking lot, because I get paid to do so. Unfortunately, it was truly a Sisyphean effort. Within minutes of moving on to a new section, the previously cleared section would be filled with two to three inches of new snow blowing in from the North. I still labored away for two hours, gaining the glittering adornment of an ice headband across my scalp where my hood and earmuffs failed to overlap. I felt no cold. It was a matter of continuing to move, feeling the muscles burn in my back as I bent to lift a shovel-full and toss it over the curb. By the end of it all, my cheeks were red like cherries and my eyes were smeared with a coal-like lining. Apparently Sephora isn’t blizzard-proof.
Hold on tight. We’ll get through this lull. The current is very strong, and I want you to stay with me a little while. Even if it means I need to start sending you things in the mail. I’ll send you whatever comes to hand. Letters, cocktail napkins with scribbled notes, conte crayon sketches, receipts for things I bought that reminded me of you. It doesn’t matter. I just want you to feel loved. I’ll send you fireworks, city asphalt, a rosary, children’s laughter, shooting stars, green chewy twigs, circuit boards, church chimes, old currency, sweater vests, blades of grass, ocean shells, whispered secrets, fears, dreams, regrets. It’s yours. It’s all yours, if you want it. It’s all that keeps my veins pumping blood to and fro in the cold nights.
Someday the sunlight will return, and maybe then I can stop running in circles. Maybe then I can run through the streets again and beat a path through the forest like I used to in Ljubljana.
Weary in the winter,
-K
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