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

Hope and Sorrow Wash over us in waves of amber and grey

Dear K,

It is late and I am depressed. I don't to die, but I'm not really sure I want to live. If I could sleep for a century and wake up from my dreams in time to see the earth get hit by an asteroid, well I think I would. I want to be fluid and mercurial and not bound to my body or the laws of reality.

I want to waste away in the real world and get stronger in my dreams everyday.

I dreamt that I was poor and driving through a graveyard with my girlfriend, and then we stopped to have a picnic lunch, and we found that one of the graves was made of quarters and silver dollars and other coins. We took them because we were poor, and I carried her giggling and kicking all the way back to the car and we drove on and made love by the side of the road, spilling all of the quarters out of our pockets onto the floor and never caring for a moment.

Once I dreamt that I was a tree, and I grew tall and strong and shot rainbow colored peppers from the edges of my leaves that exploded on contact with a psychedelic-mushroom cloud. I lived a full life and died in peace at the center of the forest, surrounded by other trees that couldn't talk or listen.

When I was six I had a fever dream that a dragon was robbing the bank where my mother worked. I woke up shouting and vomited on my bed.

I dream of things that will be and things that haven't ever been and never will be. I'm tired of what is and what can be. I want to live in the land of dreams and impossibilities.

The only question is where to find the poisoned apple or enchanted spindle.

Regards,
K

Forks, Books, and Fucking Drum Circles.

Dear K,

Today it was warm, well it got up into the thirties. I'm wrestling with something else too. Someone has come back into my life, and I'm torn between the scars and the love buried underneath.

I feel my life forking again. I'm excited to see which way it goes. Because life isn't something to be suffered, it isn't a drudgery to be borne. I'm excited for my life.

I need to leave this town next year though. As much as I love it, as much as I love home I need a bigger city, I need vibrancy and life, and that is hard to have in a town full of banks.

I miss college, and being poor, not that I'm rich but I felt like I was accomplishing something by struggling. My life is too easy here. I only have to show up at work for eight hours and they pay me. I don't have to put in the effort, but I do.

I need young people, and I'm surrounded by middle age and automobiles. I want to ride trains with strangers and get into arguments with people about what Proust really meant, not that I've ever read any Proust or have any idea what he meant, or why he would write such a god-damn long "book".

I'm trying to write again. Did you know that whiskey helps? I'm at a bar right now. My first glass of whiskey carried me three pages, and those were just sketches of dialogue, once I get back to them and embroider them I'll have nine or ten out of them.

But now there are too many people, and everybody is here with their friends, and all of mine live in other cities.

Also the people who play the drum circle every tuesday and wednesday night below my apartment are here. I'm not sure why they have their own place and their own space to play in. I fucking hate drum circles.

Regards,
K

please connect this call

Dear K-

I don’t. The days get bleaker and I get more bitter and weathered with every exposure to the winter wind. I’m faded, resting pale against a pastel landscape. I miss the sun, the summer air and the summer cares. Deep in my bones I know it will someday come again, but for the moment I ache for relief. Hours stretch into days and days into weeks, and eventually I will be old and remember all the winter days I wasted in anticipation of spring. And perhaps I will regret.

It’s funny how little things can throw off your balance. I’m a creature of routine, and I rely on stability and repetition. Something as simple as having to shift which wrist I wear my watch upon due to the bruises left by an IV needle is enough to set me off-kilter for the entire day. I look to my wrist for a sense of temporal bearings and instead I find a sickly green and grey bruise with a tiny purple pinprick at its center. My stomach lurches, I quickly glance at the watch on my opposite limb, but already I have been knocked out of step and I’m stumbling to find my rhythm. I fumble with some paperwork, drop my pen, forget to smile to a patient. My mind is still thinking about the bruises.
I don’t adapt well to change. I hate transitional periods. Lately, I’ve been feeling like this entire year is a transition, and it makes me sick.

I’m going back abroad in the summer. I plan to see Brno again…the city I loved but couldn’t have, although in all fairness I had every opportunity to take it back. I’m both eager to see it and frightened. What if it’s not as beautiful as I remember? Will I still be content to stroll its streets and admire my surroundings, or will I find it more faded and dreary than my crisp, beautiful memories? But what if I find it even lovelier than in my dreams? What if I break my heart all over again and throw my life to ruin just in order to return to its embrace? What emotion will I feel when I smell the brewery? Taste the halusky, drink a beer, amble through the Tesco, hear the fluid river of native Czech language spewing from a citizen’s mouth?

Don’t worry. It’s not a one-way ticket, and I’m being accompanied by a lover who aims to keep me settled in America at all costs. He’ll bring me back. He’s part of the reason, whether he’d like me to admit it or not, that I stayed in America in the first place. He was one tether that I couldn’t shake loose.

Be cheerful to compensate for my persistent gloominess.

-K

None of these things.

Dear K,

I've had several drafts of responses to your last couple of letters. But I'm not going to send them because they are too tragic and true. It is raining right now. January rain is a sign of hope, and I feel it welling up inside of me. I'm looking up at tall buildings with the promise of a future instead of imagining them crumbling to the ground.

Can you feel it? Can you feel the edges of your consciousness slide towards hope? Do you feel the wonderful tingling of tomorrow, as your soul bends around the other side of the world, glimpsing at the bright light heat of tomorrow's sun melting everything around us? I feel it. I feel that hope for the children playing in the street.

I've been helping homeless people eat, handing them money and telling them that they know what they need to spend it on and who am I to tell them what to do.

I feel it. I feel the hope that is Winter's secret promise. This is the only way to be ready for Spring.

Tell everyone you see that I love them,
and that none of these things
stop a brighter tomorrow from coming,

-K

a baby on the bus might have needs so easy

Dear K-

I retract my previous apology for delayed correspondence. While I don’t exactly hold my breath in anticipation of your responses, I do look forward to eventually receiving them. After several weeks and still no word, I begin to wonder if you’ve become distracted by adventures unfolding in closer proximity. I wish I could be as lucky. Here, things are dull and quiet, as if the blanket of snow laying on the ground outside has muffled all activity in the town. I find myself miserable and tired frequently, and I wonder if I’m getting the proper balance of nutrients in my diet. Perhaps it is just this dreary winter weather.

Last we spoke you were enamored by a girl who wouldn’t return your affection. An unfortunately familiar story, I’m afraid. And what of her? Has she yet yielded to your advances, or has she dissolved away like sugar into coffee? Perhaps now you only see and hear her when you shut your eyes. I hope that’s not the case. I hope you can open your eyes and see her smiling before you, sitting cross-legged on the couch beside you. Maybe she’ll fill your life with watercolors, your days seeping into smooth blues and faded greens as she hangs her wrinkled compositions about your living room. Be careful of those artist types, mind you. We tend to be a fairly unstable and unhappy bunch.

But yet I am only left here to speculate and wonder, because I have no denial or confirmation from you. Perhaps you’re busy now with work and you’ve forgotten all about her and everything else external to a new-found business lifestyle. Perhaps she’s finally come around to loving you, and you are so caught up in a new love affair that you don’t have time for a distant friend who only can leave you choppy words upon a stark white page. I wouldn’t be offended if that were the case. Perhaps you simply haven’t turned on your computer for three weeks and are shunning electronic society.

Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

Floating like line-dry laundry in summertime,
-K

tirer comme des lapins

Dear K-

Again I find myself apologizing for a lack of correspondence. This time my silence was not entirely intentional- I merely became sidetracked and bogged down and unable to adequately address your letter. Then, when I found myself ready to make a reply, I discovered the g key of my keyboard to be broken. I wasn’t sure if I could pull off a response without using a single g. And so I waited, and now this letter may be full of as many g’s as I so desire.

And so with great grinning greetings I gingerly grate out my gentle correspondence.

I hear you have a new flat, something near the center of town and overlooking a garden. That’s all I really need to know about it, for I’ve already perfected a quaint image in my mind of what I expect it to resemble, and in some ways I’m afraid to spoil that daydream. I imagine there’s a firm wooden desk upon which you scrawl your letters and your prose, with your secrets laying stifled in the dark corners of the drawers. The place is relatively well-kept and enjoys lovely natural lighting, although you’ve purchased several floor lamps to aid in lightening the atmosphere at night. Especially now, as the days get shorter, you most likely find artificial lighting as the primarily illumination of your hours (as unfortunate as that may be for our health and happiness).

Whenever I imagine that garden, however, for some reason I picture a sort of graveyard or memorial. There are weeping angels made of stone that hang their dark faces to stare at the neatly trimmed lawn beneath them. The sidewalk is even and holds a gentle curve incorporated purely for aesthetic purposes, to maintain a sense of organic form. I like to picture you ambling through the grass in the dreary winter afternoons, avoiding the cracks in the pavement because you’re afraid you’ll hurt your mother. You imagine the statues to be alive, but to be moving so slowly it is imperceptible to your eyes. Only when you blink, that is what relieves them of their lethargy and for that simple split second when your eyes are closed tight, you imagine they look up to the sky and wail in desperation, they shake their fists and claw at the earth, and a few of them simply let their tears fall to earth to become small round pebbles in the soil at their feet. But maybe not.

Light dawns and marble heads. What the hell does that mean?

-K