Dear Runner

Runner, 

One can't get past the emptiness of lost days. Time spent senseless, without thought or feeling, carves out a hole in the consciousness which no amount of forward motion can fill. We attempt to escape time when we deaden ourselves to its passage and slip into routine or simple blankness. I fear I was guilty of this for some many months before your visit and it was only the intense depth of my desire for you that pulled me from that pit. Life had been lost and I found myself more than ever time's victim, moving forward without having lived and lacking the self I might have gained had I fully experienced those days. The anticipation of your arrival shook me out of the dream-sleep that I called my waking life and I experienced each day you were here so fully and so closely that I only recognized my previous failures in the light of your gaze. I began to see everything the way I thought you might see it and by living vicariously through your judgement I was able to take objective count of all the days I lost to blindness and lack of creativity. The unexpected act of holding you in my arms again awoke in me some animal urge and it is only now that I must attempt to turn it off or at least try to turn it down. 

I think about the way you touched me, so lightly- my skin beneath your fingers quivering into gooseflesh. I think about your arms- so smooth and whitesoft, and I remember days long past of innocence and fear, of hiding and groping for each other beneath the harsh light of the world around us. We held to each other through the tremors of other people's opinions, drinking ourselves into some state of absurdity. I could never convince you that you weren't a monstrosity, Frankenstein's brute cobbled together with dead people's skin and bones. How hard I tried to give you the things you didn't think you deserved and maybe even, that's what I'm doing now. We were so much less then. To look at us now- we're practically alight with the wealth of age, experience, wisdom. When we met again, older and wiser- I thought that I could maintain a certain emotional equilibrium; I thought I could maintain a certain dignity. But, emotional weakness stripped me of all my dignity and I began to wonder if I would ever again face anything bravely. I have jumped again off the cliffs of sanity and into the madness I always sought in your arms. There is a great divide and in between the spaces there lingers a love I thought I had mostly come to terms with. But, it seems I was simply storing it away, compressed into a tiny package and like some wildly grinning Jack-in-the-Box, it exploded from its secret spot and now wobbles to and fro- maniacally mocking my once simple life. 

The moon is full tonight and I can see it glowing outside my window, little lines of light cascading down through the cracked blinds. Dust glitters, floating freely around the room and I think of how much I have changed since I last slept beside you. I rise and walk the streets alone, unseen, a ghost to those around me. I drag this heavy past behind me- as if an empty coffin in a Spaghetti Western. Perhaps, I should attempt to shed the skin of my past- take what I can from it and move on. But, it seems the stars themselves do not wish for me to begin anew- to find a fresh start in this world of worlds. Maybe that is why I wander the streets, thinking of you, not even knowing what I want to put in my coffin but always imagining that it was filled with something I will never have. I keep dreaming of you, of the curve of your chin and the bend in your fingers and of all the years that went by and yet I still remember the exact placement of each vein as it crawls down your arms. You have lived all these long years on a pedestal in my mind, standing above me on a stage and looking down upon me. I had always imagined your expression as one of disappointment because I used to feel you were always ashamed of my lack, my lack of coolness, of wisdom, of tact. But, after seeing you again with the weight of all these years behind us, you still stand on that pedestal but you look down on me with pride and love. There's hardly a better feeling that I can remember than the one that swells up inside me and explodes over like a glass of Champagne poured too fast. Beneath your approving gaze, I beam like a child given a gift. And my life is suddenly a very different place now that you are alive again in it. Whether you return words to me or not, you inspire me to write, to think, to see more, to be more. And for that I will be forever indebted to you. Wherever life takes us- a part of me will forever belong to you. 

Keep it safe, 

Fernando