A Frail and Slender Lie

To Catherine, New.

2011-08-07T20:18:00.002-04:00

Dear Catherine,

I know it's been some time since we've written. I like to imagine that you didn't respond to my last letter because you were caught up in an intriguing, mystifying romance. I see you, arm in arm with a smiling stranger- laughing, and I see myself- always looking for you in others, always looking for you in myself. The world spins around the drab and the common. We wake. We eat. We sleep. And I still try to search for beauty in the crisp winds and cloudless skies, in the flow of traffic and the beating pulse of a vibrant city. Since our last communication I have moved around a bit, traveled here and there. I have seen the lands beyond and for all their glory, the ways in which everything is the same baffles me more than the ways in which it's different. I live on the ocean now, again, pacing the sand and thinking old thoughts, thinking of when they were so new and glowing, pulsing beneath my skin, weaving in and out of all that I was. I wrote then, of then; I reminded you of the hesitant glances and and the sudden, unexpected physical contact, your hand on my knee, the other hand covering your mouth as you laughed.

This ocean is colder and there's never a time when it's hot enough to race into the water or slap sand on each others backs. There aren't fireflies here or thunderstorms and I miss warm rain at night with flashes of bright white in the sky more than I miss most things. The city sleeps earlier than I'd like it to as well. But, Miguel and my nieces are only a short drive away and feeling a connection to something whole and dynamic outside of myself is really all I have ever wanted. I often wonder, as my brother's daughters cling to my leg if I am missing out on some important, necessary experience by not wanting to be a parent. But, when they fall down and cry or ask questions I'm not sure how to answer, I look helplessly toward their parents- the desire or ability to nurture vacant and confused inside me. It is often in these same moments that I think of you so tenderly, the babe I held against my chest and soothed to sleep, perhaps the last time I felt truly and wholly this love that I can't shed. I want to give it to someone, to pawn it off a while- relax and let someone else carry its burden. But, they balk, as you did at its weight, its size, the delicate need of its tendril-like arms, reaching out to you and practically begging for absolution.

What am I ever asking for, Catherine, that is so hard for anyone to give? Devotion to the written word? Dedication to the knowledge and uncovering of hidden truths? A headstrong development of educated opinions? A love of tiny things, observing the things that go left unnoticed. I found all of these things once, in you, freckled as you were with an irresistible innocence of ill-experience. Before your brother fell sick the world truly did smile upon you, cradled you in its arms like I once did. And I wonder, now that you've lived more years, if you still have that quiet gaze that never accuses but yet always asks. Are you everything to some brilliant man who knows how lucky he is and who gently brushes back behind your ear that little hair that always strays? Does he hold you in his sleep and touch you lightly, your spine tingling up your neck?

I hope you are surrounded by all the happiness and the beauty that we once knew and I hope you'll tell me what does surround you and what you gaze upon with your contented smile, palms pressed up against your lips, fingers cupping your cheek.

Yours again,
Fernando

Caught Up In The Company of my Collapsing Consciousness. From Fernando. Three.

2010-01-19T03:06:00.002-05:00

Catherine,

I am sorry to hear about your brother. I don't recall you speaking of him much before but I suppose a thing like that just tends to sit in a fixed point in one's mind. It doesn't come up in your daily thoughts because it neither worsens nor improves; it never changes. It is during this season that I feel the tug of others most often, most deeply. My own brother is far away, his own wife- a family. I expect him to call; he always does. He's very thoughtful, Miguel. He's always been the one everyone turns to, always the one Mother asked for advice, looked at with proud eyes full of adoration. I believe I confused her. She always looked at me edgewise, worried. I think she saw my loneliness as a reflection of her own, something she didn't need to be reminded of. She felt my loss and I think she felt somehow responsible for it. Without any kind of focus, I became a prisoner to my own emotions. I might have thought it normal, my secrecy, my silence had Miguel not been so goddamned perfect. I don't resent him for it. On the contrary, he is one of the better people I have ever met. He always has a kind word, dedicated to his work on a quickly dying newspaper. He is a great father and husband- all things I will never be. Not because I am incapable of finding (again) anyone willing to marry me but because I am incapable of acting as though what I want is a normal life.

There is something to be said for passion in one's work, surely. I may not have a comfy, high paying job or even a low paying job I am passionate about but my work lives outside of the drab daily. My writing lives beside me, as alive as any woman who may sleep by my side (present company excluded). It doesn't ask, it demands to be given top priority in my life. Without it, I am awash, at sea, at a complete loss. I lose the ability to see myself from another perspective. Without it, I am nothing. Everything that is important to me, everything I hold dear- I express with my words.

I spend days caught up in the company of my own collapsing consciousness, cowering beneath the pages I have written. Perhaps I am delusional; maybe it's something your brother and I have in common. Perhaps I will live and die- a slave to words- without them ever offering me anything in return. Or, it could be that I am dooming myself to a life less whole, a life devoid of other luxuries. But, I know that words give me things in return: your words as they sound whispered quietly, almost mumbled beneath my breath. The sounds of them, tracing their shapes with my lips and tongue- these are the gifts that words give me and I give my thanks by giving my life to them.

Your words and thoughts echo through time and space and find me a slave to their rhythms. I sit in utter silence and stare at their shapes sliding softly down the length of your letters, S's curved just so and little curly loops on your M's. I see you as well, skipping about the edges of my thoughts. I notice the way a girl's hair shines in the sunlight and I imagine you standing next to me, noticing too and noting my noticing but not saying a word. And I know with a brief
glance and a smile that we both see beauty in every detail. I try to recall instances when things like this actually happened in real life but I have an increasingly hard time separating our letters from reality. I suppose that is nothing out of the ordinary, though.

The sun is sinking in the sky behind me; sapphire clouds glow with bright orange hues. I think of you as I often do in times when the things around me change so drastically and I remain so endlessly and dramatically the same. I think of you on the road with your Mother, the two of you quiet and contemplative, the pity for your poor brother hanging in the air, saturating the silence with an ever present loss. But there is an understanding as well, a kinship between you two. I have such a vivid image of your mother though I have no actual basis for this. I suppose it is like something out of a book written by a young English woman, such gentle propriety and comfort in silence. I imagine your brother trying awkwardly to communicate something that he himself doesn't truly understand, and giving up- his gaze aimed out the window and his mind clearly elsewhere entirely. Your descriptions of his postcard, his painting, have lingered about my mind these few days that I have been contemplating a response, distracted so heavily by the photograph you sent. You look slightly wiser than I remember, perhaps just a bit less innocent. You have a beautiful melancholy in the way you hold your head up which is punctuated by a slight glint- a slyness in your eye. I try to imagine what someone who didn't know you would think of this photograph, though it seems that it's more like trying to separate you from my own impressions and biases. There is no doubt to your beauty, but I wonder how much I see because I want to and how many of the subtleties of your personality are actually conveyed.

I wanted to tell you how immensely honored I am to be a part of your perfect memory to replay in hopeless hours. Though, sometimes that perfect memory calls forth in me the most heavy lonliness. I am delighted to be the soul that is capable of balancing your own.

Fernando.

The Coincidences That Life Composes. From Catherine. Two.

2010-01-19T03:03:00.002-05:00

Fernando,

Strange the coincidences that life composes in the service of infusing a bittersweet air into the passing days. In the span of a few hours I have visited with the ghost of the past, the ghost of the present, and now perhaps I am childishly imagining another phantasm that may appear and guide me by the elbow out above the rooftops and speed me across the night to show me a bit of what the future holds (or maybe that is just the spirit of the season whispering in my inattentive ear). I had just returned from that opaline asylum where my brother resides to find your letter awaiting me like something dislodged from time. You are a curious echo of my brother. The voiceless nature of our relationship (your "silence amidst a sea of sounds", which extends even now in these letters), the restrained delicacy of our interactions, the unassuming intimacy we so easily fall into; all of this you share with my poor brother. You are both also prone to express yourself in the distancing, comforting (because compliant), all-encompassing composition of beautiful images. You use words, he uses charcoal and watercolor. Not that he has much else to fill his days, besides a bay window view of a dark valley beyond the grounds of the hospital, cradled by the shadows of bone-colored escarpments, and three lousy meals a day. He doesn't read and he doesn't write letters anymore, not even to our mother (of course she understands he is incapable, and I will accompany her on her visit over the holidays so there is someone else to share the gloom of that place with), but he revives images from various intact points of his memory and puts them down on that stiff watercolor paper rather vividly. From his days as an army engineer there are boats and bridges and mountain ranges of foreign lands; from his childhood a farm and goats and a meandering river beside a golden meadow, a toy house and yard with a pointillist garden and a fence that doesn't exist in reality (even in his fantasy he has constructed an obstacle between himself and his unrealizable former life); of me then a little girl in flower-patterned socks and pajamas in a sapphire colored room parallel to five or six quick brush strokes representing a feline form (his pet name for me is "Cat" or "Kitten"). But he slips away and then doesn't connect events like he used to and we know his sickness is getting worse despite the rainbow of various medicines they give him. He will hold conversations for a time, but then his gaze wanders about the room and usually settles on the window where light is gently falling, and then he wanders in worlds unknown to us, perhaps with my father, discussing their shared fate. On the train returning this evening I looked again and again at the postcard-size watercolor he had given me: a stretch of ocean, a few thin clouds, a blazing sun and white sands. After finding the envelope with your name on it I couldn't help but smile at the startling consonance that life often provides.

Here the sky is of a dark blue porcelain hue, the stars are appearing one by one, and I have read your letter through and am watching shadows come together on the horizon through my window. It is unusually still in the city this evening, as warm as it is not many people are walking about on the street below. Perhaps it is just that I am reading myself into what I see, I am projecting my feelings across the landscape, I am again regarding reality as a mirror. The loneliness of the city tonight is my loneliness. Other times I fear I feel an intimation of that sickness that swims in the blood of the males in my family. But I never feel myself disintegrating, I am always myself, total and lucid; I almost feel ashamed at the clarity with which life presents itself to me, as if I am hoarding some rare thing that my brother is very much in need of. My mother also bears her burdens with this strength, as if nature had provided the females in our family a surplus of what lacked in the other half. I think of you often, too, you are part of that staid happiness (perhaps happiness is not the right word, what then... confidence?). It is silly to think I would forget you, or that I don't reread our letters often, or that your presence does not linger behind so many of my thoughts, teasing them and pushing them outward toward connections I never would have made on my own. Our meeting was one of those events that come to color everything that follows, if not overtly than in hidden, poetic ways. At times when I am on the verge of sleep the air in my room softens and I feel the night open up over me, and the regular rhythm of waves gently delivers me into your arms. At other times, it is as simple as the coloring of a leaf flitting across the sidewalk in the wind, a little autumn flame dancing about, that I know you would have noticed and appreciated too.

Our time together was dream-like, you are correct, but it is just as fascinating to trace what the dream has become as we have given it a body, the weight and flesh of words, our description of it. We didn't need to speak much when we were together, everything we experienced was stored away silently, almost as if by a hand other than our own, placed gently in a deep and safe vault, enough to sustain us through all the rest of our time apart. The substance of those days was so warm and full and given with the breath of life that it would take anyone years of distance to understand it at all. And these sporadic communications, these letters from another world, are so replete that they enrich countless vacant hours. I picture you in the motion of your daily life. I see secret smiles that flash across your face and are then stifled by an intruding thought (I am the same) and I see you losing yourself in the diffuse glow of a golden day (I am the same) and I see you resting between menial daily affairs in the deep field of your immense thoughts. For we can't cure everything that is wrong with our lives, we can only expand so that it is but a fraction of the total. These words do expand across distances, and as you say, we repeat the dream of our first encounter again and again, we restructure it and replay it because it is all we know of each other, that is, everything we needed to know of each other. And it is something we are missing in our physical lives: a soul capable of balancing our own. I don't know if life will bring us together again, but isn't it almost enough to know our counterbalance is out there somewhere sharing our innermost thoughts when we least expect it? This is what your letters mean to me, since you asked, they mean that my thoughts have a companion, that my dreams are understandable, and that life has provided me with a perfect memory to replay in hopeless hours.

Night has fallen all around me here, the streetlights have come on and I feel like getting out and stepping into the cadence of other people's lives. Loneliness dissolves when the mind is enchanted by the spectacle of the world, even if it is only this tiny portion of it, this effervescent gem washed up on the banks of a shimmering river (the moon is shattering on its surface right now, I see it from my window). Think of the moon shattering across the sky. Think of me tonight. Write me soon.

Always,
Catherine

PS-Do you like the picture I enclosed? I thought you might like to have it, we haven't seen each other in such a long time. My hair is shorter now, but isn't a lovely portrait?

Silently Stoic Amidst A Sea of Sounds. To Catherine One.

2010-01-19T02:56:00.004-05:00

Dear Catherine,

I've been reading about language all day and I have been thinking about your unique relationship to expression. I have infrequently met someone so gesturally and facially expressive with so few direct, vocalized observations. I am similar though. I keep my thoughts in my head and only let them loose in very calculated language, very direct and careful turns of phrase. I suppose this is evident in my life within words- more alive than my daily, spoken life in every way. The memories of nights we spent together, enraptured by one another's presence but stoically silent amidst a sea of sounds, serenade me in my snoring sleep. I dream that we are laying together on the ocean beach, the sand solid but slowly sinking beneath our entwined forms. We do not speak in the dreams, as we barely spoke- sometimes in whispers- during those few real nights we spent together. They were so brief that they feel like a dream and this letter feels like some long forgotten entry in a long forgotten dream journal.

But, the dreams that I have of those times are what betrays them to the reality of existence. I know the events were more than a dream because the dreams are vivid memories and I wake with a rush of emotion which is so distinctly attached to a physical memory. In the dreams I can feel your hair brush lightly against my cheek. I can smell the salt of the sea and hear the swells as they spill out across the sand. I don't often smell my dreams but some sensory neuron in my brain, triggered by the thought of you, engages and every sense is heightened. I wake up in a sweat (perhaps another cause of the smell of salt) and I look around my bleak and empty room, the sun shining through the window. My alarm goes off suddenly- breaking me from my sleep induced stupor. And I stumble to work, half-blind to the world around me, startled by thoughts of you.

I feel like I have written you this exact letter time and time again. And perhaps I have done so in dreams, as vivid as the others I have of you, only I can't recall. Perhaps I am only clutching desperately to the memory of someone who has long forgotten me like I have done so with so many others. But, perhaps I continue to write you because I do not believe fully that you have forgotten completely. There is a part of me, yes, who idealizes and etches in bronze, who glazes and polishes each memory of you so that it shimmers perfectly and brightly in my periphery. But, there is also a part of me that remembers your flaws and even if I do not frequently re-read your letters, I still glow with the impression of your humanity. I still think of you and shine with the memories of your careful concern for your aging parents, the close consideration you paid each passing thought, each tiny detail of life.

I remember your letters as lustrous, radiant admissions of thoughts of the most delicate kind. And, I remember your touch- equally delicate and equally engrained in my perception of reality. For you see, Catherine, the world looks so much bleaker when I forget that you are in it- somewhere- even far away from me in thought, in action, in physical body. I remember your letters and the brightness they brought to my being. I wonder if my letters ever did anything similar for you. Often, I am prone to go on and on about my own problems. I seem hermetic and cantankerous and yet still frightfully hypersensitive. I miss engaging you in rich, detailed literary speak or even in pretty descriptions of a limited number of events which have been already excessively described.

I care little about my own repetition. I know that I feel the same way about you often and I do not think I sound excessively redundant, even if I do. Were I to sit and read my letters to back to back- my opinion would surely change. But, as it stands now, I simply want to have your narrative form again grace the presence of my mailbox and my weary old mind. Sufficed to say, I miss you.

Fondly and For Always,
Fernando

Dear Garett.

2009-08-03T20:32:00.004-04:00

Dear Garett,

Some time has passed since we spoke last but I do not feel as though anything between us has changed. I remember when we used to correspond regularly, when our ideas and phrases used to bounce back and forth between letters. Now, I am sitting alone in my room, listening to the distant sounds of a train passing in the night. I think of you often in times like these, when I am left to my own experiences and I am lost somewhere between the present and the past. The things I used to know haunt me and I ache for them long after they have vanished from my life. Sometimes I believe my memories of you are something I made up to convince myself that someone else could possibly understand me. But, then I laugh because I see you in my mind’s eye- shuffling through papers on your desk and looking up at me over the tops of your glasses.

We used to speak in poetic riddles, quoting here and there within our words, begging each other to find the poems within the sentences. I haven’t had a drink in months and things feel a bit foggy. My senses seem dampened by the lack of contrast, they are so often the same, so often still. And yet, I see things daily. A lemon tree, a brick building, a small bird landing on a sill. I know these things are as real as I. Yet, it is only when I am experiencing them that I feel truly alive.

I used to imagine that I would grow out of this benevolence. I used to sit back and daydream about a life full of action but somewhere I would know that it never would come to pass. Often, I hide from myself- drowning in a swell of images, of words, of distractions. But, I come back to this form- these letters- so that I can somehow get a grip on what I want to say to the world.

If I did more, if my courage could somehow outweigh my cowardice, then I might be able to finally make a life for myself but I spend so much time thinking of how things can go wrong that the time to do them fades farther and farther from grasp. Yesterday I took a run through the city. I watched the people moving past me; I thought of how different I was from everyone but also how much the same. I rode the subway and sat next to people who I wanted to speak to but somehow couldn’t find the words.

It was then, on that subway, with the squeal of train brakes screeching in the distance and the pressure popping in my ears that I remembered how truly alive I am in the heat of an interesting discussion, when I am drinking whisky and wine and feeling carefree and yet still so focused on arguing my point.

Unseen, I pass through these streets, a ghost to those among me. I drag a heavy past behind me- as if an empty coffin in a melo-dramatic Western. Perhaps I should shed the skin of my older experiences- take what I can from them 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 still wander aimlessly through the desert- not even knowing what I might put in my coffin but always imagining that it was filled with something I could never have.

I keep dreaming that I am someone else and I know I am not myself but I do not fear for who I am because it is, at least, new. I am subservient to a master I do not know and do not see. Walking around in a repeating scene of perfect joy- I suddenly realize that this can’t be real because everything I am seeing- I already saw. My body shakes and I quiver to be rid of this thing which I do not know. Upon waking, I lose sight of who it was and my suddenly submissive self shrinks off into the early morning sunlight.

The Cloak of Winter - From Fernando

2008-03-14T02:32:00.001-04:00

Dear Catherine,

The drab, grey cloak of winter is finally slipping off of the city. The days are getting slightly longer and every once in a while you can smell a light, fresh breeze. There were two gorgeous days in a row last week and just as I thought we had finally shaken the cold of winter a sudden storm shook in and shattered all my brilliant visions of sunbathing on the roof and reading beneath the budding branches. But, still, I know it is only a matter of time before I am back again into the swing of life. When the cold creeps around each corner it is easy to stay hidden in the house, a recluse. Just today, I developed a series of photographs I had taken last summer and I remembered how many letters we'd written, you and I, Garret and I, Miguel and I.

On New Years' Eve I realized that it had been an entire year since I had written Anna. I sat in my house alone, at ten o'clock in the evening and remembered that last year at that exact time I had been writing to Anna about all the things I wanted to change and all the things I intended to do. I don't remember what any of them are right now so I do not know if they were done or changed or what have you. I remember sitting on my roof and staring into the bright blue sky decorated with plush clouds and thinking of you and of when I would hear your voice again.

We have only known each other in letters since those days on the beach and I feel like I know you even better now. When you show me the things that you see, the man in the hat and the doorman and even your own face in the glass, I see everything through your eyes and it is like I am reading the story of your life. This is what I love about my favorite writers: that I can see things from their eyes and know their lives. I think that is all that needs to be left, all that needs to be given to this world. It is all I inted to give and I think it's enough. I don't want to be distracted from all the words I give and all the gifts I still maintain within me. I want to see your words and my words etched out in the sky. I want to hear them echo across a great divide, bridging the gap with every image, with every accurately described detail.

I have spent the winter alone, judging myself harshly for hibernating, for staying hidden even from myself. I have sat and tried to come up with something to say but it all seemed too dark. When everything is dead and people are all huddled up indoors there is not much to see and not much to think about but what is there infront of us. I worked rigidly, focused on my work and I exercised too for the first time since I was much younger. I was mostly separate from myself and outside of everything and the frozen streets and the colds winds did nothing but keep me running from my past.

Now that the Spring is peeking out from the shining shield of winter and the squirrels are scurrying about, I have had a second to remember what it means to be someone in writing. Every time I write again after a long hiatus I wonder why I ever stopped writing at all. As soon as I am in the midst of a letter and I know that I will keep writing for many minutes, I wonder why it is so difficult at all. I wonder why I do not just sit down and write someone everyday. But, the second I pause to consider the next sentence there is a distant lack and I wonder if I have anything even left to say.

When I read about your mother, when I saw you two standing together on your father's grave, my eyes welled with tears and I tried to remember my childhood, tried to remember all the bright and vibrant colors of my youth. I tried to stop myself from crying by flooding my mind with nothing but the happiest of memories. But, it did not stop them from falling. I sat and cried in short but breathy huffs and I remembered those few but drawn out years that I lived in the house alone with my father, after both Miguel and my mother left. The distance between us vibrated in the air, the unspoken anger we each had building beneath the surface; I was desperate to separate myself from his constant reserve. Sometimes, I imagined him looking at me as a very tiny baby and I imagine him staring blankly and trying to find something to feel but failing.

I can't imagine staying within the same walls which held so many memories, every unmoving thing a reminder of a lost love. Already, I am plagued by the shadows of the past. Whenever I hear a seagull cry or cackle, I am suddenly brought back to the beach and I see you beaming, sanguine in the sand. When I see the sunset over the water I think of Anna and her child, hand in hand and how we used to walk by the harbor in the evenings, silent but understanding. I couldn't live on that same porch, cook in that same kitchen; I couldn't sleep in the same bed. My whole life would be overcome by the past and I suppose that is why your mother is so removed. She has to be caught up in every little reminder of what she's lost.

I think you can bring life in this world by simply living in it. I think we are bring life into this world right now as we write to each other, as we make new words appear on the page in front of us. You have put a bright light into my life with your words and I would like you to keep sending them to me. My life makes so much more sense when I write it out to you, when I look at it within the structure of your own. I want to keep telling you what I see in the world because only then does it seem real to me. Send me your stories and I will send you my own.

Here's to saving everything with words,

Fernando

Some Things Last A Long Time- From Catherine

2008-03-13T23:03:00.003-04:00

Fernando,

It rained for three days here. The daylight never seemed to be able to rise out of the steady darkness. Even at noon the streetlamps were on and the puddles glimmered on the sidewalk under their glow and I watched people dance around them, sidestep them, holding umbrellas or newspapers over their heads. In this weather the square near my apartment is often completely emptied of people, and I hurry home from work in the evenings listening to my footsteps smacking the wet sidewalk and echoing off the walls, no one to hear my little cadence but me. And the rain sometimes would fall down in sheets, and I would run under the awning of a restaurant, and to justify myself to the doorman I would pretend to be reading the menu. And I would catch my reflection in the glass display and see my hair clinging in strands about my cheeks, and I would stare into the eyes of that ghost in the glass and try to determine who she was just then. My hair is shorter than when we met last summer, and my skin has lost a good deal of its color. This winter seemed long and lonely and I feel as if I haven't changed much for all the time that has passed.

Then after the third day of greyness and cold rain, the weather broke, and the season changed suddenly. The morning felt fresh; the sun was warm and the city became full of its color and light. The people in the square reemerged, their clothes different, their eyes sparkling. They all carried themselves so much more lightly, and I myself felt lighter and felt myself opening up again. It always strikes me how people and nature respond the same way to shifts of weather. The man hunched in his heavy coat and soaked hat, huddling with his head bowed to his feet in the rain, and the leaf-less tree, sleek and black, limply waiting for the clouds to open. Both change drastically in a spell of warmth and sunshine. On this day, the same man was walking briskly, his head up, his face reflecting the radiance of the sky, his arms bare to his shoulders. And the tree, its branches now arcing upward strongly, tiny green and red bulbs appearing at the tip of every limb, releasing into the air the scent of its sap flowing through its veins like blood. The man passes under the tree and stops short, briefly called back to something by the familiar smell. He lingers over a memory, he considers the buds specking the branches, he turns his head and then he goes on his way.

I drifted about these last few months. It is strange not to be in love with anyone. Or to have your love live only in memories. They flit in and out of my heart; I lose myself in an almost perfect moment and I am carried away. But I soon descend, and I find myself back among the familiar rooms and faces that make up my life here. Some things last a long time, Fernando, and the words you whispered to me under that immense night sky softly settled somewhere permanent inside me.

Not too long ago I was standing beside my father's grave with my mother, holding her hand. It was a pale winter morning, clear and bright. The ground was wet and we were the only ones in the graveyard, and she told me that she couldn't love anyone but my father. And I thought of all the years she has been alone, with only a few friends and me coming every so often. Yet she isn't some obsessive widow. She just seems distant, like she is always distracted by some thought. And I wonder how it is to live in that house that she shared with him, to be reminded constantly of his absence. The bed they slept in, the kitchen where they cooked for each other, the porch where they sat and spoke. It must not be a whole life. You told me how Anna wanted a child but you never did. And I have thought for a long time that I do not either. But that morning by the gravestone my mother's eyes filled with tears and she told me that throughout that whole tragedy, the horrible dark last years of my father's life, he kept saying that no matter the end, when he held me in his arms, when he looked down on me before kissing my forehead as I slept, when he thought of the years ahead in which I would grow, he felt that he had somehow justified the misery of his life by giving me the gift of mine. And I don't feel that having children qualifies someone's existence, but I am the life my father was denied, and I wonder now and then if I should give life, in return. Or if there is some other way I can bring life into this world.

I am telling you all of this because it has been so long since we have written. Seasons have passed, and I am living with only the memory of you. Time moves so quickly, and we lose ourselves in its passing, but please do not lose me forever. Nothing is lost when it is written or spoken between us. I don't wish to slip into the silent dusk of things gone; I wish to create myself, to save myself, to save the ones I love. And when I was with you I felt that those things were possible; you had only to lay your arm on my shoulder or your head on my lap. There is so much that was never said between us and I want you to know that I want us to say it.

Speak to me,
Catherine

The Dust That Takes Even Cities. To Garett.

2007-05-28T13:02:00.000-04:00

Garett,

A flock of rain-laden clouds passed overhead yesterday-gray and thunderous- and the sky it left behind as it blew out to sea is crisp and clean and soaked in endless shades of blue and lavender. I lay for hours staring up at the glowing tip of the moon, growing brighter as the light around it dimmed. Birds fluttered through the intangible distance. An ancient church steeple pierced proudly through the heavens; and far off, deep in the city, the blocky top of a financial building rose equally high and yearning. I turned my face from the sky to the book I was holding limply in my hand and saw the mind of a man limited and confined in the strict black lines of logic and conjecture and yet also reaching. Does it make sense to you when I say that I want my writing to be like the wind that breathes through the treetops? When I was a child I thought it was the fingers of God that shook them. Now, as an adult, I know better than to attribute the gentle rustling I heard to some unknown specter. And I also know that the sounds of the leaves crinkling (like discarded newspaper) is only an echo of the words which become more and more fleeting until they have sunk beneath everything that surrounds them.

Have I responded to your last letter yet? Have I asked you if you can hold yourself above it all, if you can find the meaning that exists in each exhaled sigh? Have you really looked for it? I mean in the street puddles as they splash up against the wheels of the passing cars; I mean in the low swooping birds and in the buzzing bees and even (especially) in the deafening din of an excited crowd?

There is no other answer. You will live as you choose to live and then the dust will take you- the dust that takes even cities. They will kick the dirt atop you (as well they should) and they will pile their empty words upon you (as they should never dare). But, it seems now as if I am growing grim. But, I do not find it to be grim, my descent into the earth. Not when I can spend so long peering hopefully into the heavens. Because hope is real my friend, even when the fancies that feed it are not.

Hope lives alongside despair and they resonate with each other. It is always when I am high with hope that I can peer down into the deepest abyss inside me and gaze upon its infinite darkness with an objective and understanding eye. The abyss lives inside us all, Garett, we simply need to keep it in its place; we simply need to keep our eyes to the clouds and to the skies.

This is obscene advice coming from me and I am almost sure that I can hear you laughing already. But, don't mock me for getting carried away with my metaphors. There is nothing there in the clouds which doesn't also dwell on the earth, in our impassioned words and joyful laughter and grasping hands. Can I feed the love of life to you in spoonfuls of words? No. But I see it in you and I simply want to tell you, my anxious friend, that nothing is wrong.

To Father Preston- The Long Shadow I See.

2007-05-07T23:39:00.000-04:00

Dear Father Preston,

If you see in what I write, the need to make flesh and blood out of a long dead god, it is only because I write to make objective fact out of subjective experience. Do you truly wake to find some external being staring you in the face or do you merely rise daily to the stark awareness of your being, small and self-aware and filled with life and hope by the indifferent sunlight and negligent breezes? I, too, am brought to my knees, Father, by that bare blue arc which doesn’t give a damn, by the radiant color curved over the horizon at sunset and the soft dust of moonlight scattered from such black and distant depths. I stare up into the stars and see something so immense that it cannot be contained in the moment, something which stretches back to years beyond any human life.

Your God and my literature are both acts of human imagination. Imagination is the way we color the universe in the hues of our humanity. Otherwise, it would be too vast, cold and uncaring for us to live in. Science too is an imaginative act. The scientist subjects the facts of nature to the humanizing force of logic. When the angels doubted God’s wisdom in creating man, God silenced their doubts by asking Adam to tell them the names of things that they did not know. This is what human beings do. We name things and because we name the world we own it and can act upon it. And so we have the courage to walk across the face of the earth in the midst of the wild and empty blackness that surrounds it.

I am not afraid of indifference. When I lie awake under the black and starlit sky, I feel that its inhuman face, lacking benevolence, is yet benign. It's like a stranger nodding to you in the street. He does not know you and because he does not wish to know you then you may both go along your ways separate and complete. You do not need him and you need not fear him. But when the trees shake or when small, angry-squawking black birds scatter across the sky in unknown patterns like something broken and flung up by the wind, I feel called to action. Like the universe which does not know me still demands my participation. The air vibrates against my skin, the light which pours over the forms of the earth travels to my eyes and I understand the shapes that obstructed its path. The birds cry and I look up and they swarm above my head as they swoop wildly falling in and out of trees and behind me at the end of the red, dusty road the sky is turning orange. And I, looking down at the street, am also the form that throws the long shadow I see. I am also outside myself. I am also a part of the universe.

In no need of convincing,
Fernando

My Black Despair. To Fernando.

2007-05-04T00:21:00.000-04:00

Fernando,

As much as I would like to "spit out my black despair", I feel as if I am not articulate enough to engage anyone (least of all you) in what would be mere, useless complaining. You need not fear losing me, friend; for you are one of the few people to whom I speak- in a verbal or written fashion. You help me to remmeber that life is worth articulating but only because I am living it. I don't know that life would be worth living if it wasn't articulated. And that is why I feel that most of my own life is not worth living.

But, I am not complaining, or sighing. I am only saying that things pile up around me and I try to tear them down- to look at them individually- but I am still mired in the memory of all those moments we shared, eagerly awaiting our turn to speak of something literary. It was in those few interactions that I understood the point of all that reading I had done, the point of interaction in general and I spend all these lonely afternoons and evenings wondering if I will find that with anyone else again.

When I write to you I feel I am reaching out for a long gone past instead of seeking out a future. But, I am only being morbid because I am alone. Your letters send me flying (even if only briefly) out of my black despair and I sing out my high hopes to only the sounds of your words echoing inside my skull. I feel again all the weight of possibility and how it is balanced so precariously on the edge of interaction.

I feel the distance I have come, the distance between us and honestly, it makes me long for a long walk with a whistling friend. I read Ulysses again and again and I envy his entourage. I envy those laughing friends I see skipping through the stone streets.

Forgive me for being blunt, for being a nag. It's just that I have lost so much and I don't know where to look to find it.

Garret

The Edge Of A Useless Evidence.

2007-05-04T00:11:00.000-04:00

Garret,

Was that some sort of good-bye? Or were you merely worn-out by the senseless effort of a night spent in meaningless interaction? I was a little disconcerted by the sighing note at the end of your letter. I don't want to lose you or your calm and measured words. I told you that I am greedy. To examine your life is one thing, but to articulate it is something else altogether. Sing out your high hopes to me, my friend, and spit out your black despair. You help me to remember that life is worth living. I had hoped that I might do the same for you.

I've spent enough time in dark and smoky places avoiding the glazed glances that glared at me with wordless hunger. I've optimistically sought out the stories of the people around me, pulling their words out of them with my eager attention. I've spun my own stories loudly and cheerfully filling the space around me with my gestures and my sense of self. I've sulked and sunk stubbornly into a sullen silence. I've picked fights and made foolish decisions. I've tried to feel alive while others around me tried to erase the traces of their recent lives.

All the things that mean something to me waver on the edge of what is said; all the things that meant something to me ebb toward the edge of a useless evidence. I always stare at people and wonder what they have to do with me, what they have to do with themselves. And I am always watching for that nugget of honesty that they have been waiting all night to hand someone. And I roll it around gratefully in my palm wondering if they were enriched or diminished by this gift; but suspecting that they have remained irrevocably the same.

When I am alone, I give my helpless, hopeful self to the sun-drenched blue sky above me marked by the soaring passage of birds, to the silently rising trees around me, to the delicate, shifting passage of the wind. I look into the face of nature with a bold happiness. But I know that it is only another human face which can look back and show me that I am also here, shrugged onto this earth like the pebbles on the path and yet complex and purposeful. And if I sometimes confront other people with despair, it is because we are complex enough to lie and to fear and to hide. But I know that it is possible to look into someone else's eyes and see something both sharp and yielding, the desire to understand and to be understood. And I know that it is possible to write and to be read.

Fernando

To Fernando. A Fleeting Thing.

2007-05-04T00:08:00.000-04:00

Dear Fernando,

I received your letter in the midst of a storm that was still as steady as it was when you wrote. It was strange because we don't usually have those connections to bind us together. But, this time, the rain was everywhere and when I read your words it was like the echo of my thoughts. I stood inside a crowded building for most of the rainfall and only stepped outside at the end of the night, when it was slowing down and passing by.

I spent the whole evening prior with people from my work. We went to some cheap bar and sat on rickety stools talking about nothing. My attention was drawn several times to the TV's on my left (and right) and despite how hard I tried not to look at them; they were at least visual stimulation (which was more than I could say for my company). They spoke of the commercials on said televisions and drank their beers heartily, slapping hands after each pint downed. And I sat there and thought of all the other places I might be but for the one person I thought I might speak to.

Needless to say, it was a disaster. And when I got home, drunker than I intended to be and muttering to myself beneath my breath, I caught sight of your letter peeking out of the corner of my mailbox. I inhaled a wet breath and snatched the soiled paper eagerly. And when I sat down inside, full of all the emptiness that I had absorbed, I would have cried if I didn't have the solid, written possibility of really interacting with someone.

I had stood there, infront of the people I know, looking at them blankly while they spoke because they were so passionless and so bleary-eyed. The wet letter I held in my hand was a blessing. You spoke of Catherine, of someone who held you close, who saw you for who you were and afterwards even wrote to you. You are the only person I write to and I hoped that was not the case. You are so daring, Fernando You throw everything you are to the wind and you let that wind carry you into the arms of so many people.They all fall into you so impetuously, blazing with the need to know you, to hold you- even for a short time. You are always so consumed and part of me feels like this might be a flaw but part of me longs for someone to be immersed within, some sort of distraction.

I suppose I had you to distract me from the mudanity of the daily- at least for a brief while. And we still recall those long days of discussion where literature was always number one. Creativity is a fleeting thing. I suppose you must grab it when you can.

Garret

From Fernando. All That I Am.

2007-05-04T00:01:00.000-04:00

Dear Garret,

I also woke to rainfall, the sloshing sounds of a great gushing downpour and to the ringing laughter of a stranger on the street. A gray, languid light leaned lazily against my window and a wild wind circled the house with howling declarations. I walked into the nearly empty city, huddled in my coat with the collar raised and scraping painfully against my chapped and chilly ears. Raindrops gathered on my eyelashes and drizzled down my cheeks when I blinked. I stomped through puddles in my inadequate shoes until my toes were cold and wrinkled. The pavement was one great shining mirror. Dangling white blossoms tangled as they flew into the air. I crossed the sodden wooden planks of the foot bridge as it waved and creaked beneath me. The beaten, battered face of the river rose and fell in mighty oceanic swells.

I walked into work shaking the rain from my hair and squinting into the flourescent light, exhaling my exhiliration in loud, joyful laughter. And I admit that I wasn't thinking at all about my surroundings as I strolled through those narrow halls grinning broadly with raindrops on my lips. Instead, I was thinking about Catherine, whom I met by the water and who once kissed me in a sudden rainfall while her fingers carved furrows in my soggy hair. She peered up at me, gently, steadily, seeking something of my self. And what she saw she stole away and secreted behind a demure tuck of her glance. And I pressed against her trying to take it back, sweetened as it was now by her innocence. I held her and the days we had together delicately, in fear and hope, because they were precious and fleeting.

But now she sends me her words. They pour out of her with such honesty and strength. She brushed by me like the first gentle breath of spring and faded away like the echo of a laugh. But in words we can find again all hope and passion and the stormy day. Life remains, solid and true, held enclosed in simple lines. I covet her words and yours as well, my friend. I shuffle through them greedily. And I reach in and grab my own words in fistfuls and pour them at my feet. And nothing is lost. And I am whole, all that I am.

Fernando

From Garret. Gloomy Moods.

2007-05-03T23:56:00.000-04:00

Dear Fernando,

Today started out with the sound of breathy winds and thin streams of rain streaking past my window at a forty five degree angle. The light was yellow and pale, drifting fuzzily down through vaporish clouds. The birds kept shouting at one another contentiously. I rose reluctantly to a seated position and buried my face in my hands, moving my fingers through my hair as my thoughts drifted drearily up through the liquor-laden murk of my brain. The thud of blood against my eye-lids counted out my regrets. I got up anyway, kicking myself out of the mess of my sheets aggressively, and marched to the shower with conviction.

I often find myself dragging myself through my days in this fashion, borne breathlessly behind my determination like a undersized dog-walker stumbling at the end of my own taut leash. I stride into my office each morning running high on coffee fumes, exchanging smiles and greetings and I somehow maintain the forceful energy, the upright stance, the friendly exchanges and clever remarks through eight endless hours. In social situations, I talk and laugh, tell grandiose, hand-waving stories. I raise my voice, I raise my glass, I joke and flirt and I'm always up for just one more. But at the end of the day, I collapse into my quiet: silent and solemn. And when I start to write you a letter I always find myself inclined to subject you to yet another list of lamentations.

I don't want to send you nothing but gloomy moods and anxious self-doubt. I would like to give you something full of life. But I also want to be honest. I want to say something and not merely to chatter. And when I am honest, I am sad. You've always been a brooder and a complainer, my friend. But you also have something truly joyful and alive in you. It is the ability to make something. The ability to smile into the abyss. (Do you hear me growing grim again?)

I stopped drawing when I was sixteen. All of a sudden, I curled up into a fear of my creations, unable to stand their presence outside my own head. In a still moment, when my mind wanders and the life around me dims, I trace shapes with my eyes, form textures with my fingers. I envision sculpting the contours of a fond face. I imagine spreading the colors of the sky across the blankness of a canvas. I want to really grasp the world around me, to enfold it in colors and lines and spaces. But I peer at my reality so uncertainly and reach out so timidly. And I feel less than I could be, less than I am.

I try to be honest with you because I hope that you will grasp me and make me solid. Once I called myself Buck Mulligan in disparagement. But I want nothing more than to stride into the world with the steady, certain rhythm of "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan." I can see the implacable fall of those four words more vividly than I have ever been able to see myself.

Garret

To Catherine Five- Lasting.

2007-05-03T21:54:00.000-04:00

Dear Catherine,

I sat today beneath a sun-lit sky and watched big, soft clouds roll by slowly. Bumblebees buzzed around my face as I sat in the shade of a sweet-smelling tree with delicate purple flowers dangling down like a willow. I was at the edge of a bright green field and it stretched out before me into the distance. I read and re-read your recent letter and I wished I was on a train. I thought of how quickly things pass by your windows and of how strange it feels to be moving through something and yet to be remaining still, silent.

The last several days have been spent sitting in a bar alone talking to many but speaking to few. The smoke soaked my clothes and I smell strange now, even to myself. It is funny to sit back and watch the world interact around you, to peek out through squinted eyes seeing through the darkness, all the drunken inanity that surrounds you.

I have been thinking about all the things that outlast us- the tall, looming edifices, the streets beneath our feet, the sky overhead. And I've been thinking about making something out of nothing and pullings words-lives-from where there were none before. I watch this happen- even as I write this letter- which did not exist before I sat down to start it. I bask in the possibility which lays itself out before me- almost as a certainty. I know that each day that passes I am offered the opportunity to create something which lives outside myself. I often cower beneath the pressure of my own expectations, my own standards.

I could build a ten-foot tall tower of all the torn up scraps of stories I've tossed away. I could fuel the script for a ten-year long soap opera with all my failed friendships. All the things that build up behind me with each passing day, these things that I often run from and rarely flesh out into words- they are the backbone of my life. It is in these light and easy words I send you, it is in the glances I give to passing strangers and it is there, glaring up at me from the pages of my writing.

I have had the pleasure to watch you build your life, etch it out in words and sent it to me so that I can uncover it, know you. And I cannot thank you enough for trusting your self in my hands. I am a clumsy man, easily distracted, awkwardly unconcerned yet inwardly obsessed. I am trying to make something come alive at my fingertips and I am so happy for the chance to see my own reflection, to see your reflection in the sunny sky of our letters.

The wind is blowing lightly across these pages. It is a brisk wind for early May but brief. It reminds me of those last days of school when the inevitability of summer vacation was almost too much to stand. In those last few weeks of school before the break, I always was acutely aware of the temporary nature of youth. But, by the time summer came I was caught up in cat and mouse games with the lake water enveloping my small, nimble frame. The water was cold and refreshing around me and the sun was hot on my back; my friends' shouts were the soundtrack to my summers, my brother in the background, our mother laid out on a towel. At the end of those long humid days when my brother and I would sit in the cool night beneath the stars, our hair was still sticky and matted from swimming. We swung back and forth in silence on the porch swing and I would think in vague and simple terms: everything is fleeting, brief but boundless and life lays out before us all: a world of infinite possibilities, infinite interactions. I knew then, even with such little experience, that I would not be one to stay still, to irk out a life hidden beneath the cries of the masses. I knew- even then- even under the shadow of my brother's accomplishments (thin and silly- spelling bees- though they were) that one day I would see myself in the midst of all I'd done and I would know that I had done something.

Everything that happens is looked at in the context of everything that came before. You stood in your mother's garden and remembered your youth, those same smells caught in your nose, your throat. Your father, and his father before him and now you, Catherine, carving out the motions of your life and keeping them close. These things are all temporary but lasting. They last because we make them last.

Here's to lasting,
Fernando

From Catherine Four- Linos.

2007-05-02T15:59:00.000-04:00

Fernando,

Today I walked out into the warm rain, your letter ringing in my head. I raised my face to the sky and let the drops fall on my forehead and run down my cheeks. The streets were vacant, but there were some flower vendors set up under a tarp and I bought a red camelia and tucked it into the buttonhole of my shirtpocket. I walked on through the rain, my clothes getting wet and I not caring, the breeze cooling my bare arms and neck. The city was quiet and hesitated under the close, dull grey clouds. Everything was shining and silvery and clean smelling in this lovely spring shower that washed away whatever of winter this place was holding onto.

Then I was in a nearly empty train, slowly gaining speed, moving ever faster out from the city. Through the rain streaked windows I watched my world pass. Countless people huddled under hats and umbrellas in what really was a pleasant mist, coming in and out of building after building, each one falling past faster and faster in unrelenting succession. I listened to the noise of the train and thought of what you said about being in love with the sound of people living out their lives. I thought of the dream I had as I slept next to you. I watched my own translucent reflection on the windowpane cast over it all. The eyes were different somehow, they seemed younger, their color stronger than usual. Maybe I was remembering eyes I once had. I held a notebook and scribbled words and murmured them back to my reflection ever so quietly, the breath itself the thing that makes the words condensing on the glistening red mouth of the apparition in the glass. Muddy patches began to separate the city into patchwork, and the landscape changed through my rainswept window. Eventually we were passing mud fields, and everything leveled out and gave to a desolate flatness. I found myself moving above a wasteland of mud, fallen trees, abandoned bulldozers and cranes. Piles of stone and gravel, long columns of cement lay across the soaked and frothing ground like ancient ruins.

And then we crossed a long steel bridge that spanned the river. The sky lightened, I could see the rain was letting up. I watched gulls dip and hover around the bridge, unaffected by the bluster of the train. The river was catching the first light through the cloud breaks and it was glinting furiously. I wrote in my notebook of the gull's cries to each other, of lovers who call to each other from across great distances, who cannot soar over the barrier like a gull but must brave the river and swim to each other. They cannot call in that inhuman, unambiguous cry, but must communicate through words which hold many meanings and can easily be misunderstood.

I grew tired thinking of all these things and I fell asleep. When I woke the clouds were gone and through my window a forest was passing slowly, damp and dazzling in the sunlight with the fire of its blooms across all the branches. The train was slowing and we pulled into the station and I could see my mother waiting for me on the platform. I hadn't seen her for months and it was wonderful to hug and kiss her and feel her there in my arms and know she was alright. She is lonely, I know my visits mean the world to her.

We had lunch and drank tea and talked. We talked about my father. This is something I haven't spoken to you about, Fernando, and I'd like to leave that for another time. But as I sat across from my mother I looked into her eyes, and though we laughed and spoke eagerly I could tell she was holding things back, I could see the absence in her eyes. I miss my father greatly, but I only knew him when I was young, and she knew him her entire life. And he was her world. Have you heard the story of Linos, Fernando? My mother's trembling eyes reminded me of Linos. When Linos died the void caused by his absence trembled so intensely that it was heard and then named "music".

After lunch I walked in my mother's garden. She has always kept a garden of herbs and flowers. My whole youth is dominated by the smell in springtime of jasmine, honeysuckle and rosemary. The little plants had just started opening, they were stooped over and speckled with lingering raindrops, but their leaves were upturned to the sky and the warm sunshine. I sat down by the wall in the shade and watched my mother weed her garden. I thought of you. I thought of the absence between us and the music it makes. I wondered when I would see you again.

Catherine.

To Catherine Four. Lapping Lazily.

2007-04-18T02:59:00.000-04:00

Catherine,

Your letter caught me off guard- surprised me rather seriously in the midst of an already shattering Saturday. You had escaped my thoughts briefly, for a few dark and dreary days spent in silence. There is a sharp chill in the air- an unlikely April. I keep waiting for the warmth with which I was teased only a mere few weeks ago yet each morning I step outside and it feels like late October.

I plucked your letter from the rusted innards of my mailbox and it slid out slowly, scraping the sides as it escaped. It was a second thought. I wasn't even going to check it, for fear of bills, a seething letter from Anna (whom I wrote while a bit too drunk the other evening), a letter from Miguel, my brother, who I think is also unhappy with me. I fall to harshly into things and I cannot fish myself out. You tell me that you are not sure I can love instantly, without contemplation. But, I have always been told that that very thing is amongst my most glaring flaws. I fall in love with everyone, with every glinting, glowing set of eyes, with each swoosh of hair behind a girl's face, with each click-clank of heeled shoes on the street. I always confuse myself because I know, somewhere, that it is not the people I love, it is only the fact of them. I love the sounds of the body as I love the sounds of the sky. Only the sky can bear to be loved as equally as the trees and the sun; the sky doesn't mind.

I am being silly? Maybe it is not the sounds of the city, (the sounds of each individual which make up the world) that I love. Perhaps it is just the fact that I can express it. Maybe what I love is only to be able to feel love and once I must prove it, once I must make something outside of words- that is when I lose control, lose balance. I have never been satisfied by a single love. It is always that deep intensity, the beginning of something, the falling back into an old thing, which captures me and penetrates my skin. I breath in the air of renewal and I exhale all the things I used to know.

You tell me you know nothing of my life, my loves, my habits. Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? I've told you of Anna, have I not? I've told you briefly, I suppose, of our marriage and of the way it disintegrated beneath the weight of time, beneath the build up of the past which I could not look away from. She wanted to grow, to grow something inside of her. And I scoffed at her. I told her silly things, stupid things. I warned her of her child's gaze, that those innocent eyes would not see her, would not even look for her. I told her cruelly and detachedly that long after her death her child too will lie dying. I asked her, "Do you think that she, like I, will cry out your name?" Yes, she may whisper "mother" but she will not be calling to Anna but only to the soft, steadily beating warmth she felt once, nestled against her mother's breast, to the gift of life she was given but could not be given again.

And Anna stood back in shocked horror, balked at the sudden shutting of a book, the book of our life together. I did not want a child. I only want to make what I believe in. I have no desire for responsibility. And so I shut her out with cruel intentions and with a cold hand. I slipped into another woman, into Claudia, who already had a child, a husband. It wasn't serious, at least not to me. I taught her a few things though. She left a loveless marriage and is now strong and living on her own. I pushed her away as well. But, that's a story for another day.

My love, you are young. But your wisdom outweighs your years. You are hesitant because you saw in my eyes all of the loss I have put myself purposely through. You heard in my voice the hesitation, the careful careening around any actual declarations. I did not want to make premature admissions. I did not want to scare you. I did not want to say something that I wasn't entirely certain of. It is in these letters, though, that I truly know you. I can say so much more in the safety of my own mind. The statements are more genuine because they are not clouded by the beauty of your eyes or the beauty of the sky. And your words are full and idealistic, young and fresh and yet they still resonate with an understanding of sorrow and pain.

You wonder if you had mistook some understanding beyond words, "a perfect silent stillness" for love? I say that they are one and the same. Without love there is no understanding at all. Perhaps, then, on the beach, beneath the beauty of the world around us and the sky above us,the ocean outstretched at our feet (lapping lazily as we slept) perhaps it was easy to find love because it was everywhere around us, right within our reach. But, now, far away in different cities and weighed down by ritual and routine, we are still seeking out that thing we found once, not so long ago, on an accidental evening. And maybe, just maybe, that is love.

Yours in words and waiting,
Fernando

Wanting to Know- From Catherine Three.

2007-04-16T15:32:00.000-04:00

Fernando,

Many times I have sat down at this table with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and eagerly held a pen in my hand intending to write you. I've read and reread the letters you've sent, searched them for a reply, searched over and over between the words trying to gather some sense of you and myself. I've closed my eyes and listened intently to the disquiet that hums in this room, listened for the words I hoped would come. And for so long they did not. I sat as time slipped away and I tried again and again to summon my courage and wits, to make some adequate thing to send back to you that did not trivialize nor misstate my thoughts. I don't know if it was confusion, perhaps I was sunk under the torrent of things left unsaid when we last parted. Or if it was fear. Some vague fear that I am not who you think I am, that I am not what you need me to be. Also a fear that the brief time we shared was an accident, a misstep into a dream that could not possibly be sustained in my real life.

When you folded me in your arms I felt your weight and warmth press into me and it was as if I had been clutched from the intertia of my life and made to stand in the still brightness of yours. I desired nothing more than that momentous falling away from myself, and I felt no need for the past nor the future. I loved you instantly and deeply. I hope I do not frighten you by being so direct. But I am young, Fernando, much younger than you, and I'm not sure you are still able to love instantly, without contemplation. Or perhaps for you love alone is not sufficient. Maybe you were once satisfied by a single love. I knew in the darkness of your gaze and your careful words that you were letting me see exactly what you wanted me to see of you. We slept a happy sleep together, and I dreamed as I slept beside you that I lived in a bright, empty house on a hill overlooking a city and the ocean. It was an ancient city littered with ruins, but it was full with all the motions of life. Through a wide window I looked down on the city, and it was far from me. The noise of life that always intrudes and distracts was nothing but a far away churning and hissing, like the lapping of the low tide on the beach, gently rolling. And I woke next to you and I was not sure if I had woken from the dream. I wasn't sure until you had gone.

When you say you want to come running to me I cannot help but wonder if you are running towards an image you have conjured, that you are running from your past and your loneliness that you understand less than you think you do. I am not saying this to be cruel, I am only searching you out. And I do not neglect your words. I hold them tightly and place them deep inside of me, next to my heart. They live there, you live there, and when I return to them, as I always do, I find them repeating in rhythm with the pulse of my blood, as real and as thick as my blood. But Fernando, we barely know each other. I know nothing of your life, nor your loves, nor your habits. I only know the warmth of your hand on my cheek, your lips and your eyes all aflame. I could see that there were worlds to know behind those eyes. I could hear, as I lay my head on your chest, your heart beating so heavy with some sorrow, many sorrows. I wondered what memories you kept there and I wondered what place I would take among them. I wondered why you had come to the ocean alone. But we hardly had time to ask each other "why". I knew that you saw a common sorrow in me, and I knew that there was some understanding there beyond words, in perfect silent stillness, as silent and still and illuminated as the night. Did I mistake that for love?

I do wish to write you and know you, but it frightens me when I am struck dumb and wordless by such an experience. I do not think it struck you blind, as it did me. You would not have left with so few words if it did.

And I don't know what you want from me.

Wanting to know,
Catherine

To Catherine Three.

2007-04-16T15:28:00.000-04:00

Catherine,

You neglect to write me, to return the words I send sprawling towards you. They eagerly await a response but I suppose I should take it in stride. I suppose I should consider those few brief moments we shared and my obvious distance, my eyes set on far off sights while yours were forward and focused. I have always been the same man, stuck inside a world of words trying desperately to make something besides what is made with pen and paper. I always want to push people into words, to make them write to me when they would rather speak, to make them read of me when they would rather touch. I thought, because of the intensity of your letter, that I had found someone, finally, who felt the same passion for this sort of expression as I. But, by your silence, I fear I was wrong.

Today, I climbed to the top of a tall building and I sat soaking in the first vibrant sun of the season. I read a book and listened to the sound of the wind blow by my ears, the sounds of the birds as they scattered across the sky- little black specks beaming against the bright blue. I squinted into the sun, my hand angled at my brow and I thought of things I'd like to say to you. I wished that I had whispered words into your ear after holding you so close beneath the stars. But, then, I cowered in fear. I was overwhelmed. I was indignant. And it wasn't until I stared, alone, up into that piercing sky that I realized the weight of what I had left behind. It sat stale in my memory as some distant dream I might have once dreamt about a beach and the moon and a lovely girl who took me in her arms. But, standing there, high above the ground, watching the world move around, oblivious to even the building on which I was perched, I felt a distance had been traversed. I was suddenly with you, beneath the gull-strewn sky- the sounds of squaking drowned out by our loud laughter. And the sun burned hotly on my head and it illuminated the light which burst out from inside you.

There, on that building, I felt more of an imbecile than I've ever felt. I descended the stairs with haste, skipping steps and nearly sliding down a whole flight. I held tightly to the railing and the bright white walls closed in on me. By the time I reached the bottom I was exhausted; sweat dripped down my face and I tasted it, salty, on my lips. As I paced the streets the light breeze cooled me and I considered my options. It might be nice to have a drink, to sit and sip and settle, to try to understand this sudden, screaming compulsion to run to this woman who I only know but a bit. It might be better to return to my hotel and write a letter which expresses all the things I have felt- the suddenness, the barely thought out and barely understood feelings. Or I could let it slide by, try to decipher it at a later date, when I'm not so attached.

But, I am not one to feel things and leave them unexpressed. Even as I write this I wonder what will become of it. Will it sit alone on the page, smushed between the other unrelated pages of this notebook which I only pick up randomly and when I am trying to work through some heavy emotion? Will I send it off to someone who will recieve it and be shocked, who will not understand what I am saying, what I am asking, because I also do not understand what I have said, what I have asked- if I have said or asked anything at all even!

I wonder what she is doing now, that beautiful Catherine. I am stricken with a bright image of her body outstreched on the roof of the same building I just came from. The light wind blowing her boundless blonde locks across her face. I can see her eyes fixed on the sky- following the birds in flight, the corners of her small, feminine mouth upturned into a simple smile. It baffles me to try to determine what she actually does with her days. She never even told me about a job but also- I never asked.

And now that I've gotten carried away speaking about you, my dear beautiful Catherine, I will close my eyes and send this letter without another thought.

Suddenly yours and always waiting,
Fernando

Anchored- To Catherine Two.

2007-04-16T15:23:00.000-04:00

Catherine,

These memories we make, the memories we keep, are for me a lifeline- a sort of protection that I can keep close and hold onto. There are certain things in my life that, though I don't often encounter them, they sit high up on a pedastal and they outline for me all of the things I must work towards. You have always been one of those things. Someone who remains peripheral in my life but who lives inside me always- a North Star, bright in my vision and leading me in the right direction.

Those few short days full of cool blue and caramel colors, the nights of firey red and midnight black are like movies which play again and again across my eyes. I lose myself in the smell of the salty sea, the vastness of all things stretched out across the horizon and the sky huge above us. The breeze which blew off the water brushed over my hair, across my ears and I felt so many things at once, the sand- millions and millions of tiny grains, the sun hot on my back, your hand warmly enclosed inside my own, the imminence of our departure. Even then, looking into your eyes, looking out onto the water, feeling your breath hot on my neck- I still was overwhelmed by the briefness of it all. I can never just sink into anything; I am always looking ahead or looking behind. And I felt I was cheating you out of those few precious moments we had together by counting them so meticulously as they passed.

Now, back again in my lonely world of my own words with no one to bounce them off of, I sit in silence and regret. I am always wondering what it would be like to wake up beside you- to fall asleep gently in your tender arms, to hear the words I whisper echo back in my ears. But, reality is always more stark, more jagged than memory. I fear that we would fight- that you would grow tired of the listless nature which fascinates you so in small bits. I have a raging distaste for cleanliness, for domesticity, for routine. And I suppose that is why those few memories we share are so dear to me, why they are played so often in the jukebox of my memory. Because they are always a total respite from routine. We can always be whomever we choose and there is never and evidence around to prove otherwise.

You mention Anna. You told me that you could see her behind my eyes. But, Catherine dear, Anna left me for that very reason. Because she was never alone behind my eyes. Because she saw all the other people who lived here and she wanted to be the only one. You cannot blame her; I certainly can't. I ran off in every direction. I tied myself to her, through marriage, but I did not give myself to her. As I cannot give myself to anyone.

Perhaps what you say is true: that we have nothing but misty memories of moments past and gone. I'd like to see you again, fall forward into that bubble where it is only you and I. Write me something soon; your words are an anchor.

Anchored,
Fernando

From Catherine One- Queen Anne's Lace.

2007-04-12T19:00:00.000-04:00

Fernando,

Often, as I am laying in bed waiting for sleep to come, another's arms around me, another's body close to mine, my mind drifts back to those few nights we were allowed together. You chased me out into the water and we swam at dusk, after the horseflies had bitten our shoulders raw. The air had become cooler but the water was still warm, and we stayed in up to our chins to keep from freezing. We laughed and choked on seawater and held each other there, under the low tide, trying to keep submerged as long as we could. I watched your face against the darkening sky, your eyes bright in the twilight, full of energy and life and full of a dark thoughtfulness. We scrambled out of the water and ran shivering up to the fire. We stripped out of our wet clothes and lay together in the warm, dry sleeping bag. The night came on and the stars were bold and trembling above us. I counted three shooting stars lying in your arms as you fell in and out of sleep, murmuring words to me that I half-comprehended. And yes, I felt whole then. I felt my place and my emotions properly aligned. I wondered what it would have been like to have all the time in the world with you.

But, as I stared across the fire, its dancing light reflected in your eyes (bold against the night, your eyes always as bright as stars), I saw you trace the horizon, just a mute blue hue, almost complete night, and I knew you were thinking of another. We never spoke much about her. I didn't want to. In some ways, I wanted to believe the lie, that there was someone who drops into your life out of pure circumstance, and they are the ones who are to save you. I obviously wanted to believe that; I fell into you fully. And I am not bitter now that we are apart. I am grateful for having known you, to still know you, though only through these few letters or a chance encounter. Remember the last time we ran into each other? I dreamt of you for days.

The second night on the beach, when we were sunburned and weary from two days in the bright heat and the hot sand, we fell asleep in each other's arms. But I was restless. I dressed and walked out into the cool sand in the night. The night was so bright. The half-moon sat on a field of bright pinholes; the milky-way like queen anne's lace strewn carelessly across the sky. All of it reflected in the deep darkness of the Atlantic, the churning mirror that stretched the entire horizon. I walked out to where the waves were lapping at the shore, a strong breeze whipping my hair around my face. It was bright and the sound of the waves breaking in rhythm stirred the blood in my cheeks. And I wished you had walked out with me, to behold the perfect night in our world which was like a dream for that short time.

But I was also wearing the night like a mask. And the moon glowed, but it also glowed pale with a kind of grief. Our lives each seemed so full, and we were strangers to each other. Everything that happened happened suddenly and out of instinct. It often felt like we were not controlling things. But it was perfect and I felt myself small, so small beneath that giant night, the light from the stars a billion years old illuminating me, the moon slowly cycling over us. I felt ready to give into fate, to let everything slip away and let myself slip into you as easily as I glided through the water. And I rushed back to the tent; I undressed and pushed myself close to you. I took your arm as you roused from your sleep and pressed your palm onto my breast. I pushed my back against your chest and reached to pull your face close to mine. And we kissed and whispered to each other under the lull of the waves and the wind.

Yet here we are now, again each in our own world. I live on memories and hopes. I live because of things you have shown me. Yet we are still so separate, we are still strangers in so many ways. You were always some place distant. You were always many people at once. And I could never ask you to be only one for me. I could never ask you to give her up. Or the memory of her.

I will love you always, and I will always be your friend. But what do we have besides these misty memories?

Catherine.

The First Letter to Catherine.

2007-04-12T15:25:00.000-04:00

Catherine,

Despite the cold chill of the wind and the ice which is still not fully melted which is scattered along the sides of the street, I can still smell the oncoming Spring. I have been pacing the streets, trying to find the places where the sun creeps through the bulidings, illuminating a small portion of sidewalk. Memories of the sun on my skin, the ocean water crisp and creeping up to my toes. Memories of those long nights we layed still and silent beneath a shimmering sky. My feet formed prints in the sand, that stick you used to scrape words in the sand: huge hearts bearing our initials. And it seems like a silly thing to miss if you think about it: those spontaneous moments when I wore my heart on my sleeve and you plucked it's strings easily and with only your eyes.

Perhaps, and this almost seems likely, it was the ocean and it's rhythmic moments, it's steadily slapping sounds that has imbedded those brief days so solidly in my memory. But, it was also your cheeks- aglow beneath a clear sky. It was the thousand freckles which formed on your face, right before my eyes- the way they ran in a little line across your nose and scattered over your shoulders, sprinkling your cheeks. It was the smell of the salt and the sound of your voice shouting, laughing while the small waves slapped the sand. It was the way you chased me out into the water and it was the sound of the sand you smacked against my burnt back.

Regardless, though, of what, precisely, echoes in my memory it is always outlined by your eyes, by the bright blue-green hue and the way you blink: meaningfully, thoughtfully. And when I look at the pictures you took of me, those washed out and overexposed images- I can still see the smiles I held- bolder and braver than in any photo I've ever seen of myself. I can still smell your saltwashed hair. I can still feel the big bumpy bugbites which lined up along my arms, the slap of the frisbee on my palms, the smack of my arms by my ears as I lapped through the thick water. I can still feel my feet sinking in the soaking sand, the rocks and shells which made little dents in the smooth stretch of beach.

The night, the cool breeze blowing off the water, the way your eyes lit up by the fire- ablaze with thought, emotion, desire. The way your smile matched your eyes, they way they shone together by the buzzing light of the flickering flames. And we could hear the sound of the horses hooves as they ran along the beach behind us; and we could see the moon- a half moon- blazing brightly between the small stars. I felt so earth-bound then, as if I couldn't imagine myself anywhere else. So often I float and fly away from where I am standing, anywhere but present. But, with you, I feel the weight of each moment as it moves and shifts into the past, into memory.

I am now writing without thinking, remembering without really making anything of the memories. Perhaps you can make something solid of my spacey memories. Perhaps you can pull the meaning out of all these misty memories. You always could.

Yours in hope, in speech, and memory,
Fernando

Boundless.

2007-04-09T13:08:00.000-04:00

Garett,

For every day of my life that I have spent full of passion for my words and for the fictions I craft with them there have been many others that I have spent murmuring sadly in a cold and quiet cell, looking over my desolate lot with gloomy despair. If I see myself in art, it is only because I have looked. When I work at my words, I believe in them. When I set them aside and glance over them rarely, I believe in nothing. Today, I saw the round, yellow moon through a dense web of tiny, fingering branches on a leafless tree. The lit up tips of the bare branches formed incomplete circles which spiraled infinitely away from me and up towards the full moon. I thought of you and your occasional mysticsm. You denied it most of the time, but often enough, some indication of a hidden soft spot for the infinite would brim up over the lip of your whiskey glass. When the human mind fearfully suspects its own finality, it can, by some trick of the light, perceive the divine. But mostly, the search for the infinite just sends you around in circles.

I am always searching for an infinity that I can barely feel. On a rare occasion I grasp, what I deem to be, the entirety of the human condition. I stand back and stare, in awe, at the depth there is inside me, at the simple fact that I can stand back and stare in awe. And I truly beleive that that is the entirety of the human condition. What is divine is that we can perceive divinity at all, that it is something which lives so brightly inside us. I suppose we all experience the same divinity in different ways. Anna sees it in glowing in the eyes of her child. I see it in the people who pass by me when I walk, in the way they hold their heads and in the fact that I can make them real by simply putting them into words. You, well, where do you see it? In the burning corners of the papers you wrote and then set to flame?

It is beyond me how you can understand so much about what it means to make yourself alive outside your skin, about what it means to do something more than yourself, and yet you glance fearfully to the sides whenever you have written something. As if someone might catch you actually building a life of the things inside you. But, perhaps I am less than objective? Perhaps you have so much more than I. It is true that you maintain a job; you maintain relationships with people outside of yourself. And maybe I make people so fervently because I cannot make them know me, or want to know me, in the outside world. Or maybe I choose to stay silent and hidden because I prefer to whisper some small and solid things to an indefinite audience of my own choosing. And maybe that is how I approach the infinite.

But, maybe, the infinite is only apparent in the definite. Maybe the infinite only lives in the silently setting sun, in the sound my steps make on the stairs at night. Maybe the infinite is just an illusion, just an imagined feeling, a feeling everyone has as he falls asleep beneath the stars. The sky is a pale milky blue pulsing purple at the horizon. High above me I can already see the moon, thin as tissue paper and fading from its fullness. Tonight the sky will be a brilliant wintery black and I will look up into those few stars which glow more brightly than the city lights. And I will believe that what I see is boundless.

Fernando

My Own Voice Loudly Speaking.

2007-04-09T13:06:00.000-04:00

Garret,

You say that we missed things. I remember watching flickers in the corner of my eye while I kept my gaze directed towards some distant goal I imagined seeing. I remember missed whispers tickling my ear while I focused my attention on my own voice loudly speaking. Life is always there all around you; but you live it in a straight and narrow line. I'm telling you the very thing that I myself have the most trouble remembering. I used to try to extend my perceptions all around me as a way of testing their reality. I used to push myself out and into a vast circle. I find myself thinking that I was just blowing smoke. You talk about imagining my Anna. I also imagined her because I was afraid to know her. Lately, I have written her many letters. I have been forced to forget the Anna I made in my mind; but find myself more in love than ever with Anna as she actually is. And it's too late. And it will always be too late for anyone who prefers his visions to his life.

When you call yourself Buck Mulligan, I hear you calling me to come up. I see you drawing me from my moody brooding and directing my attention to the great and sparkling sea. I see you leaping in where I would hesitate. I see you sniffing at my choice of attire and pressing your own clothing on me. I think of you whenever I buy a suit. I've learned to give up my purposeful shabbiness (which I believe you once pointed out is nothing more than the vanity of the sartorially ignorant) only because of what you taught me. But you were never so empty as the jolly medical, thinking that if he only talked loudly enough, laughed hard enough, he could hide from the subtle sharpness he feared. And I, my friend, was no knife-blade. We swung around one another, building momentum with each turn and whirling with such breathless energy as neither of us could have done alone. When I found footing in your hesitations and leapt suddenly over you to a solid stance from which I could confidently lend you my hand, did you imagine that I had always known what you did not? I only went where you guided me, my friend. When we walked together we were each so soaked in himself; but a good part of each self was made of the other.

Comparing yourself to the simpering Sassenach is not something I will dignify with a reply.

I often wonder what it is that makes a person declare himself incapable of making anything. I have met many people who, full of themselves and their lives, still regarded me with envy and suspicion because I claimed to make something. The most intelligent, the most successful people often view creativity as a threat. And when I see this, I always picture them as children with their crayons scribbling fiercely and happily and then grimacing over the inept result. And I wonder if it was then that they gave up. Or maybe their pictures were proudly placed on a refrigerator door for years before they saw them for childish nonsense and suffered an even deeper disappointment. Does all the despair that drowns us descend from a day when we saw that our stubby fingers could never grasp our immense visions? Never mind Dedalus and Mulligan. Let us instead be Julian and Maddalo. And you will talk your gloomy sense to me and I will feel more and more and more certain that we are bound by brittle chains indeed. It isn't easy to be your own salvation; but I am full of hope. You fill me with hope. And Anna. And everyone I truly love.

Please continue to confide in your old friend,

Fernando

A Bit Drunk. Garret.

2007-04-09T12:53:00.001-04:00

Fernando,

I've just left the mess of the office and my mind is a muddle of unresolved issues and unfulfilled plans for the evening. I'm sitting at a bar surrounded by a jovial crowd and brooding in distinct contrast to the spirit of this "happy" hour (but taking full advantage of the half-price drink specials, nonetheless). Everyday I go to work gripped by something that I can only describe as dread. I leave my warm bed when my clamoring clock commands, grimacing and doing my best to ignore the murky light weakly peeking through my window panes and the chill that settles on my bare legs. I do my best to pretend that I'm not going to work. I putter about, make coffee, butter toast, pick out a tie and leave at the last possible second. I drive quickly, even aggressively, music blasting. It's my favorite part of the day: focusing all my attenton on surviving dangerous situations I've created with my own recklessness and impatience.

Somehow, I always make it to work and immediately find myself absorbed in the minor challenges of my daily tasks. I lose my self in the momentary, in the ordinary, in the necessary. I am asked a question, I am dragged into a dispute, I am locked in my daily battle with the quarrelsome fax machine. Eight (sometimes ten) hours pass. I'm good at my job; but it is so little of myself. I leave and the day is dimming. I wonder what is left of me after I have given so much to this company whose stones still stand so high above me as I walk wearily to my car and always into the reddening sky. And I am so exhausted by all the nothing I have so diligently done.

You'll have to excuse my self-pitying tone. You see, I've just been stood up. Well, not really. It's a long story. But it still ends with my sitting here all alone trying to piece my gloomy thoughts together and send them off to someone far away. And I'm feeling as if everything is somehow far away. As if I have nothing that I can actually touch. I'm wondering how much of my life is nothing but a distant idea half-thought in a hazy dream, how many of my passions are nothing but a faint light half-glimpsed in lazy glance. I'm missing something; I've missed something. Everything that matters is somewhere else and my life is stacking up behind me, day upon day of the same grim compromise that I have so carelessly shrugged on. And every day, the worries are getting a little harder to shrug away. I have grown quiet, solemn. I am in mourning for the self I leave further and further behind with every repetition of the day's little lies.

I'm sorry to subject you to this sulky scrawl, scattered with cigarette ash and stained with beer. I suppose I'm a bit drunk. But I'm sending this anyway. Because what's the point of talking to myself?

Garret

Willingly A Friend.

2007-04-09T12:53:00.000-04:00

Fernando,

You speak of preferring your visions to life and, yet, is that not the only way to be sure that your visions are the centering aspect of your life? I am not talking about the visions of a madman. I am speaking of the creative visions of someone who understands what it means to make something. It seems to me, and I know that I am not an expert on this matter (though I've always wished I could be), that those of us who live linearly lose something. I've always known that it is not productive to follow a straight line through your life. But, I suppose it is hard to avoid. I suppose you can only stare off to the sides, behind you, and it does nothing much. If you make your visions into your life you can look at them from all sides, from all angles. You must follow them down their crooked and sometimes darkening paths.

It is true what you say, partly. Those of us who neglect to know anything but our own visions are often too late. They look past the people in their lives and only into themselves. But, it seems to be necessary to the production of their art. I learned this from you, Fernando. I saw the way your eyes lit up when you spoke, that the words coming forth from your lips were just what you had wanted. You almost looked down at them as they escaped your mouth. They danced off the tip of your tongue and I caught them and held them and knew them. Before you, I only knew of art in vagaries. I had seen it; I had smelled it. But, I had never tasted it. The passion with which you spoke of Dedalus, of Mulligan, made me feel like they were right there with us, inside of us. And it is this ability, this strength, that gives way to all others.

You taught me that to make people see what you see, to put yourself into something so much so that they know it and it moves them, is worth all the moments, all the movements of your life. And yet, still, I cannot find a way to see myself in art. And yet, still, I struggle to muster up the passion that we had. I sit in the same bars, drink merrily, tilting my head back and smiling as I sip my beer, wiping the foam from my mouth with the back of my hand. I look ahead at whomever happens to be sitting infront of me and they are never what you were. Their eyes do not glow with any passionate light; they do not inspire me to speak and to shout.

And I wonder, is it enough to only know you in memory? Is it enough to only feel your presence in the depths of my thoughts, in the dark corners of days I can barely grasp hold of. It is enough to know your art only in these few but fond letters we are only recently exchanging. It wasn't until your last letter that I was able to really recognize the things I am missing. I am missing a passionate face to run through the streets with, eyes lit by words and by music. I pluck at my guitar every once in a while and put it away before the strings have time even to indent the skin on my fingers. I sit alone in a bar and stare at a blank page beneath me and end up with only a few sentences scrawled haphazardly across the top.

You speak of Julian and Maddalo, of the brittle chains which bind us. And how we are assured that much may be conquered, much may be endured, of what degrades and crushes us. The power that we ourselves have is embedded deep down somewhere and is not always easy to come by. I refrain from that sweet sleep which medicines all pain; I refrain from all things unworthy and I bow my head to you, to your words, in hope that I may find words of my own. I think, even now, I am starting to sound too much like you. And I think this cold world shall never know the depths of my emotions.

Willingly A Friend,
Garret

From Garret.

2007-04-09T12:52:00.000-04:00

Fernando,

I knew then that you knew me well, that you observed subtle shifts in my tones, the subtle motions of my mouth when I pressed it tightly in self-absorbtion. We were both joyous and floating forward, tumbling into the motions of youth with vigor and excitement. We were eager to live, eager to see.

I am also noticing a change in my momentum. Things I once looked at, convinced I understood them, I now look at with a hint of confusion. That's a good thing, though. I am less self-involved, more genuine. You know, honestly, sometimes when we would stumble together down those cobblestone roads, half-smashed from too many needless toasts, I felt that we were almost Joycean, or at least you were. I am different around you, you know; I'm much more confident. On good days I feel like the Buck Mulligan to your Dedalus, on bad days I feel more like Haines.
It is certainly something to be able to communicate with your fellow man, with those others who feel things as wholly and as completely as you do. It is certainly a rare treat to find someone with whom you can let your personality unfold naturally and honestly. But, I find the indulgence a bit too much at times. I am not so good at opening up; I am not so prone to letting anything in. I build myself in an image of who I want to be and I try to be that person whether I am or not. That can be rather transparent, I find.

I am also noticing a change in my pace. I move slower now, not because I must, but because I feel like we missed things. You remark on my observant nature, on the material things I made you more aware of. But, I was not nearly as observant about my own life. I let things fall to shatters while I laughed as if I didn't care. It is funny to tell you this because you always felt everything so supremely. The more I feel things, the more I pretend I don't. This doesn't go over well with the women, I'll tell you.

I remember the way you spoke of Anna, how you always spoke of her. And I invented her, my image of her, based on your descriptions. I doubt she's anything like I imagine her. I always wished I could adopt your passion, as you wished you could adopt my casual approach. But, perhaps you did not notice the cringes which crinkled my brow when you looked away. You see, I have spent all these years alone, with very few people to speak to seriously, to speak to simply and safely. That is perhaps why I wrote to you again. I was lucky to find your address.

You see, people live inside me because I cannot make them. I always envied you your creative center, your need to be more than yourself. I was always myself and no one but, and lucky, at that, to be myself at all. And I have struggled through these maddening moments when I wish, more than anything, that I could see myself reflected through someone else's eyes. It is in those times of weakness that I eventually turn to someone who I do not mean to turn to. This time it is you. I don't know if you expected this in response, but you've always brought out this tone in me.

Your recent confidant,
Garret

To Garret. Thin Threads.

2007-04-09T12:51:00.000-04:00

Dear Garret,

I remember the summer we met when I was always walking side by side with the people I'd created. I would speak to strangers the things I imagined they would say and wake with their dreams entangled in my own. I truly felt a writer then, but my words often tripped clumsily over each other in their eagerness and my plots stumbled in confusion after their initial giddy flight. I would pause, on occasion, considering the mess I'd left behind, but move forward anyhow certain that the best was yet to come. These days, I can't even imagine that sort of confidence. I suppose you have to be young to be so certain that you matter. I'm still waiting for the age when I gain the wisdom to understand that you don't have to matter. Getting through that in-between time has been a strange and troublesome process and my greatest consolation is that I have never lost my faith in writing as my only salvation.

But my writing is unpublished and unacknowledged and so I am always excited by the prospect of tapping off some letter to someone I once knew. I am so tired of writing something and finding it beautiful only to be overwhelmed by the realization that it will not be read. I throw myself into these letters seeking out a way to say the truest things because when I write a letter I know that at least one person will read it and understand.

I was very self-absorbed when we last saw one another. I paid careful attention to other people, I meticulously noted their mannerisms and intonations, delicately registered their flickers of emotion. But I always felt that whatever I saw of them was mine to have. I would take these bits of their being and scatter them throughout my creations and when I reread my work the refuse of my relationships would bob about in the rush of words and alert me to moments in memory. I always wondered if any of the people I knew would some day read my work and be capable of discerning in my vague visions their own passing presence in my perceptions.

You had (perhaps you still do) a way of concluding your expositions by leaning forward, pausing briefly in your speech and pointing with your index finger before saying something completely inconsequential and no more worthy of emphasis than anything you had said before. This always amused me and I gave the mannerism to a character I particularly liked who inhabited a story I particularly disliked and have no remaining copies of. It always makes me sad to waste my friends in this way. I feel a sense of duty toward the things that I have seen and I am always disheartened by my failure to record them properly. Especially when I realize that others so often fail to notice.

It was always a great pleasure of mine when seated with you in a public place to make an off-hand remark about someone in the room whom we had not previously talked about and feel confident that you would reply without confusion. I always knew you were watching the jack-ass at the next table ramble on confidently about his golf game to a girl who nodded timidly never taking the smile off her face with just as much disgust as I was. And I knew that I could make a snide remark about his poor grammar and you would snort and note the size of her ring commenting that he had obviously hadn't bought her attention with his eloquence. You taught me to see things like that, you brought my attention from the abstract to the material and I always appreciated what that did for my writing.

I miss those days when we strode about, each lost in his own thoughts but linked by our mutual apprehension of our shared environment. I talk to so few people face-to-face, now. Everyone I know has resolved into thin threads of words. I suspect that I have done this intentionally in order to emphasize my responsibility for my own observations. It was good to hear from you. I don't know if you expected all this in response but you've always brought out this tone in me.

Please write again.

Your old friend,

Fernando

Make Me A Pallet on Your .

2007-04-09T12:49:00.000-04:00

Dear Anna,

Today is New Year's Eve and I spent it alone, simply observing the motions of others around me. At times like these I am always overwhelmed by the imagined need to display some sort of feeling, some sort of evidence that, yes, I am like them. I see them all celebrating, smiling and I want to lend a hand, a brief shake, a condolence. One more year dead, lost to all the things we did not do that we might have done. And I wonder what it is that I will do differently with this new year, with this new arrangement of numbers which I will keep beneath my belt.

I suppose the new year doesn't mean much to me, honestly. It means that I will have an even harder time remembering the date. It will take me many months to get it straight. I have always been baffled by the way that people celebrate the new year. I have always thought it silly, inane even. I have always looked at myself on the last evening in December and I have always known that I will be who I will be despite the things around me changing.

Regrets echo in my mind and I watch the chattering crowds with such distant disillusion. It is as if everything I hear is only a muted memory of what people might have been doing. And even when I engage in their silly charades I still feel lost in the midst of everything I cannot feel. I scrutinize my every action, my every thought, looking for something to improve, fruitlessly fumbling around for some new goal, something to change.

And honestly I wonder if I am capable of ever changing. I wonder if anyone is. I wonder if the New Year is not only a brief time where people rejoyce in knowing that there are so many things they could change and then the rest of their lives are played out the same as they always were. I think of all the things that I might have done differently if I would have been able to see into the future. I try to remember my own "resolution" from last year. I wonder what it was I even did last year. I wonder what it is I am doing now.

Inevitably my thoughts return to you, as they often do. I remember the few New Years' we spent together, curled up beneath blankets, sipping cheap Champagne and giggling. I remember how sharply those times contrasted with the fights, how we could jump from one mood to the next without a second thought. Or maybe it was mostly I who did the leaping. And you just tolerated it until you couldn't tolerate it any longer.

Perhaps I should have made a new years resolution to discontinue uselessly dragging up the past and analyzing it. But, I spend my life wondering who I would be if I would have done things differently. Which, I suppose, is the same thing as wondering who I would be if I wasn't myself. I spend each moment in perpetual curiosity, trying to discern how that moment would be if you were standing next to me. I let the things that pulled us apart slip from my mind and I remember only the beautiful times, the soft, silent seconds where we each did what we needed to and held each other afterwards. It is so rare that two people can bounce off of one another and use that interaction to create something worthwhile. So often people use each other for the exact opposite; they want excuses, some reason to do something other than what it is they know they need to. I know this because I have lived it. But, I suppose that is how I know most of the things I know.

Oh, Anna, I wonder if you miss me. I wonder if you think of those kisses we shared as the clock struck twelve. They are the only memories I have of a New Year. They are the only memories I can muster of having something to look forward to, of having some resolve. Now, I am stuck, shivering, beneath each moment, wishing that it would resonate with the strength of the moments we shared. Now, I compare the sound of each second to the sound of your smile. Nothing ever adds up, Anna. And when the countdown begins and the ball drops, it is your face I see in the crowd, smiling up at me, your eyes shaking with wonder. And when everything is silent after the celebration, it is only then that I can truly feel the weight of all that I have lost.
I hope that your New Year is full of all the things you want and that you have the resolve to change the way you need to at all times of the year.

Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor,
Fernando

My Dear Beloved Anna.

2007-04-09T12:25:00.000-04:00

My Dear Beloved Anna,

I spent this day wandering among ancient sculptures in a museum. I stood and stared into the pupil-less eyes and patrician nose of some nameless citizen of the Roman Empire and knew that he had paid his money to arrange just this, that he had wanted for me to stand here and think of him eighteen hundred years after his death. Immortality is our only dream, our sole endeavor. But he failed, Anna. That man is dead and I stared at marble today. Nothing lives behind dumb lips and expressionless eyes. Nothing lasts but the words we make and whisper on into the ears of future generations.

I wanted to whisper that you exist. I thought that it should be forever known that your shoulders curved just so and that your smile slipped into me so that hours later I stood in an empty street and laughed at nothing. I never did do it. I never did write those eternal lines. Have you read Ulysses yet? A blind man who tapped down a Dublin street, a pompous medical student who wrote bawdy doggerel, a couple of giggling barmaids shall all live. But I could never get past myself long enough to ensure that thy eternal summer shall not fade. All I ever did was to carve your image into marble with my sentimental idealism. I forgot that I loved Anna and wrote only that I loved and I nearly condemned you to life as one of those smooth-faced, interchangeable Roman ladies with high foreheads and low cheek-bones, staring forever into nothing (from nothing). And you always knew how I betrayed you. But I urged you to write, didn't I? I did that for you, wanted you to make something, too. And now you say that you have.

What have you, my love? An innocent gaze to watch you, a blank mind on which your image was the first to be emblazoned, a face, perhaps, to bear your beauty another generation into the future (for god knows this mad poet never could write the beauty of your eyes). But beware my Anna. Those innocent eyes do not see you, they do not even look for you. When, long after your death she too lies dying, do you think that she, like I, will cry out your name? She may whisper "mother" but she will not be calling to you but only to the soft, steadily beating warmth she felt once, nestled against your breast, to the gift of life you gave her but cannot give her again.

What is a mother, Anna? What is mine or your own? A guarded look, a sharp warning, arms that embrace you to take away the sting of the slap that they gave and then, suddenly, that great distance that will forever more separate you from your origin. Do you still weep for your Mother, Anna? I weep for the darkness from which I came. And she, who held me against her to shield me from it, claiming that I came from her, that I was hers, she is dead, now. And even then I regarded her with distrust. This child is not yours Anna. She is another. Remember what I taught you and teach it to her. She took words from your lips. I beg you, tell her what they are and do not forget yourself.

Thine Always

If I Can Remember Having Lived.

2005-10-05T15:39:00.000-04:00

If I can remember having lived before and been different than I am now, then I can imagine the years that still lie before me, and that with their passage i will move and change and age and die. I do not fear death; but I fear disintegration. I cannot envision the dissolution of my consciousness. I cannot believe in its possibility. I want to die bravely, in words, my last thoughts clear and conscious; and I feel somehow that if I can manage this, then I can manage a sort of immortality. But I have never seen an admirable old age and I cannot imagine dying bravely after having been so enfeebled. I have seen the old empty and denying, I have seen them hard and miserable in their fear, senile and babbling, or far more rarely, too complacent in some thin accomplishment. When weakness strips me of all my human dignity, will I be able to face anything bravely? But perhaps it is dignity itself that is the weakness. Dignity is a frail and slender lie that pretends to find in an individual unearned qualities based on an abstract ideal of humanity. I should learn to shed my dignity before I am forced to let fall its final tattered shreds. It is possible to be weak and shaking, unable to speak, to shit in one's pants and still be human. To have the courage to be ridiculous before others is to have the courage to die. But it is easy to speak of death when one views it as distant. I just heard a crash somewhere in the dark and was rendered blank-minded by fear. Although I know that at any moment I might die, I know also that the far greater probability is that I have half a century still stretching before me. I choose, as we all do, to believe in this probability as though a certainty. But at some point, that half a century will wear itself out, and if I still live I will be living robbed of the comfort of those long and likely years. Old age lives unable to pretend any longer that death is not an inevitability. The old simply sit and wait, no longer struggling, aware that there is no hope for possibility, no time for change. And though the imminence of death is the single defining fact of their lives, still few admit this to themselves, because the thought that what they have never lived they never now will live is too terrible a thought. But dying consciously is no more terrible than living consciously. Each stage of life is singular and precious only in its singularity; each moment passes never to be lived again. Our youth is, in this manner, as much a part of our dying as our old age.

This Book.

2005-10-01T14:51:00.000-04:00

This book obliterates. It reduces everything to dust and leaves me stranded in the blank hum of reality. My parents think I learned to devalue things somewhere outside their house; but they taught me this book without even knowing what it does, that it whispers that nothing matters that it takes you outside of the world so that even the very structures it teaches seem false and unimportant even as it, the words, continues to pulsate with truth. It sounds back at me my own disbelief. It declares the truth of its own falsehood. It leaves me shivery and tearful and afraid. There is so much power in the lack of things, truth in the emptiness, reality in the absence of structure. There is so much that is not human and so much in what is and we mix it all up and call it truth. We do not know what is outside ourselves; we know only how we interact with the world and the world is what it is because we are here. Science says that things change for being looked at but that's not the way to put it. In fact, the looking is part of the thing. Changed from what? It never happened without the looking; that was something else. So many false flights away from the human. So much hope that some destruction of self and intuition and feeling some reduction to structure will free us from what we are. Religion and science. Contempt for the human. Objectivity. And I've only ever lived because I had words and I'll only ever live if I make my own. But I want to live and I want to feel things and be things and we're all afraid of living because we're afraid of dying, because movement leads toward death and routine creates the illusion of stillness. We're so afraid of death that we deaden the love of life in ourselves, make life something we don't want to live and then sigh about it. Everything is terrible, even what is beautiful. Nothing is simple; nothing is good. Life swims before my eyes and I write it down vaguely and abstractly instead of setting it down in its actualities with its people and events. I have to write. I have to make something. I don't know what to do if I don't. I don't know what will happen to me. I can't imagine years ahead of this self that flies away into nothing. Something must grow before my eyes and hands. I wish sometimes that it didn't have to be words; but they bang inside my head with so much urgency. I whisper them aloud all the time, on the street, at work. But this will never be whole, this rambling, these lazy summaries of things. One must build a solid thing. Connect oneself firmly with everything instead of simply reacting. Layer stories and people so thickly that they build a whole real sense of things. And all I wish now is that I had someone to send this to. I have no one else who cares at all that I'm a human being and it's my own fault because I'm so unaccustomed to thinking of myself as a human being. I stretched today and thought about how once I had forgotten so completely that I had a body, that I had a face even, that anyone ever saw me, that these arms were mine, these legs, these eyes and hands and hair and that they are the only ones I will ever have. I am still surprised that people react to me based on looking, react even to the expressions on my face. I must learn to take responsibility for my physical presence. We die and so we discover in so many people's old age that they have never lived outside of their time, that they are stuck in what they can live through, that things are already moving beyond them and that their deaths will be so final, so complete. They will be in the history books as those mysterious masses whose movements defined the time. The people who did all the things they didn't know they were doing. I persist in falling into things; I don't make them. Weakness always lives alongside strength. I don't know what that means, if it means anything at all; I am writing things before I think them.

A Rushed Hush.

2005-09-28T14:49:00.000-04:00

There is a rushed hush to half-lit mornings when no one is up and about but those who have to be, who were dragged from warmth and dreams and home by calamitous clattering of a clocks demands. We stare at each other blankly on roads, in doorways, and on elevators, unable to believe that our agony is shared. It is too early in the morning to do anything but nod and I can barely manage a grumbled, "Hello." I am not alive. I am always stunned that other people can see me before ten o'clock in the morning.

I Think in This Sleep.

2005-09-25T19:46:00.000-04:00

We think of illness as a temporary thing, a brief time spent before returning to some ideal of physical well-being. But I realize as I write through this swollen grogginess, struggling to hear my thoughts in the thick wetness of my aching feverish brain, that life forever veers from the ideal. When I am no longer sick, I may be tired or hungry, sleepy or depressed. I wait to be something that I will never be and think that only then will I be what I am. My body cries out to deaden itself to its own existence, but I sit awake and write because I fear that if I give in to the impossibility of living while ill, I must give in to the impossibility of living. Whence come our ideals if we have no experience of them? I think we glimpse them briefly. Perfection is not separate from reality; it is an element of it. The beautiful mingles daily with the shabby and the low. I think I have seen perfection. I think I have heard it, tasted it. I think in this sleep which overtakes me now in the depth of my fatigue there is something of the ideal.

The Crane.

2005-09-25T11:47:00.000-04:00

The crane was on the water again today. His elegant neck stretched out into the sky whence he came. He's like me, always wings, ready to fly away at any moment. I look for him every morning. He's always alone amongst the ducks, bending his legs this way or that. I love to watch the way the water flows past his tiny skinny legs as if they weren't even there. The water flows beneath the bridge on which I stand. I like to ignore all of the street happening, the sound of hurried horns and engines revving their way to work. I stare at the crane, at the rocks, and the water and I forget for what seems like forever that I am headed nowhere on this road, that this bridge will take me someplace I have no reason to be. So, I pay attention to the leaves on the trees and they way they fall and I watch the swallows leap about and chirp. It is in these things, all at once, that I am truly alive and that I truly forget.

Another From Anna.

2005-09-23T19:43:00.000-04:00

Again Fernando-

A mother is only what you make of her, my dear, and you clearly sucked your own mother dry until she, with bare and parched nipples, had to tear you away from her breast. I wonder what it is you think you taught me, you in your infinite arrogance, your false closeness. If you believe what you say you do, that each one is only another and no one can be mine nor yours, why do you continue to spill over onto me? I have ended that which we once knew. I forgot about that night we stood so close in the crowded bar, breathing each others breath as if it was smoke.
What do you know of words, Fernando, when you cannot even make them into something solid, something self-sufficient. I waited years for you to turn me into something, to write me outside of myself, but you never did. What is it you think you've taught me, darling? To live the opposite of my ideals, to make people purpousfully into marble, so they can't even blink you away?

I do not seek immortality through this pulse in my womb. I only seek to feel a movement, a change. Perhaps, I'll believe in something bigger, even. A God of something. The echo of a child's lonely voice in the street at night, piercing the darkness with the emptiness of innocence. I feel her inside of me as I could never feel you. You think that I have made her to sheild me from the inevitability of my own demise but, in fact, I have made her out of an attempt to put something beautiful on this earth. It is the very same reason that you, with a beggars eyes and hands, scribble your soul so passionately, so strongly. But I am not like you. I will not toss what I have made into the arms of another.

How can you speak of "another" and all the while push everything you make into the barren hearts of lonely women and girls who don't know any better. Do you not recall Claudia and how she had a husband, how she had Andrew and yet you still pressed her, pleaded, pleased that she blessed you with what precious little time she had. You scold me for making another to fill my lack but you simply steal those already living to fill yourself with a longing for what you know you can never maintain.

You knew that night, that very first night that I was not the type to change. That I would not leap into your arms with words and with wide eyes at the wonder of them. I simply looked at you when you recited Shelley or Joyce. I don't know anything about the tapping of blind men. I only know the way they, unseeing, grab at walls and railings. I only know the way they press their hands to things, making them with their fingers. One can live without eyes, without a nose, and it really is no different. You still feel the rain steading streaming down your face when you walk home at night, beneath the crooked outline of the sky. You still feel the ground beneath your feet and the air as it brushes your neck and tickles cheeks. This is what I live for Fernando, things you can only feel: a gentle kicking, babysoft against my belly, the pain of setting something loose into the world (my womb come alive), a heavy hand wrapped around my own. Perhaps you too should learn to feel.

Thusly Another,
Anna

To Withstand the Blows.

2005-09-21T23:21:00.000-04:00

I have exiled myself from life because I have felt that I do not deserve it. And though I sit and long for involvement and tell myself that I must risk some part of myself and become a part of things, I know that I do not deserve to be involved because I will never risk what others risk. I have thought that I have felt things more strongly than another only because I have been more aware of my feelings. But my awareness lends me control and others are lost in what they feel and so are more affected by it. I know I have too often hurt more deeply than I have been hurt and told myself all along that I cannot affect others because I have not wanted to take responsibility for the damage I have done. When I stub my toe I howl, I curse, I spin around the room with my foot in my hand and then I laugh at the spectacle I myself have made. But I have seen those whose eyes darken in silence when they feel pain. They take it into themselves and life picks slowly away at their ability to live with each splinter and thoughtless, angry word. When I express a thing I make it mine, but I also fling it into the world that I might experience it as an outsider and with an outsider's perspective of my exact relationship to life. I peer down at my mad shouting dance around the room and the movement and the noise become as important as the dull throbbing within me. What is written, far more even than what is said (since most people do not listen even to themselves when they speak), is understood and so no longer a part of those dark, unapprehended reaches of the brain that sink us in our miseries and drive us to our deaths. And I think sometimes that I do not have the strength to withstand the blows of an unconscious life.

To Think in Words.

2005-09-20T10:52:00.000-04:00

To think in words- purely- so that the words anticipate the thought is to know that something can be said, that the full weight of realization can be held up on precise points of understanding. I saw a painting once of a girl at a window gazing out into an ocean which creeps right up to her windowsill. And everything in the painting, the curtains and her dress and the rag on the windowsill folds and flows like the ocean which blends into the sky. But the girl is just leaning there for a moment, resting from her work, caught up in infinity but indifferent to it. I see this painting and I think of the painter, the dreamer, chained to infinity, dragged away from the simplicity of that girl's humanity by his need to express it. He confuses her with the ocean, with the window, with everything that is not himself. I spin out words to tie myself to other things and I believe those words are real, more real than I am.

From Anna.

2005-09-20T02:39:00.000-04:00

Fernando-

I will write to you now because I've finally discovered something, buried beneath years of your weighty words. I too have had words all along but I put them in the closet for you. Do you not remember all the times we spoke and I kept tight lips and only looked at you, your own lips wagging away at whatever? You get so wrapped up in your own speech that you don't see anything around. What do you think it means to be a genius anyway? What do you even do but scribble some odd fragment every day or so. They don't even begin to build up to anything. They don't even have any way of ever being anything but exactly what they are and that's why you keep writing them, isn't it? That's why you push them out by two's and by four's and you dislodge them from wherever they seem loose. It's not as though you work on them even. You just dump them out and live by your rereading. This was who I was. You think that if you can be accountable for each day of the life you've lived, if you can look at each day closely, beneath the microscope, remember it in words, than each single day will be distinct if even just for sentences. But that's not the way it is Fernando. Things just happen and you can't record them because they move too quickly by you and they suck you up into them. It's so evident in your expression, too. It's one thing to be something, to know that's what you are, but it's quite another to lose yourself in that, to live for what you will be when it's all over for you. What's the use of living and making when no one looks at what you make? How can you continue this wandering and undirected gaze? How can you look at me with that eye that says, "I will make you something you never could make yourself. Immortal." and then not do it.

You always told me that you'd draw me but I knew you didn't know how to draw. And anyway you'd already made me in words. What would pictures do? You just imagined what those pictures would look like. You just drew them in your mind, only looking at what they'd become but never knowing how they'd get that way.

Some people don't make things Fernando. Why can't you understand that? Why do you want to teach everyone to make something? Some people just don't have it inside them to come out. I stared inside myself when you touched me, and tried to find something to match your words. I remembered being a kid in art class. The way I'd always search for something, always try to think of something when all the other kids just jumped into it. I always tried to be so calculated and could never do anything naturally.

You forced me to take a long hard look at my own mortality, that I would die one day without anything ever escaping from me. I lay beneath you and stared up into your full lips and half-shaven face and I knew that you would be remembered, even for those few words. I knew that you would be remembered for the letters you write to me and to everyone else you've ever walked past on the street. I needed to make something. And now I have. I'll tell her that you say hello.

Yours,
Anna

Nor Find Myself In Its Lack.

2005-09-18T18:57:00.000-04:00

Others have stated what I wish to, and done it so perfectly that if I were an eternal pessimist I would stop writing for fear of frenzied repetition. I have seen so many turn their heads in blank stares and avoid what it is they could easily see. I know not if it is fear or complacency; I know not if it is apathy or pity which drives their necks toward the ground as they look down only at their feet and scramble past. I've been to the bottom of that which I see but not found the courage to seek farther. I wake up in the morning to gaze out my window and I dread the walk to work which isn't to come for hours. I sit and write these fragments, uncovering all I might have thought or felt, and then I return to them the next day, out of curiosity and forgetfulness. I should be writing epics, novels, something outside of myself, but I cannot find the perspective to be someone else, to know someone else. I must invent the people who understand me and I must make them into fiction but each time I take this pen to paper I end up drowned in nothing but a slow unveiling of what I never was and never could be. Books are stacked all over my small room and often I cannot choose one. I do not read a great deal of poetry; it is too abstract and distant. It defies real language by leaving jilted lines and jaded cadences. I cannot make poetry of my own nor find myself in its lack.

Time Spent Senseless.

2005-09-15T11:23:00.000-04:00

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. But in this manner, life is lost and we find ourselves more than ever time's victims, having moved forward without having lived and lacking the self we might have gained had we fully experienced those days. The human faculty of imagination is forever driving us to attempt to escape the inescapable--time, death, our very selves. I have left many cities in search of some relief only to find, in some new place, that everything in my surroundings that I had hoped to leave was something I myself had put there.

I Forget I Am Myself.

2005-09-14T23:10:00.000-04:00

At work, I forget that I am myself and a thousand things slip by unrealized. Papers are moved and words are spoken and brief looks exchanged, yet none of it bears the imprint of my doing. Time passes over me; I am involved in things without my knowing. I do not know who I am forced to become in my absence. I do not know what person is left behind in my co-workers awareness'. They react to me. I remember their eyes, their faces. I do not know who they are reacting to. I am indifferent. I am bewildered. I stare past the edge of my desk to the window and the sky. Time lurches and falls. I come home with my shoulders weary to collapse under the weight of my failures.

But She Never Does.

2005-09-13T11:56:00.000-04:00

I write as who I wish I were and then, so as not to be left with the evidence of my
dishonest wishfulness, I toss the paper in someone else's direction. It seems that despite my awkward and always reticent attempts to rid myself of my words, I put them somewhere that they will solidify at least in someone else's mind. Those whom I see at work, those whom I pass by on the street, only know me as a physical body, an image of a man who is to them a silent mystery and who (as a result of being physically nill and void) does not even rile up their curiosity to look up from their newspapers or coffee mugs long enough to see me. I am aware, though, that I give myself away in my stride: ranging from a confident one (on the rare mornings where I have forgotten about myself all together) to a mere dragging of myself behind me. I give myself away in my lunch or my lack of it and in the way I gaze out the office windows at other mysteries below. I always feel I know them, by their tight lips or sharply clutched bags. But I know I never do know anything so my impressions of people fade and leave and as they do I am left with nothing but a faint hint of wishing I were someone as well. If the woman whose desk was nearest to the window would look up at me during these episodes, I would be real because she would really see me. But she never does.

Each Word I Realize.

2005-09-09T08:54:00.000-04:00

The most difficult thing to do is write. You have only yourself to draw from and you have to watch the pictures you draw so closely and even then, sometimes, you can't figure out what they mean. So often I will start to write something which isn't wholly inspired but only fueled by my own fear of death and disappearance. I see each word as it forms the sentence and I feel the weight of imminence upon me. I feel myself so strongly and have no idea how to feel the world the same way. Each word I write I realize more and more that I write only to form myself in my own head and with the vain hope that one day, after my physical body rots and ferments, that self will somehow be known.

Upon Waking.

2005-09-08T14:36:00.000-04:00

Upon waking, the morning slips into me like the last bits of sand slipping through an hour glass. I lay in bed for as long as I can stand to listen to myself think things which I have no control over. It is the morning that determines the rest of my day; I judge myself by my dreams as I let scenes replay over and over again, never fully aware of the judgment but always aware of the emotion the judgment induces. I contemplate the day which cracks wide open in front of me and wonder if tomorrow I'll wake up fulfilled or at least content to have achieved something.

I Sit In The Cold.

2005-08-29T02:53:00.000-04:00

I sit in the cold and wait for something to come that I know is a long way off. The wind snaps itself around my fingers and I can barely notice the pen that's in my hand or the nose that's on my face. I know that to truly make things real I must make sacrifices but is the sacrifices which ail me. It is too cold outside to sit and watch the world unfold. It depresses me to watch the empty trees crack and sway in the dry wind. Everything is empty and I am just cold and waiting.

Nothing But Feelings.

2005-08-11T23:53:00.000-04:00

I tore last night completely apart and left it bundled up at the bottom of my bed like a dirty and used blanket in a room that was too hot to begin with. Sleep was the farthest thing from this room as I lay awake all night long in an intoxicating lucidity. A great many things came together, glued themselves to one another and made a ladder on which I could ascend and view the inside of my own head from a very new perspective. I found many things which I didn't mean to save in the first place, only kept out of forgetfulness or disconcert, and in them I found myself and wrung myself out of dry paper and ink. I sometimes get sentimental in my blatherings, in my odd and not often well articulated ideas, and I pretend that I exist as a human so far beyond anything that I could ever write. I pretend that my words are only but a dim shadow of the life that I live but as soon as I spend a great deal of time writing I realize that I am only a dim shadow of my words when I am at my best and most real and generally I am nothing but a smushing together of many letters and fragments and pieces of flesh. And one would expect that upon this realization, I would weep as if upon a grave or a burnt dinner, but I cry neither at graves nor burnt dinners nor this realization because I have all the words to make me more real than I would ever be if I were merely tearing at the corners of my eyes over something I knew all along was the farthest thing from tangible. If I can explain why I am crying, I do not need to cry. If the tears come anyway, breaking past all concept of words and logic, as they sometimes do, I am wholly human in that too, because I feel something liquid and fading. It's odd, so much, how I can feel so totally whole and real when I feel nothing but words and then I feel so completely whole and real when I feel nothing but feelings. The world is full of words and feelings and the only way to live is to make the feelings words and the words feelings and then you are feeling wordy and human, just the way it should be.

I Don't Know How.

2005-08-11T02:52:00.000-04:00

I don't know how the words structure themselves inside my mind and I don't know how my mind structures itself inside the words. Not only have I discovered, in this state of soggy groggy nothingness, that I cannot function without a direct and daily transference of thoughts into words but I have also discovered that one can transfer anything to words and be somewhat satisfied in making something solid. I can think something that would have just been passing by but once I catch it and grab it I can examine where it came from and what it really is. I don't know where my words end and I begin. I don't know if I am what the words are or if the words are what I am but I know that I am empty without the words just as the words are empty without me. You find the most human parts of you by feeling things not by making them into words but you cannot understand what you felt or why it makes you all the more human until you put them into words. I live only in my mind and in my words and in my ragged slippers in the morning. They are as much a part of me as my feet and it is just as hard for me to imagine that one morning I will wake up and waddle about in them and they will fall apart as it is to imagine that one morning I will wake up and waddle about and my feet will fall apart. But both of these things are true and I can only wonder which will happen first.

Dearest Father.

2005-08-08T14:47:00.000-04:00

Dear Father O'Connor,

I have never been inclined to talk to clergyman or mystics or any of that class of men who must find some other name for that which is simply life. But you struck me with the force of your words. Very few of those religious men who delight in discussion with infidels such as myself are willing to admit so openly the role that God plays in their view of things. I have always been frustrated by such sidelong proseltyzing. I have always hated speaking to the smugly smiling sort who will always find reason to argue and refuse to admit that they do not argue from reason but only from the supposed axiomatic existence of God. "God exists. Therefore, I am right. QED." But you, my good father, came right out with the heart of the matter from your first statement and so you compelled me to listen to you and to think long and hard on what you said and finally to do what I always do when someone intrigues me, to write to you.

When you spoke so forcefully, father, I thought I heard in your voice something of myself. And now I understand this impression. You are the only person I have ever met who truly has faith. I do not doubt that you could have converted anyone else with your speech. But I know what faith is because I too possess it and so your faith cannot move me. I have faith in words; I do not seek my salvation in anything but the printed word and because of my own faith I understand the secret of yours. Faith is a thing that you must create. I do not doubt that you know this. Faith is the understanding that life is nothing and that man must make something if he is to live it. This is what my writing is built on. This, too, is the pedestal on which your god stands.

Do you think that I have never known God? I remember him well. I remember how in my childhood I saw him in the silence of the sleeping house and in the stars that mark out the endless depths of the sky. How later on I felt him enclosing the definite shape of my single, separate soul. But I can also remember what is older than he. I can also remember nights before I knew God and how he was never there when I descended into dreams. I can also remember how small I was, how savage and alone with myself and how I never knew fear or trembling. And I know that God was created in me and that I held on to him as long as I did because I have always known the necessity of faith and the passionate desire for immortality.

I do hope we live again, father. I do not fear His judgment. I have not taken this blessing, life, for granted. I have not killed my consciousness nor lied about what I am. Could God know me better than I know myself?

God is unheard whispers and shadows in the night. Listen closer and you will know that someone speaks, turn on the light and you will know that there is something actually there. Well then, I guess God exists; but he is nothing more than what is always there even when I do not think of it.

We understand one another father; we are both idealists. It is my idealism that teaches me my materialsm. I love the thought of what is actually there. It is too beautiful to make in man's image, a thing that walks and talks and takes its revenge when it is denied. I think that you are like me. No one could have such faith in a crucified Jew or an angry tyrant (that is to say in someone else). I think your faith is like mine: a belief that what we are can live alongside what we are not. I have never heard you claim that God loves us or is benevolent.

Thoughtfully,
Fernando

She Saw Nothing.

2005-08-05T14:50:00.000-04:00

I cannot feel anything until it is in words. I can understand what it is I am supposed to feel but I cannot have any type of reaction until I understand what the reaction is that I am having. I once held a woman for a whole night. She cowered beneath my strong arms as if she were begging me with her toes (rubbing them against my ankles) to feel something for her, to show her that I did. And it wasn't that I didn't feel. I lay there and touched her, memorizing her skin because I knew I wouldn't feel it again but never uttering a single sentence. I could have told her lies but I opted to tell her nothing instead. She saw right through me and she saw nothing.

To Make Something.

2005-07-26T23:19:00.000-04:00

The night slipped by slowly and unexpectedly; I forgot what to do with it and how. It's morning now and I've been making desperate attempts in my half-wakefulness to make something but I don't know what. I think I dreamed in words and so I woke in words. But my dreams are a blur of the night-past and gone- to not be found again but in more dreams. I'm certain I'll dream of last night and the way it slid by so easily, without effort or sound. I wonder if I did anything, wrote anything, and I imagine I must have because I woke from the evening with such perfect balance and ease, crawling back into words, into days, like that was the only place in the world where I belonged. Yet, at the same time, I recall the evening with the same balance of tone and time as if there, as well, I was the only place I'd ever been. And even now, I can't recall the thoughts which led me to these thoughts. I can't recall the events of the evening because it was so normal and easy. It just walked me, led me hand in hand, through it, depositing me in the morning, leaving me in the light. And in the light I saw everything I was in the dark but still didn't know why I ever was these things and moreover why I remained to be them, shining and proud, the sun shining on everything.

Soggy, Groggy.

2005-07-14T22:56:00.000-04:00

Completion Falsifies, Apprehension Renews

2005-07-10T23:07:00.000-04:00

What is written is not what it is, but what is in it. A thin sheet of paper covered with cramped, rushed letters, a thick, type-written manuscript, a novel enclosed in hard covers, a poem, an experiment, a work of profound brilliance... Completion falsifies, but apprehension renews. One must write to be read, to be taken apart after having built. In the days when literature was spoken, there was no pause in which the words could gel and form a thing that was not themselves, there was no publisher and no descriptions on back covers, there was only the long flow of new-formed being. We bind ourselves within our pages and someone must free us. The freeing is not only in the opening and the reading but it is in the soaking. I want to change the world I can't bear to live in. But who would care to free me, when no one even turns in the street to look at me?

Thick, Tight Fists

2005-07-07T19:25:00.000-04:00

I have hidden from everything, in the late of evening, with my hands shoved deeply in my pockets and clenched in thick, tight fists. I am not angry; I am just holding on to what I can. The buildings flush by me and I don't see the faces that pass because my gaze is not a gaze but only an impression that I have eyes. I know that people, also with clenched fists, rush along but I feel no bond between us. I have never met anyone who excites my notion of things, who questions me or even understands enough to smile at my cowardice and dramatics. But then again, I cannot see people, I can only see through them.

Life Slips In....

2005-07-02T15:24:00.000-04:00

I live each day many lives that I have never lived. I am constantly flung forward into possibility. Each look I exchange with another becomes a thousand complex relationships, each trouble I face multiplies into the thousand sorrows it might engender. Life slips in between my fantasies and my dreaming and I wonder if I am able to tell the difference.

Brother Mine- From Miguel

2005-05-14T21:28:00.000-04:00

Brother mine,

Why do you always send your letters to the office? Is it that you don’t want Julia to know that you’re hitting me up for money again or does deceiving spouses just become second nature after awhile? You’re actually afraid of Julia, aren’t you? She really doesn’t hate you as much as you think she does. But we’ll take that up another time.
You write to me at the office and I write back from the office and so you must forgive me the inevitable brevity of this communication. I’ve a deadline looming and the editor has been practically down my throat ever since a certain incident. She made some snide remark the other day about the fine line between the “irresponsibility of shoddy fact-checking” and the “outright dishonesty of fabrication”. If it were up to her, she said, both would be considered equally unethical. I’m sure she still believes that I just made that witness up.
But let me tell you, Fernando, that despite the certainty that it will result in a drain on both my time and my pocket, a letter from you is always a pleasant experience. For one thing, it’s sure to be entertaining. Have you ever talked to somone (a professional, I mean) about these oddly juxtaposed predilictions for both married women and prostitutes? Don’t worry, I won’t bring up Mother. My telephone rings, my work cries out to me. I must go, but write me and don’t wait until you’re broke again.

Wonderful hearing from you,
Miguel