Cynthia,
These have been some tiresome weeks.
But, mostly, just a process of letting things go. To keep friends you’ve been working to ease out of hard times from worrying too much about why It’s not Working quite yet. To pull out of you all of the things that you once considered Terror only to realize they are now Relief. To give way to the Endless tasks instead of thinking yourself into (and out of) the Ends. To keep yourself honest with the people to whom you’ve attached yourself by leaving When It’s Time.
It’s been a dissolving. I’ll come back to crystal soon enough, but for the time being I get to be a warm thought or the flush in a cheek. I get to be nothing but the occasional fullness underneath someone’s ribs.
Laura
Laura,
Last night I dreamt of you. We were in my high school, and you came to me as I fumbled with my locker, unable to open it in time for fifth period English. I started crying, from nerves and also joy in seeing you during such a vulnerable moment. I decided to play hooky so we could walk through the hallways together. We discussed what needed to be discussed, and concluded that we both felt differently about the situation and neither us could possibly understand the others feelings.
So. We buried the hatchet. We then sat in the cafeteria eating soft pretzels with mustard. I told you all the things I’ve been dying to tell you about my life recently, mainly about new romances and accomplishments.
When I woke up, my pillow was wet. I reached for the phone but then forgot what it was that I wanted to say.
I recently read that you are every part of your dream, that you are actually everything. So I am me, and the stubborn locker, and I am you. I guess I am also the soft pretzel, too.
Cynthia
cynthia,
i walked past your house & you weren’t there. i was on my way to meet a friend i hadn’t spoken with in ten years because we’d let our young & stubborn minds get the best of us & then let time do its thing. i wondered if you and i will do the same or if age has loosened our grips and we might be able to let things go. i came to no conclusion.
laura
61
c,
i watched do the right thing against the wall of a building under blankets and with a few beers in me and i wish you had been there, that you could be here to witness a softer me in a softer summer than the one that will meet me back east.
anyway, i thought of your dad, policeman of that time and location, and his stories. i wondered if he had any of those hard moments “men” don’t speak of (in context of the movie, a radio raheem, if you will). like my dad, who fired the choir director of the church he was moved to when i was 12, because he was gay, and no one spoke a word of it.
he’s in the hospital, my dad, and i wonder if he ever thinks about how, when i remember his love of the lord that this weird act of faith-induced cruelty is what i think of, will think of when he’s gone. the answer is he doesn’t and this would be devastating, but that’s what that kind of commitment to belief is about, i guess.
the choir director ended up being my guidance counselor for a year or two in high school, and apparently only ever spoke highly of me, according to my mom. i wonder what that must be like, too.
—-
to be a little less morose, we’re only weeks apart from one another, and
i c a n n o t w a i t.
it’s only time that separates us and not space, anyways.
love,
l.e.
60
c,
it’s funny that you wrote about movement because a day or two later, i felt a trace of you in me as i smiled and stretched into the light of someone nice and new and sweet (like a certain image i have in my memory of you on the day we became friends, one that may very well be apocryphal and is really too warm and lovely to verify.)
the traces i’ve been feeling these last few days have been less kind. yesterday, johannes mehserle, a BART cop, was released from jail after serving eleven months of a two year sentence for shooting an unarmed and prostrate man in the back point blank. the city hummed nervously and so did i. this morning, memories of chris and dan were already running through me in angry vibrations on who knows what course when i found out that someone i once knew in a life that isn’t this one had been arrested and charged and all but confessed to criminal levels of sexual creepiness. because it’s someone who was involved in what could be called a community, the requisite debates raged about how to respond, matching pitch with a certain dissonance i’ve been trying to dismantle myself for about a year now.
but in new movements, people have been reading my book and i’ve been helping make more. i learned that ‘everyone has my back’ when it comes to last summer’s trauma, which made my eyes swell something fierce and watery. i bought my ticket east, but i have yet to buy my way back. i’m all signed up to learn how to get the crap beaten out of me for the next six weeks, so i hope you and k.wads aren’t planning on pulling any funny business…
love
59
lalo,
we video chatted two days ago, pantsless, and you’ve been on my mind ever since. you usually are, but more than usual now that i saw you moving and talking, and now that i know i will see you in two months.
not much has happened in the past two days. i sat on the water and ate a bagel with a gentleman. we talked about death. and then we talked about west coast and east coast assholes, and our conclusion was something like this: we’ve been dealing with straightforward assholes our entire lives, because that is just the demographic of the east. we can deal with them, as long as they immediately get to the point of the assholery.
after that i read an entire book, ‘half a life’ by darin strauss, in two hours. he grew up where i grew up, killed a girl on a bicycle when he was eighteen. she swerved from the right shoulder to the left lane. she may have done it on purpose. or not. his memoir is the aftermath, half of his life later.
then i found a chinese food joint that has the best damn fake meat in brooklyn.
and now, i have a UTI, the first one of my entire life. and now, i know hell.
love, cynthia
58
c,
i’m going “home” this week. to the florida/family/friends from high school kind of home. i kind of dread it for a number of reasons (driving, UGH) but the return, even more. because it’s back to being okay with not having enough time for anything, sort of conjuring my social life and/or a social “living on borrowed time.” because i made a promise to a fleeting romance, and fuck if i’m not going to feel stupid asking to hang out only to be turned down again. because i’m going from a home in name to a (future former) home in the making.
there’s this book called i love dick, which is both about that and not about that, and about people i know in real life and kind of about me in a way that i’m young and stupid enough to believe i can defy. anyway, chris kraus, protagonist and author, wrote the following in it and, oh, it’s how i feel all the time anymore:
“virilio’s right - speed and transience negate themselves, become inertia.”
i wrote krista a note because she’s going through life, and i know a little bit about that, and she wrote back saying she’d fold the country in half, if she could, to bring our coasts a little closer. it made my heart leap the way only you weird and wonderful women back east know how to do. that brief moment of suspension is my “home-home” and i go there every chance i get.
love,
l
57
dear lalo,
while in alabama, a man named david maise said the following to me: “there’s what you’ve already got in new york, but there’s what you need here.” i think he means the quiet, the air that smells like nothing, the calm. it really resonated, but the thing is this: i feel there are things that i need that are spread out all over. you’re in there.
i just realized that during my last visit to see you, no photographs of us were taken. the one below, from last night, will have to do. and it does.
love, c
