[Los Angeles, 1992]
Hi.
— your voice, always full of dark colors and roughnesses I hadn’t remembered enough, accurately enough, the grain of your voice that speaks so intensely of your body, and the way that body always stands for me, solid at the edges of my awareness, holding the safe space of feeling and believing. I hold onto the earth barely, with the edges of my fingernails, but you stand on it firmly and forever. Just knowing you do that, knowing you are there, seeing you, changes everything, makes me shift from the endless panic of everyday survival into a mode of
I’m at the station.
waiting for you, I’m waiting for you, do you know how long I would wait? I love you, I never get to say that, not seriously, but I want to say it so much. And even more, I’m in love with you, I want to be with you alone away from everyone, I want to show you off to all my friends, I want to touch you. Do you know about the passion that grips me when I want to hold your arms, to turn my head to brush my lips against your arms, watching your profile against the light, sitting on the couch, I want to tell you things, I want to shatter the silly phrases and patterns that we have gradually come to allow ourselves, break through to those all promises, those wild words I want to say that are really so simple, and I just need the courage to
Okay, see you in a minute.
so now I have to wait to see you again, going through a shorter version of what happens to me every time I leave you, I tried to tell you this once, how shattering the empty space was, the darkness of not being able to see anything but objects, my hand on the periphery of my vision, when I get on the train to go back north to the city, away from your beach town where everything is quiet and clean, but where, most of all, for me, everything is drenched with the smell of your skin, the subtle textures of your face. You didn’t say anything but thought I was just being emotional again – well, I’m not like that, when I leave you it exhausts me, disorients, there’s too much empty space and I rattle around. But now you’re driving to pick me up, you’re actually coming to get me and hold me, it’s been days since I’ve even seen you. Someday can we talk on the telephone, I mean really talk? Because you live too far away, and I don’t see you enough, at least not enough for me, I want to look into your eyes every day. And if we could really talk, say strong things, true things, on the telephone, it would be a help, although I know you don’t like the telephone, its beady little eyes and graphics that mock real numbers. But I don’t want to change you, you have your habits and ways: just as you are, so different from me, the many networks and chaotic collections of things that make up our separate ways, and the strangeness of negotiating them: when I hint at having an opinion about your watching so much television, and you maintain that you used to be a great reader, when you were younger. And in restaurants, compare and contrast my restless approach with your deep awareness of food and the body, the times when I pick the most exotic collection of symbols in the menu, dishes that refer to the highlands of oriental countries and the green fields of the west, and you grunt in amusement, looking down and not at the waiter. Your choices always make more sense, I’ll give you that, in fact all of your choices make more sense: how can I compare myself, set myself up against someone who actually owns his own house? I wish you would take my money and bills and handle them, handle me, save me from stock villains with long mustaches, take me and hold me when things get dangerous, when cars with out-of-date license plates swerve too close in wet intersections. I think of my life, my small busynesses and shelves of books and I think, should I throw everything in the sea, leave everything behind to be with you forever? Be careful, be very careful, these are risky places, because if you ask me I just might do it. And would you ask me? Would you lie with me in bed one morning, the air chilly but with me leaning into the heat and hair of your chest and looking at the curve of your shoulder, and would you mumble something about wanting to decide things, and would I say what? and then hold my breath as you say Well, and then you pause again, and think some more, and finally say it right out, and the colors of everything would change forever.
Your old white van is finally turning the corner to come to the station, to pick me up and end my loneliness, the vast stretch of standing here since the train left eight minutes ago. The windshield is blurred with dust but I can see the outline of your face, your shoulders, I can hardly wait to kiss your neck as you keep driving
Hi.
and I can’t wait to tell you all these things and to tell you that I love
Fine. You?
[Los Angeles, 2/11/92-6/4/93]
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