:: Letters ::

I.

I dreamt of you the other night. We were in a room―one of those white-washed cubicles, with its alabaster walls closing in, ugly in its clinical perfection. We sat adjacent to a row of doors―four or five of them, I don't remember exactly―cut equally apart. The doors gape like waiting mouths; we couldn't see beyond them. Everything was bathed in a strange glow that was neither bright nor dark, and I was―scared. I felt like a seditious amputee, where my body has been ripped from my mind, and I had nothing left but a deepening sense of imposture. The hyperkinetics of memory―you and your death―pulsed with the strange light. I could not speak.

You got up and started to pace. You were wearing the smart grey suit we cremated you in; there is a bulge in your breast pocket I know to be your cigarettes. I call you my Marlboro Man, even though you'd switched to Salems years before the cancer struck and took you away. I noticed you were barefooted. Are you cold, I wanted to ask―

'Why don't you go?' You asked me suddenly.

I sat at the edge of my seat with child-like obstinancy: no no no no. I don't know the way. My mind speaks, but my voice lost its ability to perorate. I tried to smile at you, but I didn't dare to touch you, because your head started to share the strange shimmer of the room, and I was afraid that if I reached out, you would implode or disintegrate and I would wake up to the reality of your death, like I do all the time, every time, since last February―

'Stupid child,' you chided with your sarcastic affection. You chuckled―I remember that chuckle of yours, so rapt with amusement, always at the edge of disingenuity, always infectious. Always there, before. 'Get going, or we'll be late.'

Where are we going? I implored with my eyes. My phantom voice floats, a dreamy essence, like traffic fumes or the trace of D's perfume―will you come with me?

'You know, it really doesn't matter which one you go into,' you said in a tone that was reticent with love. 'We all have to go.'

I wish you could come (back, I added).

But then you only smiled, and then you finally reached out: not for me, but for the light dancing like mad heretics around us. And then the room dimmed to the whine of a familiar siren, one that I at first thought to be the machine measuring your dying heart beat, but then consciousness took over with the robotic realisation that my alarm was going off, and the chimera call of my grandfather was no more than a dream.


II.

You, and the same, bored, tightmouthed smile of acknowledgement. It's been too long. What right do you have to give me that same knowing smile, as though you've been here, all along, witnessing the history of deadlines and living scars thundering blood beneath my skin? Perhaps you were inwardly amused by my past schoolgirl folly, and how it had all come undone. Perhaps you didn't know what else to do, my tragic teacher, other than to pry your pale, pallid lips apart for that ghost of a grin, your eyes safely hidden behind your glasses, as we brushed past each other once again. Perhaps.

We'll always be strangers, now. But your noir nihilism had been so attractive, so enticing in its narcissistic novelty, I know the best parts of you will always be familiar to me.

Well then. Perhaps next time, I'd say hello.

III.

Dedication

Unreturned, my love:
I no longer care if it rains in Paris.
Or if the ash of your lonely cigarette,
is staining the sleeve of your favourite book.

Unrequited, my love:
Your reproachful eyes, I sense a gleam,
A widowed, beaten look, in which
lies a teasing desperation.

Unbecoming, my love:
Do you lack my capacity to suffer?
Do you mind our shabby passions, that
Sweat freely, like crude pores of deception.

Unrestrained, my love:
I often hear my inner coward whining,
Pining for the impulse to die quiet and quaint,
Because your mouth is not on mine.

Unfulfilled, my love:
I discard the defeated profile of
Truth, which is no longer important.
Our fruitless longing brings a furtive rain.