"Take it from me, I'm a disorderly, and you'd be off better.... writing someone else a love letter."
Love Letter, Lisa Mitchell
***
Is it possible to miss someone you've never met?
How can you ache for someone's touch if you can't even visualize their hands...?
I have a case of skin hunger so intense that the concept of touch seems to have taken on it's own scent, it's own taste.
My own need terrifies me, how badly I want someone to adore me, to think I'm wonderful, to actually care about me in the tiny ways that count- to wonder what I'm doing, whether I've eaten that day, to hear songs and want to share them with me because you think I may just understand them the way you do.
My mind, and the sucking black hole of need that influences and stains every close relationship I have now in the after; my fractured mind and that consuming need will take any little thing and run with it.
I want to weep for myself, watching myself cling to every tiny interaction, watching my mind weave it into a thousand possibilities. I feel pathetic, and it's quite possible that I smell of it patheticism too... it's an unattractive scent that people can't identify, but it effects them the same way pheromones do, only to push them away from it's source rather than draw them toward it.
Biological self-protection.
The best parts of my days right now happen over crackly connections to somewhere half a world away. I spend hours I didn't know I could find lost in the best type of conversation– where you plan topics to speak about, and three hours later are still trying to find a finishing point where the conversation winds up naturally.
I'm not even sure what I'm doing here, playing with fire all over again... but how far can you fall when the grounds just an illusion, it's not even real? I take bits of happy, piecemeal, as they come, and I can't bear to push them away. Happy- simple laughing, sparkling happy– is scarce and fleeting. That much I know now, for sure.
And there are so few people that I know that I am myself with... where I let pieces hang out and trail, where I'm not as together and OK as I pretend to be.
A soft place to fall, perhaps...but it's half a world away. A voice through a data connection that makes me feel at home.
I'll take what I get, when I can get it.
And there's things I need to tell him, still... that underwear with a split in the knee and rosary beads are kind of the same thing, really; that John Safran had a fatwa put on a man, and that man's wife died young, from cancer, just a few years later; that I totally busted him, and he was fibbing when he said he didn't have a thing for Britney Spears.
Unimportant, insignificant blips on life; facts that mean nothing at all. The very kind of things I want someone to be jumping from their skin to tell me- relationships are, if nothing else, sharing the insignificances of life.
***
The best love stories, my favorite kind of romances... they always end badly. Tess of the D'Ubervilles, Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights. Brenda and Dylan. Buffy and her vampire without a soul. Shane and Angel. (They met at a Frente concert. Anyone...? Aussie Gen Xers...?) There's a new Stephen King book out just recently, set in Fort Worth; and that Southern man sacrifices a potential lifetime with the woman he loves to save humanity, and settles for one dance instead.
And he knows she heard his name, his voice, his laugh; her whole life, in her dreams.
I thought, for a little while, that the concept of love being tragic was a made up one, something gothic and romantic and not quite real.
More and more, I think I was wrong. Love is as tragic as life itself.
***
If you wrote a love letter, the kind you had your best friend pass to a boy who who teased you mercilessly in primary school; but to someone you've never seen, someone you may never meet, someone who might even be a voice attached to a figment of your imagination attached to a place in you that wants to be loved so badly it sobs for it...what is there to say?
"I think you're perfect. I adore you. You are one of the strongest, most soulful people I know; and I hope you remember that."
And I think that's all.
***
And although she knows the ground below is only a figment of her imagination- it can't hurt if it's not real to begin with- that vulnerable five year old girl in my head still trips and falls. She skins her knee and her pride is hurt and she stares at the person who happens to be closest to her and sobs "You hurt me! How dare you?!"... when it was her own two feet she tripped over to begin with.