Despite what you think or what you said, I have now read the Reynolds Price story you suggested and the Carson McCullers (reminded me of Paris, Texas in some ways) and am now going to bed with Truman Capote (let Donny deal with that one). I would love to visit you this weekend if you would have it. Would you have...
I guess I wonder in some ways if you told me about Nate and you, and the absence of a relationship between the two of you, as a means of trying to sway me from moving to Austin. I mean, as Robert pointed out tonight, of course I say I don’t want to hear about the two of you breaking up, or any other news really, but, at the same time I relish every tidbit and am happy for myself at least on some level. Of course I’ve wanted you to say something that would make me not go. I have wanted lots of people and institutions to do something that would make me not go. I know that things are going to be okay for me and for you both someday. I just still can’t shake the feeling that I was so much more content with you in my life. I think those days are gone though. I go every Tuesday to exorcize that line of thought. I don’t believe that it would be good for me or you to really be back in a relationship with each other, at least now, and possibly ever. I have to let that go and I am making progress. You are the main reason I have found to stay, but if I believe what I say above, that’s no good reason. It’s amazing that I can read the self-help books and go to the therapy sessions and then when facing the difficult situation, when facing you and all of these mixed-up emotions, I cannot figure out what to do. I love...
I guess I am truly getting better. I let the solstice pass with only the usual thoughts about Gatsby, and thoughts of my summer project, and it was only today, two full days past, that I remembered mine and your beginnings – shooting stars, kisses, and all – and it made me...
It’s not for the want of beauty that I still want you. Not that you are not beautiful. It is not that at all. It is not for the fact that I have the image of you in my stupid little head that still wants you, or the image, and it all gets too fucked up. It is not for the want of Jesus. It is not for the want of headaches. It is not for the lack of tennis. It is not for the lack of sex. It is not for the lack of your skin next to mine… Hold on, I went too far. It is for the lack of of you lying close to me. Skin on skin. It is for the lack of you in my life. It is for those lacks. It is for the lack of me never giving up. It is for the want of a non-giving-up you. It is for the want of growing old with you in my arms, night after night, and babies asleep in the other room, and me with a bottle in their mouth and not in mine finally, and for me realizing there is as much reason to stay in this place as there is to go anywhere else in this little...
There’s a tiger outside in the bushes, and he’s drunk and screaming, growling, howling in this Lake Claire night. Not me, I sit inside and listen to this discontent and wait for the morning. I wait for the calm down. The chillout. I wait for the feelings to subside, for me and that crazy cat. The neighbors have called the fire trucks and the little guy is standing on the corner by the stop sign, without a shirt, and throwing rocks at my car. There’s a woman sitting and weeping on the curb. Nothing ever happens until it does. It has to be 10 degrees cooler there. The electricity bills must be lower. Work will kill me in the end. We work too much. We love too little. We live too little also. Tonight there’s a full moon in my heart. The trees are lighted up with something like christmas lights, but different. A naked lady runs up and down the street screaming… partially in pain, partially in joy. She is naked and I cannot help from looking, so I do, but she is not...
I fell down a thousand wells to get here. Thirty three years and a month or two to get there. I like my butterflies, but not like you like butterflies. Ten day off medication. Wish that this mess wasn’t mine to deal with. I sing alleluia, alleluia. The lord is my shepherd. He makes me whole. I ask you for so many things, oh pretty boy. I still believe. I still believe. I still believe. After all of this I finally and still believe. The prisms through which we try to view this life bring us sadness, joy, heartbreak, etc. Mine is a dark crystal, yet turning light. I drink sparkling water from a can tonight, with a touch of lemon, or something like that. Don’t kill me when I think these things can be real. Don’t kill me, oh lord, for believing. Take me to a river where all of these sins can be washed away. A swift running river where everything I have done is five miles down stream already. Where we have all already seen God and passed or signed up for the passage. Forgive me father for I have done things. I have told lies. I have tried my best to protect whatever it is that I understand myself to be. Forgive me father, and mother, and friends, and little tiny animals. Forgive me, all of you. There are pictures of me, in this place, of people I do not know, and they keep asking me to remember, and I continue to say no. Let’s fall asleep and see if we can awake as Peter...
I hope you are smiling a lot.
For the time that’s left I will keep this place like a museum to what has passed between the two of us. I will be a little hermit curator moving items from one place to the next until they are exactly as I remember them. I will water the plants and dust the relics. Then I will sell off the things I can, and return the other things to the donors. I will curate no longer. I don’t know that it is as much me moving to something new and exciting as it is me feeling as if I am moving away from something. Not something altogether bad, just something that I cannot seem to make sense of at such close range. We talk of not knowing whether we can love anyone else the way we love each other, yet the love we do have between us is not enough to make us want to try again. What a sad lot we are. I know only time heals the wounds, helps us make sense of these conundrums, and I am sure it will eventually all work out for both of us, but even tonight, when I thought I had let it all go, returning from the movie in the park, I see his car once again in front of your house and it sent my spirits straight down the crapper. I could always drive a circuitous route so as not to have to see these things, but I got used to it when the car used to always be there, and now I have gotten used to it not...
It’s an hour past midnight in Lake Claire, and way over in Candler Park you are fast asleep, have been for hours, perhaps alone, perhaps with someone else. Perhaps in those dreams your heart rises up through the ether and into the sky since you say it has been hanging heavily in your chest as of late. Perhaps sometimes in those dreams I find my way in, as you frequently do in mine. I don’t know if I will ever write anything that is not in some way for, or about, you. The dedication of the first book would read, “For my mom and dad,” and then printed in invisible ink would be “and Grier, wherever you are.” Perhaps I fool myself. I don’t even know if that Grier is really you. It’s funny how you feel like you have lost knowledge of someone if you don’t see them in a couple of months, when some people you can not see for years and you pick up right where you left off. I am not sure that the you that would receive such a dedication would be you at all. I have created such goddesses in my head. You are one, the main one. Athena enshrined in your Parthenon – the one in Nashville. Muses are gods I suppose, and you never should marry your muse. You should bring her gifts, and I guess I have done that. You should feed the muse, but you should never marry her. I still wish to be the fool though. Perhaps tonight it is still cold in the Yaak Valley. There are...
Maybe it’s better like this. I can still write here and not know if you will get it. My frequency will inevitably get less and less, and eventually this will become a museum with little models, and placards and stuffed extinct animal specimen. I hope you are doing well. I hope things are settling for you. I hope that you are happy, or at least on your way there. For me, things still hurt from time to time. The days are better. I can do those with ease. The nights are getting easier too. Even the ones when I don’t gorge myself with friends and phone calls. I talked to Chad tonight and his life is all going to shit. He and Annie have split up, his mother is likely going to jail, and his father is trying to take all the money and the businesses from them all. In light of that, I realize that it is time for me to stop this mourning. My problems seem so little compared to that right now, not to mention what is going on in Africa and the Middle East, but a friend’s woes always bring it home a little better. As hard as it is, and as weird as it sounds, I feel freer now. I am not strapped a solitary version of a happy life that could not exist without you. I think that one could’ve been happy with you. Extraordinarily so. I thought for too long it was the only way. I imagine you have to feel free too now. I imagine my desire, my need, for that...
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