My Lover’s Woman—Letters Sent & Received

The ache-yearning that if it were a sound would be a single violin string. The heat of that sound in the groin. Heat expanding to push from the inside into swollen lips, to the tip where it tremors, right on the edge, begging like someone with a knife to their throat to please just do it, or don’t, but don’t leave me in this agony of the edge. I leave it there for hours in the day. The hiccup in the gut that were I to allow it would roar out, would roll out, would thunder out and drown out reality. I message you with updates on the weather system of my body. The careful watching of clouds of sensation pregnant with wetness, with humidity, threaten to pour. I do not want to rain until you are inside of me. Until it is the sweetness of you that I am raining down onto. The stickiness of my soul made material.  

“Yes, that is love,” I say to you as contact is made. The humus layer reached, nutrient rich.  Sweaty with life brimming. Tongue to tongue, lips warm, soft, like butter melting. This, where you are not reaching. Where the me you imagined arrives. Where presence pours through, breaks through ominous cloud cover and you realize that I am actually here. With you. 

This life is building steps across an ocean of meaninglessness, what lies in between each scene. I must summon from the imaginal again and again something from nothing, even if what I summon is vast space with speck-glimmers. You appear and recede over the course of years as material from which to build those steps.  

And from that is a density of love. Like the love itself touched me until I could not take even the tip of her finger for the density and intensity of her. I feel myself, as this love within me, I open with you. You curl into a ball into my arms. 

“This is me loving you,” I say.  

I’m like a sky rolling in like a wave. Just sweet sentient sky, with all the stars people have prayed to and the planets that determine the day. But here-ness is unfamiliar to hands that reach or pray. No no no just open I say, not wanting to wash you out. This, entirely amenable, wanting only to love-ness the love deficit, the love beggars, the love reachers. That in you who is so diligent and determined earning his way to the ocean he is swimming in. 

“Baby, I am right here. I want you too.”

Always a risk. Always the line of demarcation that determines between the long queue of wanters and the no-line window of havers. Having is an end-game. The end of this wanting life.  But people set up camp, build cities and towns on the landfill of wanting. Familiarity is a cruel warden. A watchful eye that never lets you step outside of the known boundary. It may be insufficiency, but it is *my* insufficiency and what would I do without it? Who would I be without projecting my needs onto you? What would come of love? What would I pine for if I knew that always and ever I was equally desired by what is issuing the desire within me. But that the issuer albeit love itself, is impersonal, without form and beckoning you always, the timeless seductress:

“Come home.” She draws you through people and ideas, time and spaces, duty and recklessness; she draws you past your own boundaries and into cages that you might break out of them as a demonstration of love. She pulls the pins in the grenades of karma that lie in your soul until the explosion leaves you blind and disoriented, then commands you to find her, still from there, from beyond darkness, offering only a pinhole of light. 

That’s the real romance. What puts the crappy death bed, raised 4 kids together, held hands until the end, farce to shame. Love her god damnit. Love her and we can meet there in the fullness. Love her and she will allow me to love you. Be like Picasso,

“I do not seek. I find.”

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