Apologies to a Ladies Man

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

***

Letter to Charlie, 7/23/00

Exotic newly-single young Mother seeking winsome poly Discordians for rompsome adventure.

I sense in my imagination a definite lack of beautiful love letters in your life, and so I have written you one, which I'll never give you because it would be so absurdly inappropriate. But then, as an absurdist, maybe I should give it to you after all?

Ineffable Charlie, unknowable you. You are golden, you are snow; your body is dense as water, as lithe as serpents. Charlie, Mesopotamian poets cried out in their sleep over you, and in the instant you were born seven thousand mothers whispered your name. This is your innocence, Charlie, the moment of your birth indelibly imprinted on the universe, to follow after you like a shadow of purity forever, to drift faintly in your wake like traces of an unsettling perfume after you have passed through a certain space. It is your signature, your symbol. It mingles with your scent, ripe as mangoes, it lingers on my pillow and sometimes during the hungry unrestful nights I awaken before dawn with your taste on my tongue, to stumble downstairs and lie in the stain left by you.
   
Charlie, I don't know a fraction of a fraction of you, but when, alone, I sigh out my most intimate secrets, it is to you I am giving them over. These confessions I breathe only to you without shame, freed from reluctance. Not an iota of me is unpermeated by your existence; even the memes I perpetuate carry with them a single repeated word as a postscript, and that word is your name, the name which is indelibly writ upon my holiest frenulum. I am incapacitated by you; spending time with friends I will suddenly sharply be incarnate in a moment with you between my thighs, your half-lowered eyelids telegraphing a message to my nipples, my cunt, my frenzied entrails; I will gasp and my hands will flex as if controlled by a startling, brief seizure. I am seized, truly, I am seized by you and your intensity and your traveling tongue, by your unconscious seduction of my body, of everything that my skin contains.
   
Charlie, I am starving over you. What food can have flavor after your succulence in my bed? Having taken sacrament from your altar my mouth is too dry for mundane victuals, my jaw too weak for secular meat. In honor of you I dream endless dreams of other women, and also in honor of you my masturbatory hands are never stilled but wander compulsively throughout muddled nights and exquisitely bright days. You dole out tidbits of your mystery and I consume them with voracity; the secret of you whets my appetite no more and no less than could omniscience of you. I would become a scholar of you, catalogue your psyche like a student of Pythagoras recording equations, file your details in the portion of my mind reserved for that which is sacred and most absurd.
   
I have written unending reams of love letters to my poet, my Cynthia, and within every word for her exaltation I have hidden two in praise of you, so many that she herself is now madly and furiously in love with you, though she does not even have possession of your name under her palate. The girls in Santa Clara whisper of you at festivals of Dionysus, Charlie, even the children are in awe, so imbued are the undercurrents of my thoughts with your essence. Everywhere the electrical impulses of my brain are epidemic, there also is disseminated an infectious fascination for you.
   
This is how saturated my appetite for your enigmatic being; a woman in another state is waking right now from a dream, and her legs are trembling in memory of a consummation which has left her weak and febrile. Her dream was of you, but she knows you only through the chance propagation of my stray brainwaves, a viral contagion of ideas symbiotically infused with the notion of you. In this way you are famous, celebrated nocturnally by virgins and grandmothers and sluts, and by absurdist single mothers in search of Discordian lovers.

My thoughts of you are not always pornographic. The veracity of you needs only to be tasted to be known; you secrete your genius rather than speaking it, like aphids secrete nectar to be lapped up by civilized ants. These creatures need not be beautiful to be marvelous, but Charlie, you are both. Profundities copulate with gorgeous inanity in your language, and without velleity you utter perfect lines or even entire stanzas of poetry in your musing. You are the coition between metaphor and absurdism, absorbing, realigning, and outgrowing particles of the absolute carnality of human existence, of your own manifestation. You are vital; you are necessary for the planet to continue her rotation, for the tides to maintain their answer to the moon; you are necessary for Charon to remain infatuated with Pluto. You are necessary for my fevered insomnia.

It is a source of beauty and mystery that one word for hunger is almost the same, save for a single vowel, as another word for truth. This beauty and mystery, Charlie, is also completely, utterly encapsulated in you.

— Your secret admirer.

Some of this is figurative, some of it metaphor, and some of it is exaggeration, but all of it, every letter, is the truth.

***

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

AUGUST

Journal entry, 8/1/00

Oh, God.
Twenty-first Century Digital Boy, ineffable Charlie.
Usually when I have this turmoil of emotions, turbines churning in my innards, I sit in front of a computer and drain myself with the comforting clack of keys. Tonight, and for the last week, I lack that pacifier. I get to strengthen my wrist by writing by hand - it's probably good for my soul. I assume I require redemption, despite my denial of same. Despite my soap.
   
Whether I'm addressing this to myself or to Charlie or to some invisible third party (God) is probably irrelevant. Relevant only is that I use it to purge, to clarify my thoughts, emotions, intentions. Playing cool. I've been playing cool for how many weeks? Months? Perhaps three... perhaps thirteen, fourteen weeks, while my intentions metamorphosed from purely carnal to an unidentifiable state in which tenderness and lust and friendship and obsession are mingled, a state I've felt before for weeks at a time but I wait, oh I wait and wait for this insanity to pass, to return me to a lucid state, and it doesn't. I felt briefly lost this way about Jerry, more than a year and a half ago. After being friends for four years, my spate of intoxication passed in two weeks, three at most, and I returned completely to normal, our friendship unchanged. Before that, it had been over five years, (my Robin) and its taken me until now, yesterday, to return to normal from that - or maybe to realize I'd returned to normal.
   
I have never felt so possessed over Cynthia; my love for her has always been clear, clear, driven, certain. From the first words of our moment of electrification to the last poem she read me over the phone, it has been exposed and undeniable. This is not that. Friendship. OK. Lust. OK. These things I understand; they are simplicity. This other, infatuation, (obsession?) it comes and goes but usually it goes. It's always going. No. This muddle, this is not what I want to write. I should ask Larry, he knows what I want to put down. No need for question-and-answer, no need for evasion with him, he knows.

Charlie, I am not going to admit to loving you. It would be untrue. Oh, in the friendship sense I am coming to love you (I am in love with all my friends) but in the sense of the paramour, it's not that. My friend, I evade (clumsily) your questions when I don't want to answer them, by returning with a question and then either sidestepping and feigning ignorance of your point, or by falling silent altogether. The guilt of this is piling up, in a way - I don't like to be an evasive person. Some of your questions put me at risk of vulnerability and rejection, and I can't handle that fear right now, so I evade (or ignore) them.
   
The truth of it is that I am smitten, infatuated, gone over you. Its sex, and it's that I like you more every time we hang out, and it's some mystery element that makes this degree of fixation happen between some people and not with others. Maybe it's your smell - you smell delectable to me, and your flavor is incomparable.

So what this is exactly, I don't know... rebound, simple complete infatuation, falling in l___... but my quandary, and what takes up endless space in my thoughts, is what to do over it. It could be dangerous: somebody could get hurt, and more than likely that somebody would be me. I seem to be endlessly getting my heart broken; I never seem to learn. My defenses have been up for all of three months and already they start to disintegrate. So what tack do I take? Do I carry on as usual, and hope it passes? Unlikely, given my basic impulsive nature. I'm not really a paragon of restraint in any area. Do I attempt to reintroduce distance, hold you off a little further? This also seems improbable, for the same reasons. I could hand you this letter, hand you the now (in-) famous love letter I wrote a month ago, and hope that you understand who I am well enough to not simply leave and never call again... which entails too much risk for me. I could, I could, continue to see you as both friend and lover and stop, or try to stop, evading your questions, the ones that open me to vulnerability, try not to freeze like a nightbird in headlights, and see if your responses reveal any corresponding level of feeling or just a fear of relationships.
   
I don't want a relationship. I myself have a fear of relationships. I don't want to get hurt and there are no assurances of safety once people start to get close. I like the idea of a close friendship plus sex, but these emotions want to be confirmed and they want, most of all, to be reciprocated. Damn them!

I don't want to own you or anyone, and I don't want to be owned. I've talked enough that you know my ideal. I don't know where I'm going with this... perhaps I'm hinting at some kind of experiment. Something that's not quite friendship plus sex, but certainly entails no sense of ownership and requires abandonment of jealousy.
Oh, God, God, I don't know, it's late, my thumb hurts from all this writing! I'm going to bed.
   
All I mean to say from all this is that you, my friend, Twenty-First Century Charlie, are a person who has become very dear to my heart, and despite all the napalm feelings I'm currently experiencing, the one thing most important to me is that you remain a friend of mine for a very, very long time. No matter what. In that light, I do love you and I would even be willing to give up having sex with you (a steep sacrifice, believe me!) in order to retain your friendship.

In loving porkness,

-Elena

***

Journal entry, 8/7/00

Here I sit, at someone else's computer. Mine is gone, taken by that foolish man. It is hot in this upstairs room; almost unbearable, muggy, thick. My stomach is in knots over the usual thing, the Boy.

I spoke with him today. He may be coming over this week, I may see him Sunday night. If I see him Sunday, I'll take him to bed, I'll take him into me in the woods, at the park, in the river, in the sky. He's my water, I'll drink him and sweat him out of the glands in my thigh. I'm all frayed over him, unraveled. God forgive me, God forbid me, God deny and instruct me! What have I done, what can be done, what will I do? I am halfway there and it is inexorable, inescapable, no matter how I pull away or think I'm pulling away, think I want to pull away, I cannot resist the gravity of this. It is pregnant. It is full of the inevitable, swelling with significance. It is the end of me.

Today I vow to use fewer periods. More run-on sentences will improve the world considerably. Hold, on there I go with the periods again! I must stop.

Dinah and I have been talking about tormenting my glorious boy, taking him to a strip club and fondling each other shamelessly in front of him, speak of spanking and and leather, bring him to the highest state of arousal possible in public and fully clothed. Who knows what happens from there? In our minds, the night can only have a succulent conclusion, but Dinah is married and doesn't fool around with other men. My boy, like all men, (or most) has a weakness for Sapphic amory, and to exploit that weakness is a persistent temptation. Perhaps he also has a weakness for being spanked, or for spanking; he bites most eloquently. My beautiful boy! I don't want his monogamy, I only want his fidelity. There are other ways to be loyal than with the body.

I am done.

Cynthia, if she were here, would hold my silly head in her little hands, strong world-encompassing hands, and heal the universe of my blemish. Goddess, angel, poet, lyrical creator of beautiful word-music, universe-healer! Beside her I am merely a good speller. This is not a letter but everything I write is to her, because she is the spring, the cold deepgrey well of my alphabet. Ocean. She is both source and destination to me, wind and anchor. A week ago, Venus faltered on the western horizon, and the new sliver of moon turned her back to the lady, almost touching. I saw her and her moon-colored hair, and I saw four pairs of lovers kissing under the Goddess-sanctioned moment. The winds stopped, cowed under her presence, then resumed in celebration of her holiday.

Cynthia, hold my silly head. Absolve me of my guilt, for I am a liar, a deceiver of innocent young men. I have lied from the very beginning, because three weeks after I met him I was already falling in love and I KNEW IT, I KNEW IT, and I lied, lied lied! I lied to Steve, I lied to all my friends, every one. I lied to the recipient of my devotion and I lied to myself so I could take him to bed without conscience. It might not have been even three weeks; I looked at him one day and it began, and from that moment I have not had any sixty seconds free of him in my head. When I whisper his name I come shakingly, when I remember the sight of him among trees I become the river. For three days before I saw him I had a pleasant crush on my manager, but he wiped it spotlessly away as soon as he entered my curiosity.

Everything in my memory is in threes. It's the witch in me. Even though I look back on my coven days as a silly phase dramatic girls go through, I am superstitious and can never shed away the ritual. Yesterday I burned a red candle with his name under it. Maybe I imagined that part; maybe I burned a piece of torn yellow paper containing a tiny prayer.

The heat is stifling me. I wish he was in it with me. I wish I was better able to control my insanity. I never wish I was sane.

I looked today through a Leonard Cohen anthology for Famous Blue Raincoat... I know I have it at home, but I am at a friend's house, Dinah, (with whom I have far too much in common) and her book doesn't have it. I think she has Leonard Cohen books because her husband is a fan. I don't know that she likes Cohen, particularly, or that she much likes poetry for that matter. It's hard to find people who actually like poems, enjoy poetry rather than read it in order to be literate or read it in order to say they read it. Then there are those who don't read it in order to be able to say they don't read it, and I find them just as incomprehensible, and reprehensible.

My eyes are closing. I am not sleepy; I am only weak.

He is gorgeous. He is water. His eyes, his side, his calves! His lips are astonishingly firm and smooth, his hands perfectly formed and long. His cheek! He laughs. He is beauty, he is the smell of moss on cedar. He is my favorite tree, and he is the root that travels to the stream. His voice is gentle, young, and carries perfect sentences on the air from within his salty chest. He is berries on ash, and he is the robins who eat them in winter. He is unselfconscious; he doesn't know the truth of his own body. He touches me like a man twice his age touches a woman he's loved for years but has only slept with six times, and the things he says while lying skin to skin make the hair on my neck rise.