Letter

Remember when we reviewed the colors? How I wheeled you through the garden? Cell degeneration is a strange thing. I am decaying, too.

This man is in love with me. Fortyish. Always a foreigner. But then again, I have no country, either. Strangers fade in and out like tv test patterns. Who remembers those? Wraps, scarves, hands wrapped, face wrapped, head wrapped.

A man gives me money. A woman showers it on me. Remote sadness in night’s quiet isolation. The streets are empty. Always home on time to feed the cats.

You spoke and I didn’t remember you. Now I do my best to forget you. I always take it personally when men have a bad memory.

So small I was then. To contract myself into a tiny point and then to disappear.

I dreamt that I knew what it was like to be married, and also to give birth to a child. And then those things of this life were done, and I outdid what incredible fate gave me in honesty. I am not sorry for it.

I am too stupid to know you or to talk to you. That is the story, over and over and over. Maybe one day I will see you from far away. Today I’m going to sweat blood out from my pores and cry chocolate. And you will be far away, like everybody else. I hope to hear the distant, watery sounds of laughing when I go. An aquarium in each tooth.

Cherish the joy. It is fast gone, and there is still too little of it here.

See you on the other side. I loved you more than I loved anybody else.

Bob Dylan haunts a dusty CD player that doesn’t even open anymore. Omnivores mock me, and toothless bums hack in the night, flying on speedy bikes.

Take me away, boys. You’ll have to. I chopped it all off below the knees.