009

This is the second letter I've ever written, and I truly hope it will be the last...For a Dear Friend; this is for you.

Dearest Friend,

Again.  I wake up.  The sheets damp from salt water.  You've not yet gone, but already I miss you so.  I miss the days that haven't come, the days that might never come.  It's not a feeling of the heart, it's a truth that buries itself deep in your guts, where it lives, and like cancer, it metastasizes.  It makes me want to leave this place; I want to go to where it doesn't snow, where it only rains.  The fleeting, sour sensation, it comes and goes less often now, but it resonates more.  Sometimes I think it's making me rotten, like the compost pile.  Sometimes I think it's eating my insides; I can feel maggots crawling in my chest, maggots wriggling in my mind.  We rake the leaves of the fallen; we pile it high and let it decompose, because its death brings life anew.  Maybe if you could just go far away, to a place where sunlight doesn't reach, a place where God's voice has never echoed, and my path will never find intersection.  My heart beats faster when I see you, I forget who I am, and I only know what I'm not.  Sometimes I wish I never met someone like you, like he wished he never met Will Hunting.  I can only ever wonder, wander in the shadow of your beauty; it shines brilliant like the raging nuclear fusion of the star.  I spend years searching for your answers.  You glow in ways that no chemistry has ever defined.  I don't think I'll ever understand.  You weren't meant for a mind like mine, I only ever thought I was awake until I knew your face, only ever dreaming until I witnessed your smile, and it shattered my world.  The ocean used to be so very big, I so very infinitesimal.  I am still so very small, but now the ocean grows smaller as well.  Do you see?  You've come to take up so much of the space, I can't love the ocean anymore, because I have spent it all on you.  I swim to the island where there is nothing; it has nothing for me, it is only a place to go when there is even less than nothing behind you.  The kind of less that rips your being into smaller pieces of yourself; the kind of less that lessens you.  Along the way I grow so very afraid; if I go there I'm never coming back.  The anchor drops from my chest to my abdomen, I can't breathe.  My stomach aches, I wretch and writhe, but I cannot escape you.  The sheets damp from the salt water.  I close my eyes, now this dream is the only dream I've ever had, so I don't know that it's a nightmare.  You seep into my veins, and I'm saturated by you; the air pours out my lungs.  There is no room for life in me.  Your Tiger iron eyes burn into my soul like molten gold off of the horizon, it envelops me, and I drown with a soft smile on my face; I am quiet because you have quieted me.  I cannot escape you.  I was born to love you, and I was born for that alone.  This I've come to know.  That's the end.  That's all that I remember from my life.  That is the only story I know.  I cannot tell you who I am, or from where I've come.  The first day of my life was the day that I learned who you are.  Before that is beyond the infinite lines that differentiate time.  It might exist, but if it does, I've long since left that place.  I learn that the universes are not parallel, but consecutive.  Again.  I wake up.  The thoughts race through my head.  I swim for my life.  The anchor drops from my chest to my abdomen.  I can't breathe...Can you see?  This is the first day; this is the last day; this day is my lifetime.  This place does not know the character of love and hate; they are the same.  I'll write you a letter if I ever make it to that island, Dearest Friend.  I'll write you a letter if I survive you.  People think that love is a feeling of the heart.  It's not a feeling of the heart, it's a truth, and it lasts into the longer days, where it lives, like a cancer.

Spatter