A Love Letter

When it comes to love lost, they say artists have a sixth sense. A sculptor can close his eyes and trace the outward contour of the brows and the inward curve of the plush lips of a lover he’s not seen in over twenty years. A painter can likewise recreate the gentle bend of her hips on a napkin, a receipt, or a dirty mirror. But what am I, a photographer, to do with you my love? I cannot close my eyes and remake you. I cannot look in the darkness of my eyelids and transform my memory of your solitary mole under your left breast into anything that I can feel again. I cannot close my eyes and say: “See, here’s proof. Here’s proof that I once loved a woman so deeply and so intensely that I could not forget her. She is woven into the memory of my fingers.” The best I can do is return to the depths of my darkroom and come back dissatisfied, holding a wet print made from an old negative. What this tells me is that our love exists in a reproduced and thus unoriginal image at once factual, but also necessarily fictional. Such it is with the past. It exists in that slippery crack forged in between fact and fiction, between history and memory: a place where love letters are written and rewritten and words are worked and reworked—a place where stories reign.

Obsession
by me
 

 ACT I

Under the azure sky,

in a field of wild mustard

you rest against my heart.

Beating,

the rhythm of my

pulse echoes

in the night’s cold air.

Hold me,

you say

like the wings

of a dove that flutter.

ACT II

Reaching for the waves,

our love come together

like wine

until suddenly,

we are knocked back

—not yet broken,

breaking,

break—

so that I

and only I

stand

knee-deep

in the sea,

in what

was once

our

sea.

Crashing against the rocks,

ripped from your body,

I now break free from obsession,

from hallucinations of the impossible

somehow made

possible.

ACT III

I can’t hear you,

I can’t hear you,

I CAN’T—

A breath

folds over

the silence

and leaves in its wake

a map of you.

It’s projected onto

this wall,

this very wall

in front of me.

It’s blank,

white,

and cracked.

Your light is frozen,

suspended in time

as if in water,

so that when I walk up to the wall

and rest my hand on your cheek,

on your lips,

through your golden hair,

you are hazy

to the touch.

Silent,

but not yet quiet,

I finally realize what you’ve been telling me all along.

I am fading,

you were saying.

am fading,

fading,

fa

ded.

I had another one of those perfect transitory moments today. You know those ones that haunt you because of the impossibility of it ever happening again. That paradoxical feeling of wanting the moment to have lasted longer or of wanting the moment to happen again. Yet not wanting it. Knowing that it would never be the same. A few minutes sitting in the sun. Her hair tied in a bun, her black scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. A smile. A quick - or was it long - glance up at me. Behind my glasses, I lock my gaze on hers. Voyeuristic? Maybe. Pleasurable, definitely. A frozen moment, a moment that spins too rapidly to digest its impact on me - and hopefully on her. Come back, I say softly as she walks away. I know you…I feel as if I know you…I want to get to know you. She stays in my memory for the moment, for the day, for the night, haunting, chanting, scraping her hands against my colder heart. It will fade. I know it will. Because that is what beauty does. And I love it for that.

True attraction is fragile nervousness spinning in its own temporality, he said.

It’s Physical

It’s physical, the boy said. Not sexual. My—okay, that’s not exactly true. But my physical response to her is something totally different. Something I’ve never felt before. Something genuine. Something foreign. Like someone holding me down in my chair kind of different. Like some big weight being thrown on my shoulders kind of different. You know what? It’s really more like a fever, the boy said.