May 26, 2010
The Other City
New York City
New York, NY 10xxx-xxxx
Dear Other City,
I am leaving you. I won’t be in touch, but want you to know that it isn’t your fault. I continue to be redolent with your smudge revolutions and will think of you fondly for the time I am away. I am going to the other other city, and another and other yet after. This is to be resplendent in past histories made future present felt. It is to celebrate and resonate with air felt before, even while wet, remembered. It isn’t because of your trains, or other selfish bodies being bitter and mean and making me move because I am taking up the space somewhere someone feels is their own.
It isn’t out of frustration or loss of the refused censure. It isn’t out of reasons behind why space is doubt. It is the need of finding a place where the memories can rush and record that rush in lines like those on a face. It is tippled tandem as dancing.
It’s like an expenditure of hope: that there are places that live and live like you used to live and you can go back but you can’t go back again, it’s such a cliche, the going back. But the nostalgia breeds others and smells like fish. I realize, City, you are opening a 24-hour fish market a block from my home, but it doesn’t seem the same. You try and succeed and sometimes fail, but I love you anyway, you’re so stable even when you’re not. Your muddy skin getting greener by the day and that means something to me. I want you to know that.
How beautiful you are in the dark. I just don’t see that well in the dark. I trip and fall and spend a lot of time trying to find the right light to move towards. You do not offer much help and even deceive me with your sideways glances, pretending the upper flirt as happenstance.
Your conclusions have a habit of writing me off, of telling me the lies of a jumper future spread eagle. The language of spiked punk satin greed and the purpler bruises. The talking like talking points. A mocking coherence of the things to do and dwell in. You surprise me and don’t surprise me and I suppose that’s because I know my own reactions well enough as to decipher those things as what I want them to be. The raggedly allegory of the horizon as hue. I want you to be happy.
The dubious tenderness is alarming, but I understand it, I do. Quite honestly, you have the nicest of other lovers of any city I have known. There is a function of protection that feels safer than I have known. I assume it to be the nature of you, how you make them feel, that drives them to act likewise towards others. Even when throwing a slice in your face.
There’s a sadness in the pronoun. There are so many I’s, We’s, they’s, us’s, you’s, his’s, her’s, it’s impossible to know what to think your sheets are so stained.
When a boy with rotten diction says hello at the bar, what am I to make of the fact that he could never be you, but just one of your more janky lovers like morning pressed further past the bad pillows? Am I to kiss him just to keep him quiet? Or say that I am a one-entity-guy? There are so many different kinds of love, does it make sense to call it love at all?
I pack these utterly weary garments as if they mean something. They do not apply to the functions I will be attending, nor myself, but laziness and comfort. This is how I sometimes feel about you. At the risk of piercing a description, I blame the other other other other city. The one culled and drained with roads choked with cars with fresh license plates. It’s like a distant language now, yet so fluidly familiar I can’t shake it, no matter how hard I try. I stutter when speaking to you, the accent of that town huddled in tone. We can know what shatters beauties but are left bereft therein.
I will be back, I promise. I am sorry for ignoring you as of late. I have been busy saving money to leave you and thinking about how much that won’t hurt you.
I’ve held out as the Marxist at the cash bar. You say there is a surplus but I don’t believe you. I let you name my heart, and right now I cannot speak it, or recognize it as my own. It begins with T, I think.
Maybe it wasn’t the streets, but the packages that stole my remainder. They came quick, and fulfilled the fiddled desire, and left me leaning for a time. That pork belly, too, drew me down. There are almost too many names you go by, I forget where I am, and scuttle the frenzied rhythm like a beat beaten down.
I want you to know my body thrives within you. The tortures of the missed moments make me worry about your faithfulness but, similarly, understand why you would feel the same and yet I feel you might not care. The density of hybrid expression calms both our nerves. I drag and it’s both the end of the line and my stop fortified as cool boozy breaches, fondling under the table and we haven’t even paid the check yet.
Do you ever think of me, or consider the affair a lived in subject as if a ducky wild and crazy tie?
Do you consider me boring, when setting the alarm and turning on your right side because I always sleep on the left?
I talk about you with others. Everyone does, sure, but I feel guilty sometimes in the bar after a few drinks. I tooth my favorite phrases, and they seem so redundant as to make you behave like you’ve heard it all before. You have. The folded things you keep under our bed, in the face not now; a special reservation for those who only need to make only one reservation.
I will keep my illegal prescriptions in the hidden places on my carryon. I cannot fly without them and without you. You who allow everything because you don’t care, eventually, about my return. I find this truth a hard nut to swallow.
While away, don’t worry, I will be fed the other sadness, the happiness that will eventually leave, the things that cost more money and face than I have or know what to do with. A jesus with a higher ‘ho. When I return you will not be concerned, nor even ask about who I saw and how many times I said “I love you too”. I pretend this as understanding and not indifference. The part of this indifference I comprehend is blue and blue and maybe little pink.
For he past month I have been searching for reason for my loneliness. The body bends towards lonely and finds a fincture there. You said you had a surprise for me and I remain sitting buying time and tickets to get away.
I hate how you don’t care when I flirt with other cities or how you don’t understand how I’ve been with other cities and while they don’t compare with you, they still lay there in bed with us.
The fat blooms a truer sense of our relationship, I ride your countenance like a breath. The grove and the flowers skipped to the workaday lame. These are the people I love and hate and always wonder about their intent intentions. The trouble is, I can’t. It’s not your fault. It’s the absorbing meaning through slow thought. The wanting to make everything doable and unable to because there is no doable in an office where slack makes corpulent dumb dumber. This, again, isn’t your fault but I don’t want to pass blame on the blameless.
But a smoke and a minibar makes things at least seem better.
I don’t
want
to pass
away the blame
of my own honest misunderstandings and the reasons why reasons make me look stupid in your eyes and a fault line like mascara.
You understand, don’t you? The faults and the acceptance and personal responsibility held within the flexible flights.
I try so hard to make things easier for everyone and you just sit there and laugh. And, well, this makes it harder for me to kiss you goodnight without pills of some sort. Just barely held out like a person fishing for a way to name trouble. Muddled in your largeness and your pleasure and I’m no size queen but the kings take it, take it all.
Remembering is body building and I plan on building as many bodies as I can muster during the time I am away.
I want to belong to the sweet and the dangerous. I want to call you, later, about the supple hegemony of my dissolve. I hope you’ll pick up upon seeing my number, knowing there’s still something to talk about.
I remember when I first met you. I didn’t think too much about it, I was seeing someone else, and even though that wasn’t working out I didn’t really pay as much attention as I would have if I were single. I saw you from time to time, from far off in the years after, but then I decided once and for all I would make you love me. Once I decided that, I couldn’t eat or sleep and went to the bathroom with constipated groans. I wanted you so badly. I wanted to be in bed with you, surrounded by you, and kiss you goodnight, every night. I was going to make the dreams of my childhood idea of what a perfect you would be like be like real. And it was. It was it was it was it was. You made me feel safe at night, the soft hum of your humor making me last. I remember the pungent jokes told in the dark, as if touching my chest with a hand that’s cold yet comforting and by extension makes me laugh. The flickering screen belong to you and me and the plate of garlicky snails in front of us both. And the wine. All the wine we order and drank without a care of where it came from we weren’t so particular. I’m of two minds of you but can only see with one eye. I want it to capture the flickers of our convenience as sold solid this is, is it. I laugh and the charming thing is you always laugh with me, but maybe not in the same way, or intention, you can be a bitch when you want to be. But it’d not you, it’s me. I’ve arranged my life as a language box. The things that enter there mean love, but I fear that you don’t hear them, or (worse) that you don’t care. This hard time lately only makes the feeling worse, an empty poised to pose as meaning. The man you made me is different from the man I expect to be and that alone is testament alone to your something I cannot name. Whether in or out, I can never understand your motives, your feeling, and riding the bus I worry you have no feeling. Your little quiet moments spark like shy urges. Your bigger ones bomb.
I hate
retrospective be(moaning) being
like a ticket that you have no intention of paying
and spend the rest of the day resenting,
and damning the reason.
We spend time together even when we don’t and I don’t hold it against you. You’re still here in my pocket, like the loose change that sometimes annoys by being there, but I’m grateful when I need it. Why do we even need change, it barely buys a soda. The blocks of time it takes to take a loss.
I like it like I envision vision held held.
I will beckon you to still be there, as you will, surely, even when I am gone and am gone, again, and gone again forever. This is the love that seems so painful: that you will live on without me there, and barely remembering.
I am not unaware of the vanity of this fear. But that’s usual for letters like these I suppose. They aren’t really about the recipient, but just a well wallowing for the person writing it to make things somehow feel right under their own gazing black brow agenda. A way to look in the bathroom mirror and blame the sink for all the things it disappears.
I am leaving you, for now, just to see the faces of those who helped make me the person that made me love you and to spend some time loving them more.
I am doing this so I can love you more, the way you need me to love you, better and bunkered in our bed.
I hope you understand.
Fondly,
One of your other lovers
