I and love and you

Hello Darling,

I’m writing to you from a wicker chair that I’ve pulled near the fire. It’s warm here, but I love the smell of wood smoke and can picture it curling away, bluish into an ashy sky. Little bits of flame break off and wink out of existence. The water in the bay is dark in places, and darker still are the shapes of the trees. The sunset is the color of a yellow rose, faded by mid-summer.

I’d say that I missed you, but it wouldn’t be entirely correct. I miss the idea of you. It’s strange of course because we hardly know one another. I wandered through my pictures this evening, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. You aren’t in any of them. But sometimes, if I look closely enough, I’ll see you somewhere in the margins. In the picture, I’m drinking a glass of champagne. My cheeks are bright and rosy, and I have my arm around a girl. And yet, if you look deeper into the photo, past the tumble of russet oak leaves hanging over my left shoulder and into my eyes you’ll see an absence. Like the ocean on a grey sort of day, where the horizon and water are indistinguishable. What’s missing, what makes the picture lack definition is that I was thinking of you and am therefore, not really present anywhere. Look at any picture, and you’ll see that its composition is incomplete. It’s defined by absence.

Way out over the water a bird is hooting in a way that reminds me of an owl. But no owls live up here. No one lives out here right now but me. Your toe nails are painted red, or they are in my mind. Your lips are sometimes thin, and sometimes full. Honestly, I can’t really recall. This afternoon I paddled out into the brackish water in a kayak. I started to write a poem. It had something to do with ashes, and bones, and a reference to Pompeii that tied back in to something from out of one of the death camps. It was inefficient and unlovely.

Do you think if we’d made love, or exchanged phone numbers, or done any of the things that normal people do when they start to fall in love that I would be sitting here by myself at this window? Probably. In the vagaries of time; time which I don’t believe to be linear or immutable, such a state would result in profound boredom for a creator or the universe, in the vagaries of that time, I believe that a certain evening exists, in which you are not miles and miles away, but sitting here, watching the light drain from the sky, a fire crackling near our extraordinarily warm toes. “Should we,” you’ll say, and I’d put a finger to your lips, to quiet you while we listened to the distant thrumming of water at the shore.