lost-loveletters

[lost-loveletters]

when i have a crush i dont kick my feet or twirl my hair instead i am in my kitchen at 3am pacing in circles with my hands clasped behind my back like a middle-aged divorced detective haunted by a cold case he just cant crack

[lost-loveletters]

i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.

[lost-loveletters]

But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.

[lost-loveletters]

I urge you: Come be angry at a nearer distance.

[lost-loveletters]

Jude,

You are in no mood for games. Very well. I am in no mood for them, either.

Let me write it outright. You are pardoned. I revoke your banishment. I rescind my words. Come home.

Come home and shout at me. Come home and fight with me. Come home and break my heart, if you must.

Just come home.

Cardan

[lost-loveletters]

"I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. But now, my pictures only show me how much I've lost."

— Nan Goldin

[lost-loveletters]

would you like to be old friends? maybe meet again in a decade or so? stumble into the same corner of the world by happy, human accident? look at me like you know me? like all the love we had was just on stand by, waiting to be fallen back into, waiting for permission to wake up, like the dormant volcano we are? pick each other back up again like a well loved, well forgotten book? would you like to be old friends? would you like to remember me a little?

[lost-loveletters]

i am made of memories

[lost-loveletters]

how is it possible that it feels like you are breaking my heart, and i haven't even had you yet?

[lost-loveletters]

Pretty fucking tragic twist of fate, but you don’t seem to remember that we first met years ago. An issue, since I remember a little too well. I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.

[lost-loveletters]

why is my heart breaking like it'll never get fixed

[lost-loveletters]

i feel so lonely. god i'm so so lonely. it physically hurts to breathe. i just want someone to hold me. someone. anyone. before i can't hold it anymore. i feel so lonely it's almost scary. and funny. with so many people around who'd think that's it's even possible. it's funny in a sarcastic way. in a way that makes you flinch. i'm lonely. and scared. and so lonely.

[lost-loveletters]

But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.

— Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

[lost-loveletters]

It's as if memories have a heart that beats only at night.

[lost-loveletters]

Music is something so so personal to me. The way I feel about it, the way it makes me feel, I don't think anyone else could ever understand it.

It's like a part of me that I can't risk to anyone. I can't share a song that's very close to my heart because it somehow hurts me to think that it might not mean anything to the other person when I'm in a way putting my heart on the line by sharing the song with them.

[lost-loveletters]

"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief."

[lost-loveletters]

The joy of sorrow!