FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 808

It was so simple, and because of that, altering. Sitting across from you, the space between us an ordinary distance, feeling as though an entire ocean was moving. An immensity contained within the easy reach of a hand. The unspectacular fact of two people at a table…a canvas, upon which our imaginings are thrown. The invention of us.

You sat there. Still. Quiet. Only your eyes, the atoms of your scent, the whispered circle of your breathing. Presence on the verge of absence. You were a blank slate, and I duly projected. Onto the surface of your silence I smeared the ramblings of my desire. Because the emptiness will always be filled, most often with the migrated self.

Now I see the love I created with the lush cinematography of my longing. You were the beautiful mirror – reflect, refract – and I the willing believer of lovely mirages. Is this the truth of our vaunted love? The other, filtered through self, such that in our ardour we consumed the analgesic staples of fiction. Are we the lovers of a romantic graffiti?

Perhaps, stripped of cliché and poetry, this union of ours collapses to empire. As though, by some expansion of territory, we Romanised the tramontane wilds. Our question is whether, suspecting this, we desist. Can love recover from the habit of dominion, or does it wither at the first cry of revolt?

Let us sit without ceremony and peer into the void of the other/lover; and from there, endeavour to see what, if anything, lives beyond the citadel of self.