16 notes to love
How do you write a love note over the phone?
Do you text?
Do you punch in a seemingly infinite line of emoticon flowers and heart shapes. God no.
Or would you send an audio note? Croak your husky, raspy hormonally-charged dedications into a metal mouthpiece?
Would you maybe just call the object of your affections and hit the play button on WinAmp and let ‘More Than Words’ waft out of your crackling speakers? Good luck with that choice of track, by the way.
How do you convey the intimacy and sincerity of a handwritten I love you via the phone?
I wrote. Then, I took some pictures.
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Why I will write you four letters in one night
Because I cannot keep away from you. Because my nights are yours in thought and memory of the morning before, of the unexpected detonation of desire beneath the sheets at 6:49 am. Because my days are filled with disinterest and wild distractions both. Because your lips keep the memory of my tongue pressed upon them like unwithering flowers. Because my skin is stained by the fingerprints of your craving. Because breathing reconciles itself only with short, sharp pulls and forgets how to exhale. Because writing to you is not writing but an accident of words; colliding, spilling, revealing. Because my body is sore but my longing goes un-neutered. Because the amber-gold highlights of your hair spilling across your face tease a wicked game. Because the white in your smile is a reminder of the bruise on my neck. Because love is a four-lettered word when we make it. Because I cannot keep away from you.
I find you in the unlikeliest places
I find you in the unlikeliest spaces.
In my pockets, where the spare change you handed me, still jingles cheerfully.
Or, at dawn when the morning peeks out from the clouds and reminds me of the sunrise in your eyes.
And you are there in the folds of my laughter
Resting in the belly of my lids.
Sometimes, I find you in my silence
and my sorrow. My regrets are plenty but you are there too
Traced by the gnawing strum of a lonely mandolin
Or the haunting lament of the aria muffling in from next door.
I find you in the unlikeliest places.
Today I opened a book of poems and there you were
In between two hundred pages or more
You’ve found me, you said, I don’t know why you keep looking.
I live in poetry when I live in love with you
And try as I might (and will), I will not find home nor the peace that comes with it until I have you ensconced in my arms again. I wait and yet, try not to live as though in wait. I live; perhaps I only exist and I continue only because there is the promise of tomorrow and with it, of you.
I believe you are mine and belong wholly to me. I believe it is only a matter of time before faith ripens into fact.
I believe, my love, because I know no other way.
‘… my dear love
I will not sleep without eyes,
I will not exist but in your gaze.’
*all excerpts taken from the poems of Pablo Neruda
For Good
I know now that whatever happens from this day forward, we will never be the same again. Our lives have been changed by love; touched, moved, jolted, emboldened. And we are changing still.
I don’t know where we are going but in a way we are there already. This is not living, this is re-membering the disjointed parts of our pasts.
We take our steps. We take the hand that walks with us.
‘I can’t shake the weight of what we’ve been through…’ – William Beckett
‘Every time we kissed you closed your eyes, and I clamped mine open, just to see those short lived moments that I almost let me love you. So lie away, I did, so wide awake, trying to give myself a good reason to forget the empty words from this hollow curse. I can’t shake the weight of what we’ve been through, and I won’t justify the way we never really listen to a goddamn word we claim to. Let’s be fair. Let’s take some order. We’re too much like each other, and there’s no chance in hell that you would change for me. Why would I change for you?
But the painful truth exposed here, as you grab your autumn jacket and slowly make your way towards the door, is that in this short lived moment my heart is left unfastened, as the single thing I feared the most just happened.’
- William Beckett
In Your Care
The world falls away with the fabric as you undress before me.
I hand over to you my flesh and my secrets; my skeletons, torments and truths,
and hope that you will kiss them gently and put them to sleep.
No Protection
I read in a poem once that emotions, put to words, lost their power to choke the heart.
So I write,
only to find that the words I put around myself and between us will not stop the torture of this longing for you.
the speed of time
bleeding heart, endless nights, fleeting days
time does not stand still when I am with you
“… It flows between my fingers, it bends when I command it to, it is at my whim and mercy; just how I would have loved to have you. When I am with you, time and your share of it could be mine to command and have…”
- RR
Or we could just do this
“We wouldn’t have to do anything, you know.
We could just lie down here and watch how the stars do nothing and be beautiful anyway.” – MK
“… Meteors would pass us by and we would wish on the sun stalking the horizon. Beautiful minds longing for a single, lovely sight and sighing lustfully when that sight leaves us aching for a single moment of peace…” – RR
*RR blogs at: http://ramyaranee.wordpress.com/
Ravaged Love
The last day of March,
My darling Sleeping Child, I am oddly shy about you. I still regard you as an inviolate presence. You are as secret as the mysterious processes of the womb. I’m not being fancy…I have treated women, generally, very badly and used them as an exercise for my contempt – except in your case.I have fought like a fool to treat you in the same way and failed.
One of these days I will wake up – which I think I have done already – and realise to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself.
There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have racked my shabby brains and can find no answer.
But when people die, those who are taken away from us can never come back. Never, never, never, never, never (Lear about Cordelia). We are such doomed fools. Unfortunately, we know it. So I have decided that, for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the next room is the only thing in the world worth living for. After your death there shall only be one other and that will be mine. Or I possibly think, vice versa.
Ravaged love,
And loving Rich
- Richard Burton in a letter to Elizabeth Taylor (1973)
How Wonderful by Irving Feldman
How wonderful to be understood,
to just sit here while some kind person
relieves you of the awful burden
of having to explain yourself, of having
to find other words to say what you meant,
or what you think you thought you meant,
and of the worse burden of finding no words,
of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person
has found just the right words for you—and you
have only to sit here and be grateful
for words so quiet so discerning they seem
not words but literate light, in which
your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous.
How wonderful that is!
And how altogether wonderful it is
not to be understood, not at all, to, well,
just sit here while someone not unkindly
is saying those impossibly wrong things,
or quite possibly they’re the right things
if you are, which you’re not, that someone
—a difference, finally, so indifferent
it would be conceit not to let it pass,
unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun.
And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage
of those high murmurings over your head,
having found, after all, you are grateful
—and you understand this, how wonderful!—
that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself,
like a root growing wise in darkness
under the light litter, the falling words.
*Thank you Rohini, for sharing this with me.
‘If something inside of you is broken, you must put it back together with your own two hands.’
~
“And yet, as happy as you are to be with her again, you know that you musn’t overburden her with your troubles, that you can’t expect her to transform herself into the divine surgeon who will cut open your chest and mend your ailing heart. You must help yourself. If something inside of you is broken, you must put it back together with your own two hands.”
- Paul Auster, Invisible
‘I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.’
~
“I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
- Elizabeth Gilbert
selfhatelovesyou
You don’t know what it’s like to have someone leave you. To feel thwarted each time you tried to reconnect; to be ignored for years and left for dead. You thought I hated you for leaving me. I thought so too. But it was me I hated.
I hated myself for being so bad you had to go. For driving you away by doing nothing but being myself.
It takes a rare kind of love; a stupid kind of courage to make your way back into their life and to love them with all you have knowing full well that they could leave you again. And probably will.
‘Disaster does not matter, intensity does.’ (Why I love…) – Jeanette Winterson
~
‘I love you is always a quotation, and it is the least original thing that any of us can say, but just as it must be often said, it must be sincerely said, and as if for the first time, on a planet new-made from love.’
‘Anything with love in it always has a bit of a muddle in it, because love is chaotic and exuberant as well as careful and dedicated.’
‘What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?’
‘Desire deserves respect.
It is worth the chaos.
But it is not love, and only love is worth everything.’
‘Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.’
‘You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?’
‘But on the wild nights who can call you home?’ – JW
‘There are many forms of love and affection; some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power.
But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.’
www.jeanettewinterson.com
‘Love. The word is not enough for what it is.’ (Why I love…) – James Frey
‘The first time I saw you, my heart fell. The second time I saw you, my heart fell. The third time fourth time fifth time and every time since, my heart has fallen.
You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Your hair, your eyes, your lips, your body that you haven’t grown into, the way you walk, smile, drag your feet when you’re tired. Every single thing about you is beautiful.
When I see you the world stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There’s nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The world just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you. Just you, and my eyes staring at you.
When you’re gone, the world starts again, and I don’t like it as much. I can live in it, but I don’t like it. I just walk around in it and wait to see you again and wait for it to stop again. I love it when it stops. It’s the best fucking thing I’ve ever known or ever felt, the best thing, and that, beautiful girl, is why I stare at you.’
(excerpt from James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces)
