Love Letter

I am writing this so that it will stay true. Though we are kept apart never doubt that I love you, that you are in my heart. At night I lie awake and run your absence through my fingers: here's the touch of you, your warmth, your tenderness, your brutality: all our conspiracies of love.

I dream of kissing you, of course, in all the lights this room can muster. In the slurred light of dusk your mouth is as dark as a knife; when dawn extends its bouquets of roses and marigolds and my hot sheets are printed with your ghost, I turn and bury my face in them, trying to kindle you from the last embers of an erotic dream.

Everything becomes you in your absence. I peel blood-oranges and search through all their quarters for some secret pip of you. The wet sheets on the line wrap their cold arms around me. The swing in the garden is banging in the storm; Or is that my heart beating? 

Where are you? My mouth misses you.

You left me on a day of such puzzling beauty that I could not match it. All those patterns of chaos and bliss. In my mind I play endless home movies of you walking away from me. You limped out of our life in your lopsided stilettos, like a man proud to be leaving. I watched your receding back and felt love fox into rage: into something vagabond, refined, shattered. We were never that far apart. Your body spoke a foreign tongue – I could only swallow half of what you said to me.

What are we? Skin, books, words, bodies: libraries of sensation and desire. Flick through my song of songs, learn the choruses from the adulterer's hymnal, open my diaries at random and read what you will. I am laid bare for your gaze. Let me draw you towards me with some novel magic.

Perhaps I am not making sense to you, but we confounded sense from the very beginning. We lived in a space where sense was the first deserter. So, simply, I love you. It is beyond me to help it. I love you in ways that humiliate me, exhaust me, excite me. You are my guilty pleasure, my heart's desire. Your rhythms beat within me, make me sob with pent up longing.

I want your thumb to graze my palm, and then your mouth to kiss me there. I want your breath on my neck and your fingers on my throat. I cannot account for all the ways I miss you. I miss you the way a body in love misses its beloved.

So here I am, on my knees by the bed. Not praying, just missing you.

I send you this with all my love. Take care of it. I send you my beating heart, my love, my foolish beating heart.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele