Dear L_____:

I'm listening to Adagio by a man named Tomaso Albinoni. It's slow and almost entirely of strings and a sad, old pipe organ worthy of Preisner. As it plays, I imagine a man in a trench coat walking cobbled, city streets alone in a darkly, grey foggy evening. He stops on a bridge and looks out over the water with the wet of the air plastering his thin, balding hair to his scalp. Passerby's ignore him as they hurry pass. He exists by himself in the world.

Fade out.

--

I'm writing this to you because it is what I know to do. I know that most of my words can no longer touch you, yet still I try to lay them side by side on this paper in some magical arrangement like the notes of music that I'm listening to. I try to invoke some deep, dark magic; a Qabbalistic venture where the weight of each sound of each of these syllables push against closed doors and open them.

Words.

Only words.

--

I live in a room with five walls and a door that leads neither in, nor out, but only somewhere else. Always, I walk through as one person and walk through again as another. If only I could imagine where this door of mine will lead to, next. I could rest my hand on the doorknob, close my eyes and wish. I would open my eyes and then the door and walking through, I would be there.

Ah, the Cello plays, now. It is a sad, gentle giant of a voice murmuring as it turns in its sleep there under the hill.

--

I am the man who could capture you, once.

I was of a thought that I had not grown since that day when I first dared to hold the hand of the woman that seemed so far out of my ability to reach. As these words flow out of me, though, I can feel a thing that these last weeks have allowed me to find. Were I to meet that girl of five years ago today, I would not reach... not with my hand, and not with fear. But, she is gone and with her some of the strings from the music in my life fall silent.

These words...

I chuckle at your observation that I am not like other men. How we were able to talk is not how other people talk. You want to learn to get along as they do. You want the ease with which men talk to men... men as old as you are, now. You want to speak the casual language of rising stars and be seen, not as you were with me, but as one of them; as a leader of them.

You'll learn.

You'll learn that I've ruined your pleasure of the surface of things. You want more. Go explore, as you say.

Go explore what lays underneath the ties and jackets; the penetrating eyes that can hold your stare and release it as a game not worth playing, or already won. Go explore the touch of that man and I think you will see. You'll finally be content.
--

I am free.

Finally, I am free.

Tags: essay, letters, poems