I would like to remember your pleasant beauty: but only for a moment, for you are a siren, and I have much sailing to do.

I would like to say I do not mind not being friends with you, now, for what is left to me is the memory of you and our good, bad dates and our bad whiskey and our wild, fun, sexual, drunken dancing together. I would have kissed you that night but your mouth smelled of put-out cigarette butts. Acrid. I remember your thong, you against the wall, you on my bed on all fours, your wide open eyes, narrowing, your bangs…my temporary humor and your model ice, melting in the hands of memory as a frozen polaroid, perfect as the autumn leaves veined in orange and lit-up orange. And then they fall, dry, over, the end.

You are a once-bright yellow green leaf, but your season has turned. You have sold your self to hungry men who will touch every part of you but your cynical heart.

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Your leaves are now beige fodder for future seasons.

You will soon be rolling a vast baby carriage into a cafe and eyeing the young party girls with wistful condescension. Your thick husband will be distant and have affairs, and so will you. You will visit a doctor when you are not sick, to fake your self back to a distant perfection.

I would like to say that you were cruel to me, and many others, because you could be. You knew the power you possessed and you did not use your power for good: oh if you had you could have raised waves against the cruel tides of suffering. Instead you used it as a salve for your boredom; you used it to drown out your humanity, your beautiful loneliness, your sweet insecurity, your kind fear.

But your power could not hold me for long, for I am not ultimately interested in merely having you: your carefully delicious style, your elfin eyes, your full young breasts, your full hair, your fit arms, your strong neck, your butt, your gold shoulders, your gold legs, your bangles.

Those things were like chimes, to my ears, a call that sounded through space and riveted my attention. Riveting like…like a shadowed symphony. I was not blinded by your brilliance: I kept looking, and as I looked, you softened, and as you softened…you made a poor choice.

You played cold games with me—you treated me as you treated the others.

“All that grace, all that body, all that face, makes me want to party…will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful. I know that you will. Will you still love me?”

 

But you did not think of this: it takes two to play. And I can not play games with you. And so you lose me and you do not care. But it is a loss, nevertheless.

My cold games are fun! They involve wool, and snow. Snowshoeing, with my dog and seven other dogs and friends and hot chocolate afterward; or sledding down the foothills beneath the mountain faces where our elders used to ski, or rolling a snowball until it weighs more than two men; or baseball tossing snowballs at snowheavied trees to relieve their aching branches.

Your cold games are something out of a heavy girl’s fashion magazine: they smell like sweetly toxic perfume samples.

“Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

But I thought I knew you: and I still believe that you are better than this. You just have not had encouragement.

But I respect myself: I am too patient, and strong in my broken places (shinjang), and I am lucky enough to have been encouraged by kind warriors: and so I am not desperate for something that does not care for itself.

I am desperate for your honesty, for your hasty laughter, for your gentle breath, for your inspiring coos over my shoulder, for your saltwater tears, for your ordinary friendship. I miss your cozying into my gray couch in the winter beneath a black-striped red wool blanket when I bring you tea and you continue reading my used book to me, sitting beneath you on the carpet facing and feeding the fireplace. I am desperate for your love, or for your caring if you prefer—you are afraid of that first word, for desperate boys have lobbed it up at you all of your externally beautiful life.

And so you sought after troubled boys who did not love but wanted.

And so I let you go and so I relaxed my pursed lips and so I drew a hot bath and listened to my dog sigh in his sleep. And so I will close my day, offering you a dignified bow. And so I will cozy into my bed, warming the cool spots with my long strong legs and I will watch half a movie and work on my laptop, or read. My dreams are dreams of service that I can blow air into, and make real. And later I will dream, my aching shoulder wounded, pinned beneath me.

And so I would like to thank you. You taught me, again and again, again and again, and again, not to dream of you. And I listened. And I am silent. These words are not words of love, but of the silence that will remain when I walk away when this letter is done. I have listened and I shall not continue to imagine our love, for it was not to become love. You are too busy living a flowered path, present tense, and it is my misstep that I thought we had something special when I was only an hour’s fun for you.

“Failure should be our teacher…Failure is delay, not defeat.” ~ Denis Waitley

Thank you, for clarifying for me what love is not.

Love is no thing, and nothing is a gift, space is a playground, and time and distance are merely peaks and valleys in the topography of real love.

And I would remind you: I am not one of your fans. For I know what I deserve, and it is someone who is not afraid of fear. Love does not require this map: it makes its way across the miles. Love does not heed the time; for it is not rooted in the months of one or two moons.

Love is not bothered by obstacles—they form the high sides to the left and right of this rocky path. This path does not depend upon external signs: love will find its own way.

And my love will wait, a tiger in the tall grass, and my love will relax and curl up then stretch out and nap, and sigh. And you will be there, but it will not be you, it will be Her: I can not tell who she will be and this is not for me to know.

I am here.

“I miss you like hell.” ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Get your copy of Things I would like to do with You.

~

You just read the tenth.

Read the first, Things I would like to do with you in the Woods.

Read the second, Things I would like to do with you this Evening.

Read the third, Things I would like to Remember about our day in Vermont.

Read the fourth, Things I would like to do with you in Time.

Read the fifth, Things I Would Like to do with You Before I Lose You.

Read the sixth, Things I would like to hear when you are Confused.

Read the seventh, Things I would like to say to you without you Knowing.

Read the eighth, Things I would like to do with you when you visit my Home.

Then read the ninth, Things I would like for us to know before we Fall in Love.

~