This is in response to Waylon’s piece, Things I Would Like to do with You this Evening.

“And love. Love above all. No… not the artful postures of love, not playful and poetical games of love for the amusement of an evening, but love that overthrows life”

~ Shakespeare in Love

If this evening was the last night in time, the sun unable to rise again, time was to cease to exist. I have some very simple things I would like to do with you. And every time we meet, I wish to be believe could be our last.

I will send you a hand written reply, or maybe a telegram, in response to your invitation.

There will be no fancy restaurants, or high tech buildings with lots of cinema screens or bowling alleys with noise and business and people everywhere. I would like to meet in Scotland and you would be surprised by the chill in the air but you would layer and soon would not notice.

I cannot feel you today, my ribcage clenched, aching from desire and destruction. You give but I am giving more and you have the greater share of the power. Although you don’t want it, you already have it but it was an unfair distribution. But I understand it and know because there is an endless flow with nothing to stem it.

I want to return things, but some of those don’t need returned because they were never there. They were there, but you never saw them so they are still mine at least for now. You are weary even though you try to recharge, but you have lost so many times even though you will never admit this.

I have lost too but I have wanted those losses and so I have encouraged them and appreciated them and lived and breathed those days. Embraced the penetration of whichever weapon was used. My wounds were ice cold and they were sharp and they have healed.

This is new and I want to teach and learn to teach and be taught.

I have built a silken cocoon for when I retreated but I spun it so tight that I thought I would not breathe again. I was a caterpillar but time passed and my wings beat so hard and I broke through and I was alive again. Although, I have saved my woven silk nest for it is my net, for when I freefall.

I want to fall with you.

There will be horses waiting when you arrive. I can feel the stare of passers, for only, they are not used to horses at train stations. But we will ride to our evening and will naturally follow the path of tradesmen from hundreds of years before. Navigating from village to town with only the well trodden paths to guide us. For now, we are happy to follow the marked out road.

When we arrive which will not be until we are meant to arrive, we will be exactly where we are meant to be.

We hear music and so we drink ale and it doesn’t taste good but it is the chosen drink for the barn dance, so it tastes good. We lose ourselves. I dance with others and you do too and I watch you dance with others and I smile. I like to see you from a distance as much as I like to be within.

It is all an illusion and it is real. You are an alchemist but so am I and so we mix and blend and stir—hot, cold, dry, moist. The elements of many others we have met in the past. We have both encountered silver and gold but these do not interest us. We are not intrigued by the outer properties. We have fallen for those tricks in the past and been frozen or burnt by the interior.

Mercury can seep into metals and turns them to amalgam. We are both iron. Mercury cannot poison and destroy us. We have grown stronger over time and just like the property assist each other and others to breathe fully.

We gallop and escape from every memory. Right now, this moment. There was no one before us. There may be no one after. We have sharpened like a pencil and we have written and we became blunt. We have wrote our insides out and the lead is almost over. The new pencil learned from the one before. Not to be too sharp, or too blunt. There is no hurry, the graphite will still be there and when the time is right it will flow.

“What really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside.”

~ Paulo Coelho

I want to play some music to you. I want you to listen to the piano. Does it move you inside?

Tell me about your childhood and did you misbehave and why and for what. I would like to know your passions. I will ask a hundred questions and you will answer only three. I am inquisitive and curious and my curiosity is even curious. I like to understand and know, I do not like illusions, they lead to delusions. I want to know all of it. I will love all of it.

You will be my rose and I yours. There are millions of others that appear exactly the same. But you are the Little Prince and others have not seen the secrets within.

Well, I am grateful to them. For what they lost, I gained. In the whole of the universe there is no other the same—unique.

I will tend to you and I will water you and I will watch as you grow. When you are not there I will grow stronger. You will nourish me and keep me alive as I will you. For we do not wish to just live.

We will run through the fields and tumble in the woods. We will sing, even terribly sometimes. Make daisy chains and dig into the others soul. I will fall and sometimes you fall harder but I will pick you up and rock you and in you. We will laugh until we cry and sometimes we will have tears and heartbreak.

But I will never be the cause of the latter. You listen and sometimes you hear me and sometimes you will deliberately not hear me. But that night, that evening, your senses are alert and you inhale me and breathe me and hear me.

“People have stars, but they aren’t the same. For travelers, the stars are guides. For other people, they’re nothing but tiny lights. And for still others, for scholars, they’re problems. For my businessman, they were gold. But all those stars are silent stars. You, though, you’ll have stars like nobody else.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you look up at the sky at night, since I’ll be living on one of them, since I’ll be laughing on one of them, for you, it’ll be as if all the stars are laughing. You’ll have stars that can laugh!”

And he laughed again.

“And when you’re consoled (everyone is eventually consoled), you’ll be glad you’ve known me. You’ll always be my friend. You’ll feel like laughing with me. And you’ll open your windows sometimes just for the fun of it… And your friends will be amazed to see you laughing while you’re looking up at the sky. Then you’ll tell them, ‘Yes, it’s the stars. They always make me laugh!'”

~ Antoine Saint-Exupery

 

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Editor: Dana Gornall

Photo credit: Pixoto