To someone

Dear…I don’t even know who I’m writing this to.

No matter – I am determined to make this a love letter, and anyone who knows me would never doubt that I could. Your visionary spirit, it’s indomitable, they tell me. Some would call it blistering ambition. You can call it what you like. I like to believe that we cannot be found in texts of reference or facts blinking back like stone. We are limitless.

I do not know what a love letter is; I do not know what it should say, but I do not believe I need to know, because some things go deeper than words. There is no one person I write this to; this is for anyone who is the history, the present and the tomorrow of love. This is for anyone who drinks my words like water and lets them sustain, lets them touch something so raw we can only twist ourselves around the feeling and hold on; let it carry us over tides and rend itself in a great storm. This is for you. I want you to feel everything I say with the fervour of a flame consuming every thought, every idea that ever lifted itself off a page and came alive in your hands. We keep them in our pockets, little stone hearts that rattle to the tune of the red birds singing in cages of powder dry bone. Hold me before I fire because my words can cut deeper than any rock, and bodies are like spider-web in the wind. We are so fragile.

The edge of my breath is jagged as the cliffs I rip my hearts from – I know there will be nobody to read this when I’m done, because this is not made of crystal and my words shackle thoughts that will always be locked in me; they are mine only. I wish I could unroll the fabric of my dreams and let them trickle and flood silver and gold over gulfs of humanity – for we are apart even when we press hands, bodies, lips, hearts and minds together till there are no boundaries and a song of the ages sings in veins joined as one. But I cannot; and you cannot, either. Because I can only speak and minds can never truly meet. Because what I say struggles against the limit of meaning. Meaning is our constant – it lets us measure the world against words but what we didn’t know when we made them was that we were constricting our world into neat compartments – a pill a day, a label, a name; an idea buried in a box. It is up to us to set them free.

But the sorrow of being human was not what I wanted to kill. I want to kill all the pain of loving you and seeing myself skate like a reflection over your mind. I want to be more than your afterthought. I want this for everyone who has ever loved someone and not had an answering voice sing their harmony like a fragrant harbour to home to. I want this for everyone who has ever been lost, who has ever shed sea and blinked salt at something that bobs just beyond your fingers, anyone who has ever hurt and writhed and touched the centre of their capacity for pain. I do not know your measure until you show me your heart’s grief, but this is the flimsy comfort I can give you, for I am human and I am as frail as what I do.

Every moment with you is a strand that weaves the tapestry of my story – for I am the imprint of the people I meet. As the heartbeats tick down I clutch what I can to my chest, crush it with the fervour of my feeling because I cannot imbue you with what I feel. I walk heavy because we will have no tomorrow. You may be the space between my words but your silence starves me and my hunger is one for the ages – I could devour all of you and still be left wanting.

I’m sorry I spoke and I wish we weren’t written on our skin and walls that pulse with my blood – words line my veins and sway my heart so dangerously far it almost slips between my fingers. It’s a shackle reserved by time and it bolts me to the door I push, but I have peddled pity and nothing pays the price of the key. We weathered the sea but you forgot that I cannot float without you. I sank when you left but I couldn’t drown because you’d stolen my breath and I didn’t even know, because we don’t need to breathe under water.

You told me you loved me and it was the other head speaking a language I was too young to understand, so I chose not to listen.

You tell me I am god and it’s all I can do to straighten your facts like bookshelves as I say, I’m only a woman. You bathe in the salt of my tears and I shed them not for you but you knew that anyway. Words embrace me across the span of the globe and the threshold of distance flares for a second before sputtering in the ponderous wind. We weigh down and I do not tell you that every word I say is poetry because it cost me, and everything worth having is worth toiling for. I toiled beyond you. I thought I died for you but here I am, still so full of words each casting like a stone to skip over bodies (of water) and I wish I could fly that far, too.

I would tell you that my love is boundless but the very word holds everything I ever wanted to say to you, so I cannot.

I love you. That is all.