amil magicforest in the city that was once ours the cannonball is yours and mine no one else can break our sacred circle and i so thought that I was done grieving i'm lonely and i miss your arms so bad it takes people so long to know what to do with me because i am silent at least you guessed held me compacted in a ball please i am so frightened right now (I said, i say) and everything was finally all right always ALWAYS ALWAYS beautiful dark one 040802 ... magicforest once I asked you what your selfish wish would be for how I ought to live if you ever died. you said the usual "for you to be happy and find love again" thing and I had to remind you that it was supposed to be selfish. you went silent for a long while until I thought you must be angry, but then you told me that your selfish wish was that I would never dance with another man like I had danced with you. you weren't supposed to die, darling. but I granted you your selfish wish. it's been years now, and I can't do it anymore. My flexibility is gone, I can't stretch, you would think me so awkward now. Perhaps you don't think at all. For a long time I searched blather in some weird craze, certain for some reason that you would be here, typing to me from a heavenly realm, or wherever your soul went, if you had one, if it went anywhere at all. but you were always above computers. 040803 ... magicforest Sohe is upstairs napping on the couch. He's sick with allergies, or something. I'm sad. I want him to enjoy our city. I still think of it like that, and I protest that when Sohe calls it my city. First, I protest because it isn't mine (never truly was, and certainly wouldn't be now, when I am as out of touch with it's glowing holes in the ground and high-wire electric rhythms as a tourist from Arkansas) and also because if at least I had any claim of ownership over this city, (I sound like such a miscreant, or a derelict) the word would have to be plural possessive. This city is ours. The thing is, I can't say "The city is ours" to Sohe because he'd think "ours" was a reference to he and I, and also because you are long gone, my Original, and nothing is ours now. I like to think that if you met Sohe, you would like him. You have both a theatrical streak in your veins. But to be honest with myself (mostly) I would hope that you wouldn't like him. I would hope that you would burn with jealousy until it consumes you, until you are forever unable to see Sohe's merits. I would hope this because it would mean that you still love me. Something I should, but likely won't, figure out in this lifetime is exactly what dies with a person. Other than their body. What about the feelings they emoted, radiated? Do those die too? Is love like a ray of light from a star; the star can be extinguished but the ray of light keeps travelling? 040803 ... magicforest It's strange to know that I'll be in love with you, however unrequited, for the rest of my life. You, and everyone else I see who reminds me of you. The black man who always sits on the bench by the church reading his book. The younger man with the soft moist dreads who walks his dog and smiles at me. The taste of coriander, cumin, wet curries. Raspberry nail polish on my ballerina toes. I fall in love with all of you every time I see a bit of you again. I fell in love with Sohe because I fell in love with the feeling of falling in love, the feeling I fell in love feeling for you. 040803 ... magicforest One thing I loved about you was that you were raised like me: upper crust, knocked down to the little people, knocked down to the downright decrepit. When it came to the part of human life in which one is expected to clean, we knew how to do it. We cleaned up after ourselves, we did our own dishes, dried our own laundry, planted and weeded our own flowers. It's not as much as someone who hunts their own buffalo for meat and sews their own clothes from its hide, but it's one way of returning to your roots. To humility. To the self-pride, the dedication, the diligence, the tranquillity of doing your own work with your own hands, tidying up your own messes, taking responsibility for your own creations and destructions. It's a way to stay in touch with your sense of duty to the world and to yourself. Now that procrastination is a house-hold term and casually regarded as one step towards the modern ideal of having absolutely nothing to do at all, and with everyone claiming its bittersweet seduction, it may be profitable for us to turn off the dishwashers, closet the Swiffer, abandon the gardeners and Spanish cleaning women (with generous severance pay) and get down on the floors of our renovated houses and scrub our souls clean with lye and vinegar and water and soap. Tonight I will change this, I write not to you, but to me, because we are, after all, one and the same. It just seems less crazy to have an imaginary conversationalist than an inner monologue. With all this logic in my head I must be insane. 040805 ... . . 050411 what's it to you? who go blather from