Letters

A Love Letter, to All of You:

Maybe the problem with you and I is that we were both born in California; we have fault lines from earthquakes etched into our bones. Maybe that’s why we’ll never be whole. You’ll keep going to parties and meeting those plain girls in dresses that you love to take home. The ones who reassure you that you never need to settle down. You can keep bouncing around like a pinball with a passport, never returning to the same place twice. I was silly to think we’d move back there together some day.

I bought a sugar skull necklace today at a flea market. I’m never going to take it off. Not because it’s too pretty, but because I like the warning it gives. Danger. Poison. It matches the Mexican wedding dress that I bought to remind me of Olivera Street with my father when I was small. I should have run away fast when I learned you were like him, with powder in your nose and gin and tonic on your teeth. Instead, I was curious. I used to love the way you drove fast on the freeway.

I fell in love with you when I thought I’d never love anything ever again for the rest of my life. Forget about having a love like my grandparents’--I was drowning myself in cheap Coronas with lime and clogging my arteries with macaroni and cheese in your bathtub. I stopped believing in god. And I never looked back. I exhausted myself trying to come up with alternate versions of the word “nothing”.

I remember when you were too embarrassed to kiss me because you thought I was too pretty. I remember how you’d lie to my mother so that you could keep me out late. I used to love telling people how smart you were.

You can’t force someone into being your friend. I want to smash your fingers between mine and make you spend a weekend with me when I’m home for Christmas. I want to shake you and make you accept my thousand apologies, but you’re too busy studying. For what, I don’t know. Something more important than me. I want to be the yellow bird outside your window, but I don’t know how to drown and fly at the same time.

I don’t want to feel like I owe you for putting my heart back together with your fingertips tattooing prints on my rib cage. I don’t want to think about your body when I’m trying to fall asleep. I don’t want to miss tickling you and sleeping in your car with your jacket on my knees. I don’t want you to watch Star Wars, or eat grilled cheese sandwiches ever again. I don’t want you to listen to music or drink whiskey.

I don’t want you to forgive me.

But you will.

I hate that you forgot that night on the couch, your hands on the zipper of my blue sparkle dress, your mouth in my hair, your laugh mixing with mine. I hate that I’ll never bake cupcakes with your mother again, or look at the pictures on your refrigerator. I hate your sister. I hate the words, “I’m scared,” the words, “this isn’t going to work.”

I remember being a girl that was much stronger than the pathetic, smeared mascara version of myself that crawls out of bed, jams her toothbrush between her teeth, and dreads going to work in the morning. But right now, the thought of going on an adventure sounds exhausting. I forgot how to fall asleep at night without listening to Harry Potter audio books. I think the sound of Jim Dale’s voice flowing and changing pitch over the speakers of my crappy karaoke machine makes me feel like I’m not sleeping alone.

I wish I were braver. I’m still trying to figure out how to buy my own groceries and go to bed before 2 a.m. I don’t want to drive the 118 freeway and think about your car weaving in and out of traffic when you’d kiss me in the passenger seat on the way home from Disneyland. We would listen to these crappy songs on my beat-up iPod and read autobiographies in traffic and make up stories to tell our kids someday. You were every plan I made aloud in your bedroom and every secret one I kept inside my head for someday. I promise that I’ve moved on. I just haven’t forgotten. Perhaps it’s unhealthier than the double-double from In-N-Out you used to bring with you to pick me up from the airport, but I can’t just stop being your friend.

It would be all together too difficult to seek the names of the animals that the Box has unleashed, to count them, to sort them, to know them by touch. It’s easier for you to stay asleep.

I ask too much of you, and you give me the moon every time. I’m still ungrateful. I know that.

Can we please just get Chinese food and forget this ever happened?

-W.

*A Note to the Reader:

I started this project after reading “Ten Love Notes” by Clementine von Radics. If you haven’t read this truly beautiful piece of writing, do so by clicking right here. http://whiskeypaper.com/ten-love-letters-by-clementine-von-radics/

In her “Love Notes,” Clementine combines ten different love letters (written to, presumably, a number of different dudes), into one absolutely smashing anthology of poetry.

My piece is based on the inspiration I garnered after reading her work. I’d love to say that it was my idea to push a bunch of sappy, pathetic love notes into one place and make them sound semi-fluid, but alas, it was not. I aspire to be as lovely and well spoken as Clementine someday, but for now, I have my own crappy version of what it feels like to write a love letter to someone who is never going to read it. I’ve spent far too long with a bunch of random scraps of paper and untitled word documents floating around in my archives, and I wanted to share them.

All creative, inspirational credit goes to Clementine von Radics and her life-changing book of poetry, “As Often as Miracles.” Thanks, Clem, for being my muse.