Dear Aidan,
I would say it is late, but what paper do I write on invites the sun’s touch? I am low, I have been low for six months now. Half a year of being trapped inside letters and letters, trapped inside words that mean nothing to me and nothing to you. I could pick up all these words in a laundry basket and wash them clean before I give them to you — but windows and skies separate us and all we have is a thin string connecting the basis of what we have been saying for two years. Have you ever wondered if our lines became tangled? Wrapped around buildings, around beds, around people. Two ends, but an endless middle. We couldn’t become straightened out ever again, so we’d have to cut ourselves, and maybe that would mean we’d be finished. Maybe not.
Love, Charlotte
Because I can see the bones in your wrists when you grab my hands and we freeze because that is the first time you’ve ever ever touched someone intentionally since the day your mother left and the particles of dust settle down on us like we are in a tomb — a desert tomb with far off rocks as a hole and we are entrapped. It’s magical, if this is death. We isolate ourselves and we can scream scream scream but no one would hear us.
my knees hold bruises in them like a bowl holds syrup, i keep trying to find you but where do i look first? mysteries usually have clues, you are a locked door novel. a nail i sit on when i don’t look where i park my rear. i can wipe my tears off with a soft towel but it still wouldn’t beat the dirty tissue you shared with me that one night we both pretended the rain was enveloping our faces, as if we were letters to be licked and sent off hastily, but it wasn’t raining. your hands are the stamps i want to stick all over my body and hopefully i could worth enough for you. hopefully. i can call your name and caress the vowels until they are flicked away by the wind, leaving the consonants inconsonant and your ears untouched.
He said he wanted to rise in the air with the smoke. I told him if we burned all of his writings maybe we would have a big enough fire for him to evaporate with.
he brings forth a lighter from one of his oversized pockets and flicks it, and she asks him if he smokes. “sometimes,” he says, eyes moving with the little flame, “sometimes when i feel like the world is shitting on me, i fire this up and stare at it for a while. i like to believe it takes all my sorrows away. light in the darkness kind of thing.” she asks him if he has a cigarette. he shakes his head, and she pulls out a worn out pack from her beaded bag. “sometimes,” she says, and fingers a cigarette, “sometimes when i have a day when i meet not a single happy person in these streets, i take one and sniff it and think about how much better they would be if they were dead.” he scratches an invisible itch on his head. fumbles with the lighter. “that is awful,” he manages. “yes,” she agreed simply. “do you wish i were dead?” he asks quietly after a few moments of him looking at his hands in his lap and her staring at his eyes. “light my cigarette,” she replied.
is it not scary to be walking? is there not a perfect balance to stand on one’s feet and not fall over? he rocks on his heels, and aches to tell her hello, my name is aidan, what is yours, can i interest you in a coffee and bagel or would you like a cookie and tea and we can talk about walking or whatever you would like? the air leaves the room and he takes percise steps across the stuffy cafe and he tries to breathe but he cannot control his lungs or his arms or his legs as he suddenly runs over and with an excruciatingly delicate force brushes her soft hair to the side of her head like one would do if one thought a robber was behind the shower curtain and he sighs as she gasps and he opens his mouth to apologise but she says it for him.
her dark hair curtains her face not because she wants to shield the world to her eyes but because she does not want to look out window of the world. she likes to sit alone with a book and a magenta mug of dark tea and he likes to draw her secretly. she never looks up, barely moving in the same sport everyday and he cannot help but wish she would smile. he pencils her in, like she is the apple that changes everyday, but when he looks back at his sketches she never looks different than the next. he wants to tell her she is beautiful. he wants to tell her he loves her hands and every flip of a page or sip of her cup brings him a queasy feeling, as if she bestows the power to destroy him. he wants to tell her every book she reads he sought out and tries to read them, too, but could not because every word agonized him — he was not any closer to her mind; those lines and these paragraphs quite probably meant something else to her and he could not know.
his eyes are as big as the sky he is always looking at, as big as the expression on his face when he trips. he hides from trees, cannot stand shadows of corners or dark rooms. loves photographs, loves drawing shading but avoids them in real life. his hands are knobby like my knees when he traces his fingers on my leg and i find myself in the spaces where he did not touch me.
his socks can be barely called socks anymore, they are more like threads that hold his feet together. he walks too much, runs too much, chases too much. cannot stand not standing. he holds himself up by the threads.
he loved a girl who loved doors. always wanted to go to them and knock. her favourite ones were the ones where they did not answer. they went around to neighbourhoods meeting strangers in their homes and often the pair of them were greeted by an opening and slamming of the door. sometimes when they came up to a house shutters and blinds would close, and she would giggle and squeal, “i mean something!” and he would contradict her and say they did not care for her at all and she would turn to him with a pitying smile and whisper, “but my presence caused them to react” and he would have no will to argue.
he used to write her letters. forty four cents for ten words, including greeting and the close. “dear charlotte, i miss you. please come home. love, aidan”. every time. she never wrote back.
He presses me close, as if he is the book and I am a plucked flower. He imprints the ink of his words on me and I imprint the outline of my smell on him. “People are books,” he says. Am I a book, Aidan? I ask. “No, you are a flower, remember?” he reprimands. He carries on. “We are conveyed to places we have not the slightest idea of, we are stacked up against each other on bookcases in musky bookstores that give out battered cookies every once in a while, we are forced to wait for something we are not sure of.” To fade? To weather? To erode? To be bought? I muse. “Maybe,” he says. Whenever I need an answer he gives me back a question. Is forty-two the answer to life? I would ask and he would reply with, “Is there ever a question to the answer of life, Charlotte?” Now, he tells me, “But you are different, you see. You are not a book.” I ask him why. “You are a flower because you turn with the sun everywhere it goes, you chase after it by yourself. You shed petals when you shed tears, you wilt when you see someone sad. You are a flower, and I will protect you in my pages.”
his hair like dirt, his face ashy when he is not blushing, he says he wants to band his arm and i think he would be perfect as a tree. we do not go hand in hand like lovers, but rather our sleeves brushing and the threads of out clothes fraying out as if trying to reach each other. he speaks to me incoherently, like he is pulling his voice out of a box for the first time. he could be a bird, i think. i think of vultures for his structure, blue jays for his mind.
he draws. he will deny it, saying they are only doodles in the margin of his math homework just like i would say my writing are only scribbles of words. he will sit there with his back to me, in his lap a sketchbook and pencil (“never pen,” he tells me), while i sing a couple of songs for him on my guitar and when i turn around to look he will already have drawn half of a eighteenth century party or a battle scene in the vietnam war. he tells me to make a story out of his drawings, but i say no, that i cannot interpret it in the exact way it was drawn, that it would ruin the whole drawing if i did in my own way and not in the artist’s. he describes what it is in his head, and i write it down. in all actuality, he is the writer and i am merely his scribe.
When he types he gets everything out of his head first. “To make it pure,” he says. He constantly has to go back and fix his words and sometimes his words are jumbled and no one really knows what it means so he leaves it as it is. He always wants to be good, wants his thoughts to be the first bird of the spring.
“Charlotte,” he starts, “I want to be real.” I strum on my guitar and tell him I do not know how to make him real, I am not really sure if we are really real at all.
“I see you,” he says earnestly, leaning in and breathing sweetly into my face. “I can smell the perfume you put on. I hear you when you sing.” He kisses me and lingers. He lowers his voice and begins whispering hotly. “I feel you, I taste you. Am I not real?”
I cannot answer him, so instead I hum right on his mouth and both of our lips buzz with an intensity that would cause an earthquake for an ant had it lived on our faces. I ask him if that was real enough.
“For the moment,” he says after thinking a little. “I wonder if we become real when we die.” Well, I say. When you die, be sure to come back and tell me what it is like to be real.
He laughs and I smile, telling him pain was close enough to feeling real. He stops and looks at me. “No,” he says commanding. He holds me. “No.”
