I didn’t actually believe you were going to do it. I have to apologise, actually, because that was very unfair of me. All you have is your feelings, and all you have to display them on is your word. It just seemed like such an extreme length to go to, to give that word its natural authority. I thought that even if you were telling yourself you would, you only believed it in bad faith and would keep putting it off until you felt differently. If you’re carrying on for my sake, then I really didn’t deserve to be proven wrong. I don’t understand why you would, but I’m eternally grateful for it. All I can do now is promise that it’s going to get better.
I want this to be the most pleasant and rewarding experience for you, but it probably won’t be. To be honest, I hoped you wouldn’t do it. You have much better places to bring your feelings, your desires and your precious minutes. You’re here, though, so all I can do is keep reaching out to you. It might change you in some small, even negligible way. I’ll be embarrassed if it doesn’t, because it’s a matter of basic human decency. You could have given anyone this chance to make an impact, but you gave it to me. All I ask is that you forgive me for doubting your curiosity.
I’m nervous to find out why you’ve made the right decision to keep going, because now that you’re here, I have to invent it. More accurately, I have to find out what I invented, because it wouldn’t be here for you to read if I hadn’t done it already. It might not have mattered what I wrote, but in my ignorance I never would have guessed that you would actually read it. Now it matters greatly, but I’m still looking at your feelings from a distance as if I didn’t know what to do with them.
Let’s have a closer look. You’re doing the best you can. That’s to say, the best thing you could reasonably be doing, because that’s what we always do. When my alarm made its pointless noises at me this morning, I dragged myself out of bed because I stood to gain more that way. When a day has nothing to offer, I switch off the alarm and go back to sleep. To think that my noises might be worth dragging your eyes across a page for is truly humbling.
If something vital wasn’t missing, though, the best thing to do would be to wander off this trail of words and drift back into a space that can’t be shared. You would drop whatever you’re reading from and go cheerily limp; I would find that I’d written nothing, because there was nothing wrong for me to approximate teasingly, exacerbate unwittingly or ultimately fail to address. Since these words are all here, wrapping you in their most honest embrace even if it fails to connect, there has to be a shadowy corner among those elusive feelings of yours that’s shouting out for a fire to illuminate its hidden colours.
I’ve never read anything that didn’t ignite even a brief healing spark in me. Just breathing in a human body is enough to inflict injuries that would render reading intolerable if it didn’t promise to heal. Tedious academic texts and heart-shredding letters of rejection were all in my best interest to battle through, but the most thrilling and suspenseful storylines also must have fought against me if I really sunk my tongue into their syllables. If your missing colours aren’t dazzling in the light of my words yet, there’s always hope: the effect can’t be immediate. First, we have to struggle through a maze that weaves in and out of meaning.
Whatever is concealed in that nook that you’re seeking the words to demystify, it only has one quality that I can be certain about: it’s as profound as your tireless little heart. That’s why this is really too great a responsibility for me. Anything that language will adhere to can be raised into profundity by the right choice of symbols. Being human, you must feel like you lack a validating description for countless bubbling springs of unease. All I need to do is elevate one of them into something you can take away and think proudly about. I must have done it already, since it’s here for you to read, but I just can’t imagine how one of those brow-softening pieces of you could attain its lustre on my account.
To level the ground between us, I have to admit that I didn’t believe I was going to do it, either. Not because I doubted that you deserve my best effort, but because I wanted your confidence to be misplaced. If I thought that even the most absent-minded gesture of your wilting fingers was within my powers of description, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to start spilling all these words onto you. When they contract passively towards your palm, then slightly flex as if you had imagined reaching for something before curling back into a sheltered bud, every crevice of me that your influence might reach shudders; in that twitch alone I see the script for all those reasons you give me to smile, but I can’t read it. All I can do is circle my own awe with misshapen stories and plead for you to keep reading.
Whether or not it would become the beacon of validation that I owe you, I should have known that my effort was inevitable. The incredible speck of you that it announces to the world has to be one that no prettier prose could access. You might not even notice it shining from you until it reflects off something else. A clean towel or the cold kiss of a pillow under your wrist could carry you unexpectedly over a wall of misery, and if I’ve really implored meaning to flood your feelings as urgently as it ought, my words and the morsel of you that they’ve captured would be woven decoratively into its fabric. Even if it’s just a flirtatious suggestion of elegant red hues that catches your eye as it fades from your coffee’s crema, or any other fleeting imposition of colour that enriches your day, the fire that you came here to light will have to reveal its glow somewhere.
I hope it turns out to be more than that, though, because I have no choice. I couldn’t have given this to you if it wasn’t meant to be a devastating revelation of your worth. I have to hope that it rattles the foundations of your being, because you could have found something that did, instead of reading this. I didn’t want to believe you would do it, because I owed you more than I could ever give. If reading this is the best thing that you could possibly be doing, then it falls into my hands to determine what’s possible for you.
Having made a fumbling attempt to understand what to do with your feelings, all that’s left to discover is how a selfish act like writing is meant to handle such a delicate task. As with reading, I’ve never written anything that didn’t assume its final shape to heal me in some way. Without my own void of loss or injury to fill, I’d have no words to pour into this space and pass on to you. It’s an intimate, trusting exchange. When I write that I want this to be the most pleasant and rewarding experience for you, I mean that when I was the height of your navel I rocked abstractedly on a dewy clump of grass one star-flooded night and gazed upwards until I almost fell onto my back in disbelief. I mean that I’ve reaped that reward and watched it fade like the glittering constellations as the more pressing light of day spread into my life. By virtue of its existence, we’ve both recovered something profound here. It doesn’t really matter how, because soon we’ll find that all we had to do was keep going.
If there were anything more effective I could have done for you, I wouldn’t have wasted a second trying to mend my own wounds by stitching vacuous sentences together. I hope you won’t forget that, even if you never lose your unwarranted confidence in my capacity to extract meaning from the silence of sleepless nights, or those stuttered gaps in your thoughts. When you feel a chill that’s too deep for any verbal consolation to trickle down to, reading might only seal the crack where that unease is hidden. Maybe that will be the best thing you can do. If it is, I’ll have written something that conceals your pain from you as profoundly as your poetic smile hides it from everyone else. In every recess of me that your own fire casts into shadow, though, I hope it’s not.
I don’t believe you’re going to do it again. I wouldn’t think much of you if I did, because I think so much of the world that we’re decorating with stories together. With the most emphatic gratitude for your trust, I urge you to take your feelings to a stony beach and promise them to the hollow rattle under the wash. Take them to a restaurant and feed them something new. It’s been a pleasure to navigate our losses in this creative embrace, but I can hear gulls softly whining in the background and it makes me quake in my seat. Every time daylight spills over the horizon, it seeps into the cracks between the words we used yesterday. We try to use them again, to paint over those stubborn gaps with desire and soothing labels for our faults, but they keep dissolving. Next time we’re both missing something that doesn’t have a name, please know that the best thing you can do is hold me against your warm, feeling skin and listen to the flames we have crackle under the fainting stars.
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