You don't know what love is

On the occasion of love letters I've written through the years burning with a burning house

Get over getting over it. — My mother

I thought I could retreat into a sheltered life after a childhood of upheaval. I dreamed of making America proud and real in myself, marrying my college boyfriend from Wisconsin, himself scarred by divorce in a way I found quaint and indulgent after what I’ve been through, and creating a stable household, just to prove I could do it. Half-heartedly or not, I could pretend I wanted a tidy, conventional adult life, as a woman who hardly even believes in the desperate charade that is called adulthood in the West, because it lacks wisdom and makes up for it in ego projections and obsession with keeping busy and calling insignificant business important. Every step I took in the direction of my perfect life felt like self-betrayal, disingenuous over-achieving, and hollow performance. I could not pretend to chase falsified desires that I’d invented because it looked right and made me more legible. I opted to walk backwards into the outlandish and uncanny to redeem myself. I am not the settling kind, I enjoy being alone too much, trust myself too much to be deterred by fancy, and long to run away into my own arms and be silently comforted there. I dream of that reunion with my truest nature more than I’ve ever pictured something as absurd as a narrow rented road in white lace with prince charming suspect waiting for me under a canopy of… terror, it’s not enough for me in this iteration, to be welcomed back into every structure I’ve outrun and held there, hunted.

—

In 2008, fresh out of a six year relationship maintained for three years too long, I met one of the loves of my life. Love at first sight is how it felt then, though we had met before in passing and across several eras and each felt that frisson of an inevitable encounter this late October evening, both of us solo leaning on a photo booth we’d unintentionally hidden beside in a packed Lower East Side basement bar during a show he was playing as part of New York’s Winter Music Festival. I’d attended on a whim, last minute, with a group of friends I’d lost in the mass. He’d joined the audience at his own show with a similar impulse. He wrote his address down on a tiny scrap of paper torn from a book he’d been reading, a Downbeat Reader aggregating interviews from a jazz periodical, after we spent the weekend together.

A month later, rushing to Manhattan’s twenty-four hour post office to mail the manuscript that would become my first book to a prize that required it be date-stamped by midnight, I decided I’d also mail him a letter, and a book we’d discussed on the phone. The epistolary, the dear sir or madam or Ol’ Stockholm, the lover away at war who you reach for in words, The Story of O, an erotic novel penned under pseudonym as a series of letters to the author’s lover, reinvents itself again and again in the hearts and deeds of poets for whom romance isn’t trendy or strange or a mode of hacking into mimicked intimacy.

We really wanted to learn one another, to learn something, to collaborate on a feeling. Spontaneously, I love you. I sit down, not on assignment or to make a point or wield a fiction, or in a fix of escapism, but to speak into the abysmal verdure of what love is and expand it, and follow it to where I feel more whole for announcing something as minor and revelatory as: today I am mumbling prayers for rain in a navy blue kimono I bought three hundred Sundays ago at the Park Slope Flea Market, the one I wore when you were in town last, and listening to Phineas Newborn Jr. and trying to recapture in words the satisfaction of having uncovered a real person in a crowd of great pretenders. What fortune! What dread that it might diminish with use. What ease. When you got out of bed to turn the record over in the morning, the first morning we spent together, the record playing on the portable turntable you’d brought from L.A. to New York, then came back to bed and held me in your arms while we listened in silence, I decided how I wanted to live, forever in that embrace and its kind, the lazy pleasure of soul mates, and what it would take to capture my attention and fulfill me from then forward, gestures like that, imperceptible until you realize they are reincarnations of private desires that had been forfeited because they became too painful to sustain. The world had let you down and removed everyone from every pedestal. You don’t know you’re jaded until confronted with your renewed innocence, a chance to reclaim your optimism, and you have to take it or exist in a malaise forever. You have one chance. And you take it. It’s hard to be disappointed by a person who is in love with music and can compose it as beautifully as he hears it. That work ethic, all of it trained on sound and frequency, delighted me then, in such a way it ached. That simple care, that obsession with tone, the fact that it’s a covert and compulsive obsession only those closest to it can really detect the magnitude of—the fidelity of it, the inception of a love story that will be both indelible and fleeting, impossible to sustain at that level of relaxed intensity, and unbroken because it never conforms to convention.

I’m bound to leave you behind, the letters insisted, the spell might crack under the pressure of our responsibilities, how selfish we both can be and are determined to remain, human bodies in space and time, clumsy and fallible and groping toward one another anyways only to collapse and heave together in a loop, in a pattern only the heartbeat recognizes. This is not a novel or a two hour movie or the past, and the era of unions so sacred they reimagine how we function in society is fading and ceding to these digital boxes of unknown beneath-the-ocean whereabouts, these metaversal slums of hello and goodbye, lacking in whimsy and wonder, drowning us in air and lack thereof. But until then, I offer you this library of pages and records to turn over and over for every lifetime.

We don’t need to be in the same place to build it, in fact it’s better this way, from afar, like students of one another, novice and naive again. We are so lucky to have our separate but compatible commitments to creative freedom and to need to express ourselves in writing and music, in these ways, we are too lucky, torn between the luck and the draw, it’s better as a secret. People will envy our luck, how we found one another by relying on it, the struggle to cleave us failing over and over, we must hide it better, act dejected, act estranged. I’ll record it here, I’ll write these notes and letters by hand, I’ll coat them in fragrant oils and the dust of quartz at and jasper.

And along with the letters I sent books— Baraka, the Derek Walcott that I was reading your birthday weekend, Foucault, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, so many others, pages of poems torn from books I was reading with effusive notes in the margins, absent-mindedly enveloped and couriered to Los Angeles from New York. You’ve given me this music, I thought, I want you to know what I know of words, you make me want to know more about where words and sound meet and are inseparable as the syntax of the free spirit. Welcome to my world, don’t study me, so many lovers make this irreversible error and scrutinize one another to pieces and become one another’s ops. Study with me instead, really be here with me in this unreasonable approach to multi-valent literacy and impossibly close microtonal listening, and we will make a world of such understanding; we will will be what the song implies when Joni croons love is touching souls/surely you’ve touched mine, but without drawing too much attention to the nearness which is strained when noticed. It’s just that the other modes of romance are glazed in shame and protocol and I need something that feels substantial without subsuming our identities and turning us into mirrors, so that all we see to create are paths back to one another. Maybe we can be one another’s route back to our truest selves and travel it together, and when we get there, if this closeness is all for appearances and we can take it or leave it by then, we’ll let it go. Never let me go. Let me go and I will want you more, etc.

And so I turned a chance and fated encounter into my one and only love for a time and wrote him letters I needed to write to myself, to receive myself, told myself secrets by pretending to confess to him, and he happened to stay there and be such a skilled listener he sampled more and more recorded poems and we dreamed up potential collaborations across disciplines and I read every biography of a musician he suggested and there is no better education than that which teaches you to follow creative gusts before they fade, to where they falter and past that, as an ensemble, a pair of souls trying to meet without grasping and undermining on another’s sovereignty, there is no greater way to love.

In a vault in a studio somewhere in L.A. he kept those letters, dozens, that I sent over the years, inside the books they came tucked in, branded with the oils of rose, cinnamon, and amber. Eventually our archives might have revealed themselves as a necessary scandal, some works on paper traded back-and-forth that turned into books and albums, affections that defied and defiled all the modern things just to exalt them, and become more normal on the surface. The studio is gone now, burned down earlier this month in the fires, with that vaulted ventricle of my heart inside it. I am free of the humiliation of all that devotion I used my own determined hands to inscribe, I can pretend I only felt half of what I did, I can act aloof and fabricate a version of the story where I never cared and it was all glamor, lust, luxury, novelty. All we have left of its beginning stages for now is this forensic reenactment, marked and sparred to render an outline for the more in depth inventory to come.

—

Sade was right, it is a crime, to keep wanting things you also keep having, and the evidence has been taken care of, our decadence can be concealed, there are no perceptible traces of the unconventional era of us. And we no longer resort to the ancient ways. I’m no longer moved to display my vulnerability and care so casually, ritualistically. And I no longer worry about whether it was earned or deserved when I did. It’s a miracle that while I lived in New York and a man I love lived in Los Angeles, while writing poems and prose every day professionally, a part of my creative mind held itself in limbo, in the margins as direct address to one man, just for him. If I were my own daughter I would tell her no, never love like that. And she would be broken by rage if she heeded such safe advice.

His letters back are songs with no words. We’ve made a call-and-response for the ages. It’s always been like this, each time we meet on earth. I feel numb about what burned, which concerns me, and I reach for the version of myself that would find a man worthy of all that beauty and energy again. Then shudder to recall my father’s belongings gone before I could access any. Remember, I just wanted a gun or something, an album, my inheritance of smithereens. Even knowing that the version of myself seeking that solace was deluded, neglecting herself, too impressed by men, awaiting permission to become who she is, as granted by a man she loved for the way he listened and could be heard in return— I still craved what I knew to be danger, to be ruin. Was I hazing myself, preparing myself for what it’s like in the field, begging to be either groomed or saved? What’s truer is that I was just afraid of my creative power and love is a great excuse for self-sabotage, a perfectly acceptable alibi, a reason to give it all away, our most socially acceptable mode of malfunction. I acquiesced, both because it is real and because it isn’t. We are still one another’s fantasy, alternate-destiny, if we weren’t both workaholics, if we weren’t so in love, if not for so much else, we could be together hand in hand and make a terrible alliance the bends the whole world.

What’s changed by now is I’m also my own fantasy, wheeling my heart back open to peek from behind a curtain I’ve since installed around it to preempt wounds like this one, the wound of confession, self-inflicted with motivations I don’t quite comprehend, when it dawns on me—if it’s all meant to be swept away and become the too-perfectly singed pages from books and notebooks and stray mail and pamphlets, tumbling off the wind into yards all over Los Angeles, stellar DNA that teaches the future that love is decent and vital and falls from the sky like suspiciously well-timed rain, it is safe to start again, it is safe to love that hard again, be that ridiculous and free and have mercy on ourselves for it, to need someone with an unrestricted understanding of what that means and never let ourselves get too satisfied. It happened then because we made one another feel safe, we contrived an illusion of safety where there was only menace and disturbance, lied to one another to keep it afloat, hurt one another pretending not to notice, asked one another to come out and play anyways, and saying yes made me brave and ungovernable. Knowing now what I didn’t then; I will do it all over again. Is it time to do it all over again?

—

Dear O, the book began, of all the things that burned in Los Angeles this revenant American January, who can say a confetti of silver and obsidian turned paper weight and placed inside of the copy of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, which I mailed after Obama was inaugurated the first time, with a circle around his line two or three days at the beginning of love… would go up in smoke, along with all of your records, vinyl and poems taken to the sky, may they land someplace worthy as the grave of love. The private Ahmad Jamal album you sent when he died is on my phone and I’m listening to it as write this on Mountain Standard Time, still in Arizona waiting for the rain to clear the L.A. air, waiting in vain, and you’re moving closer to where you lived when we met and it’s as if no time has passed we’ve just shifted into a new world and are trapped as those who have overcome ourselves get trapped, looking over our shoulders at what could have been, had we been cowards, had we been abandoned by our very own names, which demand music. Instead we remain where creative freedom is the only incentive to keep going harder and less gently into the night. Give me a reason to be the girl who takes turning in a finished manuscript for her next book to a publisher and reminding someone I’ll love them till the end of time for no reason other than it seems like a fun and iconic thing to do, as equally important, again. Hadn’t we been asking for signs, reinvigorated gumption? Haven’t we managed to become the signs without losing ourselves? Weren’t we listening to The Miracles but I mistook it for The Whispers.