Love Letters

Last year the Village Voice printed love letters for their annual “Sex in the First Person” Valentine’s Day issue. I found myself absolutely in love with Valentine’s Day, for the first time in my life. It seemed like something more than just a greeting card capitalist holiday. It seemed like a celebration of love, a day when just about everyone in New York stopped to appreciate how simple and precious and rare love really is. It seemed like a day of solemn respect. I didn’t feel cynical at all. When the waitress at an Italian coffee shop gave me a long stemmed red rose with my spiked hot chocolate, the words “Viva l’amore,” sprang to mind, and that became my mantra for the rest of the day.

This year, I find that I have several love letters to write, and I’m unsure of all of them. Each one sort of blends into the next and I’m not even sure who I’m writing to. These sentiments are like deep water colors that bleed into fuzzy shapes with indistinct borders. I’m not sure where they begin and where they end, but they are undeniably, frustratingly present.
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Dear J.,

What I feel for you is a mystery to me. Initially, indifference, but muddled with something like kinship or the recognition of something in you that harmonized quietly with something in me. Then later, attraction. Unexpected, but undeniable attraction. Every physical part of you is perfect: your sweet guileless face; your surprisingly beautiful body. Your sexiness snuck up behind me and pounced when I wasn't even looking.

Now, what I feel for you is a sort of playful, mischievous interest. I’m curious. I want to run around with you and explore. I want to creep inside and push buttons and pull strings. I want to take you away from everyone you know and wander the streets with you at 4 a.m. I want to stop in a porn shop and see how you react. I want to hold your hand when we leave.

There’s a look in your eyes sometimes like something is waking up. Inside you, certain things are starting to move again that maybe haven’t moved in a long time. I think they’ve been waiting to move. I think they’re sorry they slept in so late.

John
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Dear A.,

That mix CD I sent you for Christmas was somewhat restrained, I know. At the time, what I felt was so big, so intense, I thought it might freak you out. It sort of freaked me out. Our time together – those two weekends bashing around New York, that amazing night in your hotel – was still so fresh in my mind. It filled me, bolstered me, inflated my heart so much. For the first time in a long time I had a sense of the future, not as a dark empty corridor you stumble through blindly, but as an open terrain filled with possibility. And the thought came, unbidden, into my head: “I’d have kids with him.”

It was strange and shocking and unsettling.

I have been so imprudent with such feelings in the past, stupidly declaring my adoration for the most fleeting of suitors and calling it love. I don’t offer my heart; I throw it, wet and beating, at men, and when it hits them and falls to the dusty ground, or misses them altogether, I am devastated. These are the actions of a child, a silly boy who doesn’t really know what he wants and so hurls himself, full speed, towards what doesn’t want him.

And so when I see in you the possibility of reciprocation, of something real, it chills me to my core. I’m afraid that the nasty, rotten bits of me will eat you alive. I’m afraid that my misanthropy, my dissatisfaction, my temper tantrums, my willingness to indulge in my worst possible impulses, will drive you away. And it’s not even that I’m afraid of losing you. I’m afraid of doing to you what I’ve done to others. I can’t stand the thought of exposing you to the muck and mire in my soul, of shoving you face first into it, and then seeing it reflected back every time you look at me.

So I didn’t put the sweet, sad songs on your CD. I left off the songs about love and longing, the ones so bitterly beautiful they make heartbreak seem sweet. And I kept my heart to myself.

John
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Image: Cupid by Chuck Jones.