I've been thinking about the things that happen in 10 years' time: degrees received, births rejoiced, deaths mourned or denied, a slew of bad movies, a nearly infinite multiplication of the real housewives franchise, tenures awarded and denied, books published and celebrated (or overlooked), weight gained and lost, and lots of cats.
In 10 years' time, in this temporality that is now both its wholeness and a loose set of blobs and fragments, in that time (but what is that time?) I see us. Now (when?) you are sitting on a bench with a memory of me spread between your hands, like a book lying in your upturned palms. Your head is bent but your gaze is not downcast.
You are weaving so many threads that you will carefully undo every night, a penelope who weaves without waiting (because there is no awaiting the future that couldn't arrive). Your firm step guides you home in another direction.
Then (when?) I am writing long strings of seeking words at my computer late at night, in despair of an address but not of the sending itself. Barely a shadow on the corner wall, my memory of you keeps vigil, ever so quietly and politely.
Nothing more surprising, then,for those hands to spark that shadow into life, like the dead in greek myths who are able to come to life in the underworld by eating this or that. Those hands entwined in strands of my hair re-found a whole world, lost and never lived. (Baudelaire is clearly evoked here, and his melancholy spleen haunts our new world, prevents it from becoming too vital, too greek, too complete).
The loss of that unexpected and yet familiar world is something I cannot yet bear, and so I must write it (write you) ceaselessly. I will write you always but send nothing, I promised. I'm writing to make up for ten years' time; not ten years in the future, where you have re-adjusted your gaze, but ten years in the past, where mine now lingers against my will. We will have outloved ourselves in some future, or did already in some past.
In 10 years' time, in this temporality that is now both its wholeness and a loose set of blobs and fragments, in that time (but what is that time?) I see us. Now (when?) you are sitting on a bench with a memory of me spread between your hands, like a book lying in your upturned palms. Your head is bent but your gaze is not downcast.
You are weaving so many threads that you will carefully undo every night, a penelope who weaves without waiting (because there is no awaiting the future that couldn't arrive). Your firm step guides you home in another direction.
Then (when?) I am writing long strings of seeking words at my computer late at night, in despair of an address but not of the sending itself. Barely a shadow on the corner wall, my memory of you keeps vigil, ever so quietly and politely.
Nothing more surprising, then,for those hands to spark that shadow into life, like the dead in greek myths who are able to come to life in the underworld by eating this or that. Those hands entwined in strands of my hair re-found a whole world, lost and never lived. (Baudelaire is clearly evoked here, and his melancholy spleen haunts our new world, prevents it from becoming too vital, too greek, too complete).
The loss of that unexpected and yet familiar world is something I cannot yet bear, and so I must write it (write you) ceaselessly. I will write you always but send nothing, I promised. I'm writing to make up for ten years' time; not ten years in the future, where you have re-adjusted your gaze, but ten years in the past, where mine now lingers against my will. We will have outloved ourselves in some future, or did already in some past.
