-- Can't stop thinking about you. Staring at a photo I took sometime in bleary AM.
Accidental art. The beauty of your midriff, belly button ring just visible, your sexy olive texture fills my mind like heady naptha -- even as I type this. I feel a warmth spread across my body...nay a heat. Stirring-- and I'm so high on you right now I'm terrified of looking down -- fear of falling, fear of failure...head over heels, arse backwards, dumbstruck obsessed drunk on you so that I'm swimming in it -- I'm gonna need a bigger boat. Truck calls, no cars go, no cars go.
I just had a long conversation with an old friend where he recounted the week Max died. Pretty much blow by blow, day by day until the evening the police asked him to come over to Max's apartment in Thornbury and identify his body. It was like re-watching one of your favourite films, albeit one where the hero or heroes don't make it, and you know how the story ends but still you cling onto the edge of your seat in some surreal anticipation that maybe this time it will end differently. And of course the inevitable conclusion of such irrational fantasies a few moments later when it doesn’t.
I sat reliving this terrible and sad story, and I kept thinking about you and how I’ve been living my life the last couple of years and how although meeting you has been a singular joy it has come at the heels of a long dark tea time. An empty bed and pressed into the spot where you might sleep forever, of pain and sadness and I feel I've dragged some of that chaos and mania into your life. Running around like a pair of teenagers drinking and carrying-on -- things I wouldn’t change frankly-- funny old life because I’ve been slamming my body and yet I feel the happiest and most healed I’ve felt in years -- so I'm thinking of you and it occurs to me that Richie sitting out the back with me in the freezing cold recounting the story of the death of one of our oldest friends, as we shivered through the tale was like the universe giving me a heads-up...My old friend Rich being the likely candidate in this situation if in some cosmic way Max was trying to tell me something and in my mind I ran with the celestial messenger idea and felt, much in the same way that one might feel if they were hearing sacred words from a shaman, that I was hearing a message and it was simple: Take care of yourself and embrace all the love and life you can.
You see for me having a lover is just about the richest most enjoyable thing in life. I suppose this must be true for many people. Whatever external success I might enjoy in the future I am reasonably sure that none of it would feel as rewarding to me as being in love with another being and feeling that love flow back. Especially in the context of having spent a couple of years wondering if I'd ever know passion in my heart again. .
All a very ponderous and longwinded way of getting to here so that I can say to you: Whatever time we have together, for however long, no matter where this story ends I want to try and be the best person that I can be. For me...but also inevitably...for you.
--For in the long line at lunch in the internal hall that seems to stretch out to the horizon we see a milleu of faces but never know the places that they're from and like a song sung in braille it doesnt quite translate -- I'd like to walk along the beach pitching cold stones into the sea if all it took was eternity to find a warm one and throw it free.
Apologies: Kaino Gardner ;-)
