Delmarva

I was addicted to her... I know this now because i'm much more intimate with addiction than what i used to be, but it was a gorgeous feeling this addiction, somewhat like the first high of an opium addict, so soft and intense, it seemed as if every part of the universe was expanding and that universe was buried deep inside and every nerve was being overloaded with pleasure and lust and sensation, it was smiling with teeth bared and knowing it would come cascading down in the most glorious of flames... oh but while it was happening it was a fucking beautiful binge, an all out ball, like standing in Valhalla with the sun blaring down and waves crashing and her walking towards you and every cell on your body suddenly comes to attention and as she nears you can sense that she's right there with you and it's like an electrical storm, the room fucking charged, and the world could or could not exist it didn't matter, it was as if before time, nothing but chemicals, water and carbon and iron and it was a fucking beautiful thing to behold...

Years would go by... then one day a letter sent... Letters.  Good old-fashioned letters, pen put to paper, scribbled out on park benches or in quiet afternoons at the bar, sitting at the window of an apartment, didn't matter if we were miles apart or in the next room... those letters, practically from the day we met the fucking letters, i have no idea who wrote the first one, maybe me, i was supposed to be the writer but she was the artist, oozing passion and fire and serenity all at once, maybe it was her that wrote the first one, page upon page of letters, i remember it hurt to finish them, like coming down, i'd re-read it and re-read it, skip to my favorite bits, hit the mailbox like the junky looking for his dealer all in the hopes of a letter... and then there was the days of salt and sand and roaring surf, days where i'd come back to my rooming house and find one lying on the bed, on my trunk next to the stained and dirty mattress, knowing i'd read it and be waiting for her, her standing at work daydreaming about the look in my eyes as i scanned the lines, knowing that later she'd show up, the lights low in the old whorehouse i now called home, people talking and laughing and drinking and drugging and i'd be standing in the door of my sweltering, dimly lit room, shirtless in cut-off work pants, her in her navy blue skirt with the white flowers, a white T-shirt, making her way through the bodies, accepting a drink and grinning up at the silhouette standing up the stairs on the second floor... on finding out the place was a whorehouse a friend of mine said "if walls could talk" and by the time that summer was over i would look at those walls and hold up my finger, keep my secrets i'd whisper, they may be the most beautiful ones i'll ever have...

Now even years later i don't how to tackle it, it still seems molten, it still shifts and moves, she once told me of another letter she had written, it was written to another lover and in it she explained to him much better than i ever could the state of things and how the events of those months would shape her life, how the intensity of it would become the litmus test for every other relationship, knowing full well that something that burns that white hot was something to touch but no place to attempt to live, it would have been impossible to sustain and in doing so would have been the greatest tragedy of  all, because even once it was over it took on a life of it's own, mythologized into our beings and sown into the tapestry of our stories, as if we could not be where we are now if not for what happened then, that had it not happened things would have been completely different and had it lasted, had it out-lived itself by some cosmic accident that the magic and mystery of it would have all been lost...

And what sort of ramshackle narrative is this? what am i getting at? somewhere in here is the story, a major chapter in a minor play... and i intend to tell it, one of these days of course, every so often someone shows you the truth and in it you find your faults and heroics, in it you catch a glimpse of the soul... and here is a secret, a moment in time that i've never talked about, that moment when she left, it was not because it was over but somehow both of us knew it was, we couldn't stop time and the change of the seasons would move us, the winds shift us in different directions, and so i stood on her wooden porch and let her sob in my arms, her whole body shaking, my shirt soaked in her tears,  promises of letters and visits and lies...

And then it happened, she got in the car and drove away, the mere thought of not being able to touch her, to kiss her, to wake up next to her buckled my knees, i walked the six blocks home dazed, hat pulled low over my eyes, pulled low so no one could see the tears welling, pulled low because i couldn't look at the streets the same way without her, suddenly i was lost in my own barrio, it was now foreign and desolate, i wanted to wretch looking at the filthy streets that i once loved so much because without her there was nothing, ah yes to be young, to be sad, to be high as the song goes, i walked those streets and slowly climbed the wooden steps to the rooming house, the ex-whorehouse, i climbed those same steps trodden by so many johns and girls, except this time i could feel all the pain and loneliness, i unlocked my room and stepped in, i sat down on the bed and then i cried like a fucking baby, torrents of tears streaming down my face, i cried in silence as my shoulders heaved, back then it was the most painful thing in the universe, now it just seems beautiful... and until i typed this no one had ever known... not even her.