LOVE LETTER: BEING IN LOVE ***

There is an extravagant exultation in being in love, living always at the extremes of emotion. The problem—which is never evident to the victim—is that this exultant state induces mental tunnel vision. My religion is well known to those who know me. I believe in bodies, arms entangling and untangling. I believe, and I know it to be so, that there are so many curves and hollows in a single body that none of us can come to know them all within a single lifetime. I believe in one to one and one on one. No wine or magic, no hand-me-down Bible can improve on that. I believe in spring, but only if I’m rolled up in a pillow or holding some well-loved face in my hands... More often I’m a spectator, meaning I’ve no reason to believe in anything save what I see. But I do. All these words are just a front. What I would really like to do is chain you to my body, then sing for days and days and days. I loved her body and I could never have enough of regarding it as a world in which I could wander and wander without fear. There was no engine on earth whose power compared with the want of one body for another. Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name. I love one woman, I love her while awake; while sleeping; living; dead; love her. And if I can’t have her then God doesn’t exist, As long as we are sitting here together we have everything. …then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down…and kissed her. And the world cracked open. A mouth that is kissed loses no flavor, but, like the moon, is renewed. As the adjective is lost in the sentence, so I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—you have enchanted me with a single kiss which can never be undone until the destruction of language. – I don’t just want your heart I want your flesh, your skin and blood and bones, your voice, your thoughts your pulse and most of all your fingerprints, everywhere. Half-sleeping, my body pulls toward yours— desire a long oar dipping again and again in this night’s dark rain. ” You and I Have so much love, That it Burns like a fire, In which we bake a lump of clay Molded into a figure of you And a figure of me. Then we take both of them, And break them into pieces, And mix the pieces with water, And mold again a figure of you, And a figure of me. I am in your clay. You are in my clay. In life we share a single quilt. In death we will share one coffin. We leave the bed where your fingers are a wide surprise, where your tongue tells me slow stories. I watch you, in the daylight, bring your hand to your face, to your mouth. I tuck pieces of myself behind in the tangle of our bodies.How is it that our two bodies made only of flesh and bone ignite with this fire yet do not burn? A million light years and a million more would not give time enough to store that small second of eternity when I took you in my arms and you took me in yours.You, my own deep soul, trust me. I will not betray you. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. I want what I love to continue to live, so that you can reach everything my love directs you to, so that my shadow can travel along in your hair, so that everything can learn the reason for my song. My body was a lovely bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast. You began to be irreplaceable for me long before I had ever heard of you. You’re closer to me than my skin—that’s how much you’re a part of me. – I loved you once. D’you hear a small “I love you” Each time we’re forced to meet? Don’t groan, don’t hide! A damaged tree can live without a bud: No one need break the branches and uncover The green that should have danced, dying inside. I loved you, knowing I’d never be your lover. And now? I wish you summers of leaf-shine And leaf-shade, and a face in dreams above you, As tender and innocent as mine. Sex is momentary, and sex is transcendent. That’s the paradox. The most intense physical sharing we experience with another person is gone in a matter of minutes. And yet, it connects us with a larger energy, a life force. Real, authentic intimacy leaves behind an inner glow that warms every aspect of our lives. Sex reminds us of our limitations and our expansiveness as humans. We are alone, and we are together. In my hands your body is a hymnal open to the familiar page of praise. I sing you in the ancient rhythm that brought us all here to make what we will of this world, I sing you in tongues and in silent awe of our loving, certain only of imminent separation. And you will always be with me.I shall never cease to be filled with newness,Having you near me. in the mirror in front of me my hands on you your hands reach back as we stand dripping slippery and delicious our tongues and we begin again the long slow dance we have perfected like pilgrims returning home again to the promised land. 2 And suddenly, again, I want the long road of your thigh under my hand, your well-travelled thigh, your salt-slicked & come-slicked thigh, and I want the taste of you, slaking, under my tongue (that place of riding desire, my tongue) and I want all the unnameable, soft, and yielding places, belly & neck & the place wings would rise from if we were angels, and we are, and I want the rising regions of you shoulder & cock & tongue & breathing & suddenness of you opening all fontanel, all desire, the whole thing beginning for the first time again, the first, until I wonder then how is it we even know which part we are, even know the ground that lifts us, raucous, out of ourselves, as the rising sound of a summer dawn when all of it joins in. 3 Your body is a new country, hidden landscape in cotton and chambray that I want to travel with every vehicle I own: hands, tongue, slide of silk. Below, in the heat and rush of wet, we’re learning again how summer moves through the deep canyons, stirring grasses and honeying fruit. The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.In love there are two things: bodies and words. Desire is relentless. No matter what science says, it appears not to need our digits, or our gonads, to persist. What does this say about sex? That it is so much more than the hormones which sustain it? That, like life, sex has a soul beyond the body in which it’s housed? That, like God, it is invisible, indefinable? Should we pray to sex? Can we be saved by sex? One thing’s for sure, you cannot kill sex. Carve out the clitoris, cut off the testicles, bind the feet until they are putrid with pain, and still the urge keeps coming, we keep coming; alive.Desire confounds us, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist, pantheist, agnostic…desire confounds us. Our vocabulary of the erotic spirit is often impoverished Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much love or two little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It’s like your sunlight and water—the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish. it. …I don’t believe that in order to be interesting or meaningful, a relationship has to work out—in fiction or in real life. In fact, I consider a forced happy ending in a book almost as bad as a real couple who get married even though their friends know they shouldn’t. … Now, believe me, I love swelling music and kisses at sunset as much as the next woman; when I was growing up, my family crowded around the TV to watch The Love Boat. But as I’ve gotten older, I realized that when it comes to love, it’s the journey that matters as much as the destination. And the messiness is part of what makes romance so fascinating in the first place. Movies and books lead us to believe that if a relationship doesn’t end in marriage, it didn’t count, but that’s absurd. Even unrequited crushes can provide hard-won insights into ourselves and our lives. I have come to be fascinated with the messiness of desire, of mitigating circumstances; with the ways people fit themselves together, take themselves apart for each other, for want of each other, of some parts of each other, be it companionship, be it great sex, be it brilliant insight or common sense. Whether you’ve been in a relationship for ten years or ten weeks, you know how crazy love can make you. On any given day you’re insanely happy, maniacally miserable, kooky with contentment, or bonkers with boredom—and that’s in a good relationship. Why do you think we call it being “madly” in love? You have to be a little nuts to commit yourself, body and soul, to one other person—one wonderful, goofy, fallible person—in the hope that happily-ever-after really does exist. And yet we can’t help ourselves. We throw ourselves into love time and again, even though we know real-life love is no fairy tale. We trade in our sexy glass slippers for soccer-mom sneakers, or pretend we didn’t hear (or smell) that gastric emission Prince Charming made in his sleep. We stress out and make up and do it all over again—and why? Because nothing makes us feel more alive than the exhilaration and exasperation of everyday love. When we’re deep into the ecstasy of love, no closeness is close enough; we can’t bear to think that our partner could survive without us. Real love can whirl you from the glory of ecstasy from the hell of misery and back again, but that’s just how it goes in real life, and aren’t we lucky to be part of that dance? We touch Heaven as we lay our hand on a human body. I know where you are with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other with huge invisible threads, our sexes muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole body a sex—surely this is the most blessed time of my life...I long for her most during these long moonless nights. I lie awake, hot, the growing fires of passion bursting, blazing in my heart. …and now my heart melts like wax embraced by flame. Oh, I know, I know. She is dark. And so’s the coal before the spark that makes it burn like roses. Think how unspeakably sweet the taste of snow at midsummer, how sweet a kind spring breeze after the gales of winter. But as we all discover, nothing’s quite as sweet as one large cloak wrapped around two lovers. The strongest, surest way to the soul is through the flesh. I gave my life to you as soon as I saw you.I have a thousand images of you in an hour; all different and all coming back to the same…And we love. And we’ve got the most amazing secrets and understandings. whom I love, who is so beautiful and wonderful. I think of you eating omelette on the ground. I think of you once against a skyline: and on the hill that Sunday morning. And that night was wonderfullest of all. The light and shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. You are so beautiful and wonderful that I daren’t write to you…And kinder than God. Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice—you. Now in the quiet of the evening and in the warmth of the bed a drugged and dreamy feeling steals over me and I am with you once more. Lying here I love to think you near me, your arms encompassing me, my head buried in your shoulder, catching the rhythm of your breathing and living for a few exquisite moments as one being—I said I was dreaming, darling, but I am so delightfully intoxicated, relishing such heavenly moments with you that I wish it to go on forever. When you’re young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it’s barely the beginning. To lie with you under a ceiling bright with shifting water shadows—that’s good. To drowse in flower-scented darkness—that’s good. But best of all is rain—drumming, roaring, gushing from the guttering—and we two warm and dry and safe together, in each other’s arms. –In those first minutes before light starts making sense we uncurl and kiss...snowflake on your tongue my tongue on your burning thigh your thigh: a sweetness fleeting, frail, formless: love is nothing more than breath in late December in hindsight, starvation is the closest approximation to love.I would kiss your nub of collarbone and trail my lips down your salt- solid spine, tracing the words “all my days remaining” in the hallow of your back. And before morning, we could ignite a fire greater than any planets’ suns.What are words but a means of conjuring up flesh? It is your fingers I want, not words; your fingers tangled in my matted hair, your tongue trailing across my heart, the damp nape of your neck resting against my shoulder. But words are sustenance in times of hunger... This chaos is as maddening and gentle as the moths that thump against porch lights on summer evenings and all I want, sweet lady, is a moment of respite, a moment when I can remember that sometimes joy is nothing more than a fleeting stillness,an interlude from longing. And there lay the lovers, lip-locked, delirious, infinitely thirsting, each wanting to go completely inside the other, each filled to bursting with their love.they grope and they fondle, lips devouring lips, twisting like vines. And she who is mine trundles off to bed, thrice blessed. She is mine in secret only—we burn in separate beds. Nothing is more practical than…falling in love in an quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. Sex has a way of softening limbs, oiling joints and melding hearts.We burrow in closer wrapping arms and legs over and under each other. Earthy blanket of sleep covers us two bodies releasing one breath.Finding home,coiled and tucked in each other’s sweat. but who you are connecting with who I am making me tremble like a stroked violin the pulled bow teasing, pleading until the moving music wafts from us vibrato vibrato pizzicato dolce dolce dolce. And if I can’t speak about my love— if I don’t talk about your hair, your lips, your eyes, still your face that I keep within my heart, the sound of your voice that I keep within my mind, the days of September rising in my dreams, give shape and colour to my words, my sentences, whatever theme I touch, whatever thought I utter. So you know I always have a fancy at such times that our love makes us somehow alone together in the world. We seem to have a deep life together apart from all other people on earth, and which we cannot show, explain, or impart to them. At least my affection seems to isolate me in the deepest moments from all others, and it makes me speak with my whole heart and soul to you and you only. And perhaps this isolation is one reason why deep love makes one feel—at least in some moments—so religious. …you can’t come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame, and if, wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, and if, when you hold me, and I don’t speak, it’s because all the words in me seem to have become throbbing pulses… Secretly we both think we were bred for each other as part of an experiment in getting dreams made flesh and then having to feed on the daily bread of passion. So we die and die with loving and go on living.Sex and beauty are inseparable… You touch me I hear the sound of mandolins You kiss me with your kiss my life begins. I’ve never really dated. That’s not the way you find somebody. Anyway, I’m not trying to find somebody. I trust that if I’m meant to be in a relationship, that person will come into my life. A meeting between two people who complete each other, who are made for each other, borders already, in my opinion, on a miracle. From every human being there rises a light that reaches straight to heaven. And when two souls that are destined to be together find each other, their streams of light flow together and a single brighter light goes forth from their united being.I cannot breathe without you. My need for you is near addiction. – I let you sleep because I love to watch you all disheveled and unwound dressed up in your undress like a careless animal your hair uncovered unmanned by no one but me. Forgive me if I love you while you sleep. I forgive you for not knowing. Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes in the twinkling of an eye, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delights of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed. I shall love you until I die. Having tasted all the pleasures of our separate lives, let us enjoy the happiness of discovering that none of them is comparable to that which we once experienced together, and shall again—to find it more delicious than before. Our love is like the misty rain that falls softly, but floods the river. Your love is comfort in sadness, quietness in tumult, rest in weariness, hope in despair. And this eternal longing can turn a heart to dust. Everything’s uncertain. Except that my soul is burning. When I think of you, fireflies in the marsh rise like the soul’s jewels, lost to eternal longing, abandoning my body.As we were sitting together, suddenly there came into her eyes a look that I had never seen there before. My lips moved towards hers. We kissed each other. I can’t describe to you what I felt at that moment. It seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect moment of rose-colored joy