Immolant

Dear Aunt Amelia and Uncle Harold

You raised me to be open to new and different ideas, for which I am very grateful. I am mystified about how I should respond further to this person, if at all, and thought I would ask for your advice.

I have received the letters from a young woman I met at a party recently. She was attractive and exciting to be with, if a little overwhelming with excitement and enthusiasm. I have replied, as you can see, with, perhaps, diffidence and hesitance.

What do you think? Should I continue the acquaintance or not?

I know this is a curious thing for an adult to ask, but I would seriously like an independent view and am hesitant to ask my friends who would probably laugh uproariously and tell me to run like hell!

I have written a few words at the end of each of her letters with what I assume are simple translations of what I think she is trying to say. Also my letters back to her for context.

Love from

Gerrard

…….

Dear Gerrard

Words are a poor substitute for proximity. Like war is a poor substitute for intelligence.

Our reach into infinity is as poor as our grasp on kindness.

I dreamed of a better world and woke to this one. I dreamed of you and woke to silence. Our reach into happiness is as poor as your grasp on my tangled heart.

I am reading poetry and daring to imagine. I am reading Lermontov and daring to conjure the Caucusus among my passions, my mountains storms, my harvests of despair.

You are cold and my heaving breath gasps. I am sweating in the sauna of my urgency. I am angry in the confusion of your sullen rejection and my hope that dares, dreams, desires.

If you walk then you walk because I allow it. If you soar you soar because I dream it. If you dream, you fail to understand the dread that absorbs and surrounds me.

Reach out and pluck my immolant anxieties from the cherry blossom branches of springtime’s torpid shadows.

Jane

I enjoyed your company and now I am missing you.  

I am not sure if you liked me or not.

Did I just imagine you? Write soon.

Dear Jane

Look. We met at a party. I liked you. We got along fine. We kissed a couple of times. I may have come across a little reserved. You were very passionate. It was, to be honest, a bit like trying to breath under a waterfall.

I’m a straightforward kind of guy. I teach in the week, I watch football at the weekend, go out with mates. OK, I read good books, I listen to good music. Maybe those are your match-strikes? You certainly seemed to catch fire and burn.

I’d be happy to meet again, but I can’t work out if your letter is a product of an overworked imagination or of total craziness. Maybe you just feel the need to write and find it hard to control your imagination? Maybe you feel too much?

Prove to me I’m not going to wake up with a knife at my throat.

Regards

Gerrard

P.S. I wrote soon.

Dear Gerrard

Inside this looking glass that crumbles to dust before we glimpse our frail uncertainties, the galleons glide unceasingly, carrying the dust and gold of each minute of our personal empires of hope and ambition.

Other vessels ride by, some on storms, some on blessed calms, some sucked to the depths on uncaring vortices. Some heave to and hail, even exchange gifts.

Life’s a tempest, a clumsy beast that sloths and stalls its bulk. We are merely pleasantries exchanged by gods, so temporary are we, so insubstantial.

Heave to, heave to, your flag cracks in the stiff breeze, your planks well-rammed with oakum, your tars hornpiped, your capstan bent, sails taut.

So, so the crack of your smile, the cut of your jibe, the pace of your heartbeat, the rhythm of your lockstep. I walk beside you but am separated from you by dimensions of possible and hopeful.

There, there in the indolent dust is my speck of nothing, my glare of wanting. I am in the path on which you walk, the gravel you crunch, the passage you make not knowing what it is you pass.

Turn, turn and see the mist that is me, the drifting air that hints of mine, the dandelion pappus awaft upon sun-subsiding rays that carry the seed of me, the promise as yet unfulfilled.

Write again

Jane

It’s hard to grasp life sometimes.

Will you stop and see me?

Dear Jane

Ah, I see. This is some kind of game in which you wax poetic and I wonder how I am supposed to respond.

I can’t reply in kind. I am a simpler creature.

Life’s certitudes and possibilities rattle on the street outside and I await the aplomb to take advantage of whatever those noises might mean.

If you see what I mean.

Regards

Gerrard

Dear Gerrard

Ah, sweet boy, you grasp the galloping beast by the horns and are dashed into the trickling gutter of words from which we try, try and try to extract pearls.

Eager be the devotees, lustful the acolytes, praying in incoherence that their splatter of expressions might rise from the mud as jewels, delights, inspirations.

Be thee a writer, blessed child. Be thee a compositor of the new, the ribald, the grim, the faerie.

Trace the pen, explode the hot-metal typography, excavate the quill, deride the letter-cutter, Darius’s hired henchmen hammering Moumt Batistun. Cuneiform, hieroglyph, Linear A, Canaanite. Be thee the inheritor of these clumsy, unclear attempts at communicating with gods and tax collectors.

Hold my hand and calm me down, soothe the ragged beasts, the demons of hyperactive that demand I blurt out (excrete?) whatever arrives at my tongue/fingertips.

I will be calmer, I will be older, but eternity awaits and within this taunting press of hours I will be me and me is fully charged and ready to extravasate.

Jane

Forgive me – I just discovered the word extravasate and had to use it!

           Please write back to me.

           I have ADHD and need someone to help calm me down!

…..

Dear Gerrard

Run like hell – Harold xx

Marry her! – Amelia xx