What she wrote:
Dearest,
Once there was a boy who loved a boy who did not love him back. Once there was a girl who loved a boy who loved a boy. Once there was a girl who loved a boy who loved her back. Mostly.
If love is light and food is light and life is light, are we always in day? Are we doomed to never sleep?
Ever yours,
Angela
Dear John,
I dream of your hands. I dream of fingers as they play along, across, and in. I dream how a moan becomes song and song becomes art and art becomes light. Your light enters me and I shine forever.
Ever yours,
Angela
Dear John,
Light
Art
Light
Song
Light
Light
Light
Do you understand me?
Ever yours—
Dear John,
adooropensawomanlovesalifeblendsintolightandlightandlight
ever yours
ever
ever
What she did not:
There are three things that seem important to her now:
First, light. Light is useful. Particularly when one has no form, but still has substance. Light is a vehicle, though unreliable, particularly given the climate.
Second, the body. Despite its fading, and dissolution into light, she still feels the opening of the mouth, the electric nerves of the fingertips, the hungry scoop between her thighs.
Third, doors. There are doors that remain impenetrable, doors that yield to the gentle insistence of her will, doors that lead her from place to place. There is a door that she needs to find. But what or where it is, and of what use, this is a mystery.
She slides through space and time. The moments of her life unfurl before her, an elegant geometry of angles and arcs and perfect reasoning. She sees a boy who showed her how to see ghosts—which is to say death—which is to say art—which is to say infinity. She sees another boy with pale skin and a red mouth, coughing blood into a napkin. She sees the red-mouthed boy floating away on harmonics and dissonance and brutal love. She sees another—her other—dissembling, dissolving, despairing daily.
She is formless substance. She is light. She is song. She is the art behind art—which is to say, infinite. As formless substance, she sees her other kneeling in the doorway. As light she pours through the door. As song she slides what used to be her fingertips into the secret grooves of his throat. She plucks out melody and harmony—line, phrase, dissonance, and counterpoint. As art she lands upon his open mouth. She lays her mouth upon his mouth, space and negative space. He tastes of lilac and lavender, oil and smoke. He sings of bent metal and burning wood and beautiful soldiers and poisoned waters and multitudes of airships hurling themselves against the geodesic sky. He sings of a war that seems as though it will never end. He sings of lost love, lost art, lost music, lost nations, lost women, and lost men.
He sings her name. He never, ever stops.
A young girl loved a poet. Loved him. She loved the graphite stains on his fingers, the thick cowlick that covered his left eye, the hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his open mouth. She loved the way he pressed himself against her in the dark and scratched poems into the soft skin of her long, bare back.
“Don’t date poets,” her mother said. “More trouble than they’re worth. Open them up and there’s nothing more than a wad of torn-up paper at the heart.”
To the poet she said, “Why settle down yet? You’re young; she’s young. A broken heart will burn you alive. You hear me?”
But the girl didn’t listen and the boy didn’t care. The girl came home with sonnets scribbled on her arms, first draft villanelles veining their way up her lilied thighs. At night her mother heard the off-pitch wail of love songs through an open window, a bed creaking to lines that did not scan.
But he was a poet, so his fate was sealed: seventeen; cigarette spewing ash into his eyes; a launch of metal; gasoline blooming like roses at the side of the road. A screaming boy, flung into the darkening sky.
He left her his poems. He had already promised that he would, and so the girl was waiting by the window. Expecting. Boxes arrived filled with smudged notebooks, stacks of torn paper, inked sections of box tops, envelopes marred by off-kilter metaphors and mostly apt allusions.
“We don’t want them,” her mother said when the truck arrived. But the girl insisted, and men delivered the poems into her room, leaving her mother grumbling downstairs. The poems lined the walls and blocked the window light; they assembled into chairs and chaises, into curtains hanging from the walls, lamps hanging from the ceiling.
“Well,” her mother said. “I hope you’re happy.”
And the girl was. At first. She slept on a bed of poetry, felt the click and beat of internal rhythms moving up her legs as she slept, the slick of rhyme in her mouth each time she inhaled. She let the color of his words rest against her eyes as she dreamed and dreamed. Each night she saw a boy made of paper—scribbled eyes, a lettered mouth. She saw a body that formed and unformed as the wind blew, and a mind that insisted on revising itself—words written and unwritten, arranged and scattered, a poem that would never be finished. And somewhere inside that paper boy, a flesh heart quivered, and swelled, and pumped, and beat, beat, beat, beat.
She woke each morning stained with graphite and cut by paper. She stopped eating. Love satisfied her. She stopped wearing shoes. Handwritten letters cushioned the space between her soft toes and the hard ground. She wore a dress made from notebook paper. Stanzas bound her hair. Her mother shook her head. Worried.
“It isn’t right,” her mother said as the girl drifted to the breakfast table, followed by a flurry of unbound papers. “Girl your age shouldn’t be tied down.” The poems shivered in horror, but the girl gathered them in her arms, curled her pink lips, and crooned
