K.S. ANTHONY: 2011

12 August 2011

Fragment (bar napkin writing)

The whisky tastes like raisins and bread pudding. The woman next to him--more girl than woman, really--watches from the corner of her eye, fascinated by the ritual with which he drinks.

He swirls the liquid around in the glass, idly, carelessly, thoughtlessly, and stares straight ahead.

She gets up and sits on the bar stool next to him, then turns toward him. He glances over, waiting for her to say something. She doesn't. They stare at each other for a moment. Her eyes are blue, her lips look dry.

Her phone rings and she touches the screen to silence it, not looking at it, not looking away from him. He looks down at his phone sitting on the bar. The screen is blank. He reaches for his drink. Her hand brushes his as she reaches for it, too.

He stops.

He turns away and leaves as she tries to kiss him, again staring straight ahead.

11 August 2011

Decaying Angel: Thoughts on Love

The golden-haired little God falls in decay, his wings lifeless, his tarnished bow clutched in a cold hand, his quiver empty and his arrows lost in flight.

The feathers fall out one by one until there's nothing left but yellowed bone and strands of skin where once were wings.

They fall out because you stop talking, not because you argue or because you disagree, or because he leaves the cap off the toothpaste or the seat up, or because she forgets to fill the tank when she takes the car. Those things, the manuals will tell you, start off as minor irritations and blossom into major ones, but that is not why death comes to brush cold lead over Eros' arrows and breathe ice into your hearts. No love ever died because of hair in the sink or someone forgetting to buy butter.

The feathers on those golden wings fall out when you forget: when you forget what it was like to long for her, when you forget what it was like to want to impress her; when you forget that you used to become your better self for and because of her. They fall out when you forget that no other man ever made you feel safe before he did, when you forget that you used to feel butterflies when you saw him; when you forget to call him at work to tell him you love him and when he forgets that a meeting or a project can wait a few minutes so that he can stop, listen, and tell you that he loves you too.

Love never dies in fires or by drowning. Love dies of starvation and neglect. The feathers fall out one by one and at first you notice and then you don't and then, when those wings cease to beat, you ask why.

A pair of rings does not guarantee anything but a smile from the jeweler who sells them. They should, I think, be more like Eros' arrows. They should pierce the flesh, draw blood, cause aching and longing and pour fire into the blood. We would not forget then.

But rings are just rings. They do not nurture. They do not protect. They do not guard against fickleness and idle hours and temptation. They do not negate the questions of "what if my life had been different" or the malignant regret in the false promise of "if only I had..." They do not stand between anything and they are not as sharp as arrows.

When feathers from Love's wings fall, they fall upon beds of broken oaths and wedding rings. They scatter over love letters that should have been written and angry words that should have been left unsaid.

Love dies in indifference.

Do not forget what you feel now. Learn longing and sear its agony into a scar that will never heal. Never let the wound close around the arrow. Carry desire with you always. Love should be the stone of Sisyphus: every day, force it to the heights and every day, start anew. Let it be a bittersweet agony, an enduring pain.

When the sound of wings grows distant, twist the arrow in your heart until it sounds like thunder.

14 March 2011

Scriptio Divina: the sacredness of mail

I just got back from checking the mail. Aside from some government census humbug and a DVD copy of Julie and Julia from Netflix, I also got the very rarest of pleasures: actual correspondence from friends, thus proving their high and noble birth beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt: not that I thought otherwise.

Letters and postcards from friends are even better than finding your family in Debrett's, which, face it, would be pretty cool. Letters and postcards from female friends are even better than finding anything in Debrett's because of the wonderful nature of feminine handwriting and the fact that I am, and have always been, a sucker for women.

Email is nice, but it is not magical. It's purely practical. It lacks any type of aesthetic; in fact email is entirely anaesthetic. It is numbing, dulling, and not terribly interesting to look at. Email is downright oppressive when it becomes convoluted with text-speak: when you become "u" and when your correspondent begins tearing apart what little is left of the language for the sake of efficiency. Email relays information. Letters relay much more.

Consider this:

When you write a letter, you invest it with something. Whether you know it or not, the practice of putting pen to paper has an elemental quality to it. You are writing with some of the oldest things known to our species. No, you didn't have to grind woodpulp and roll it into sheets and make ink from saliva and ashes from the fire, but the tools haven't changed very much. You use your hands to craft letters, using some of the very first mechanical skills you ever learned. Consider that the first act of creation for a child is usually drawing. There was no line on the wall...but, like Harold, you picked up the purple crayon and you created a line. All of that is now at play when you write a letter. Thousands of years of history and memory come together whenever you write something in ink on paper.

That's not all. There's also the question of word choice and the thoughts that preceded the actual writing of the letter. Anyone can simply type an email. Most people now spend more time in front of their computers than they do watching television. You're typing anyway: might as well tap out a quick email to so-and-so while you're googling cheeses of the world and listening to the soundtrack from last week's Gossip Girl.

You cannot multi-task and write a letter. To write a letter or a note, you have to pick up a pen and paper, sit down, and write. Emails can be unconscious. Letters can only be conscious. They require patience and effort.

I've gotten thousands of emails this year. I do not remember any of them. I can, however, remember lines from letters that I got twenty years ago. I feel a piece of paper that is almost as old as I am and remember what it was like to read it for the first time. I still have letters dating back twenty or more years; letters that the writers have undoubtedly forgotten but that I have carefully kept through dozens of moves. I remember the handwriting of friends who have died and there is something of them even in the thought of the strange word-touch that letters evoke in us.

I keep old letters because they represent a moment in time when someone thought of me, then sitting still and thinking of me, reached for a pen and a piece of paper and poured those thoughts into and onto something tangible; something tactile. After that, they folded up that piece of paper with those frozen thoughts--both written and unwritten, for there is always text and subtext--and placed it in an envelope. They wrote out the letters of my name and address on the envelope, put a stamp on it, and put it in a mailbox. Did they think of me as the letter made its way to my hands? I have always thought of those to whom I have written. I have always wondered if they thought of me as I thought of them; if somehow they could feel me writing to them. From the mailbox, the letter passed through cities and zip codes and arrived wherever I was. I opened it and, like magic, that moment unfroze and crystallized in my hands. You never read a letter just once. You read it a couple times when you get it. Then you may read it a few more times later. If you keep it, you may read it whenever you need some reassurance that you are worth thinking of. Letters can be our beacons when we feel tossed and turned in the storms of our lives, searching for a safe harbor. Don't let anyone tell you to extinguish those lights.

The ink never really dries on a letter. Those moments are always there, waiting to be reopened, waiting to be re-read.

So pick up a pen and write to whoever you are thinking of. They may need it later.

12 March 2011

Season

Did his eyes shine or were they deep, dark, full of mystery and newness? Did he say all the right things? The things you thought when you were alone; when you were fully yourself? Make you laugh when you least expected to? Of course. Of course.

Rest assured that your eyes shone too. And that he went to bed at night thinking of you; that in the pink light of morning, he reached for his phone to see if he had missed a call from you. And when he saw that he hadn't, he missed you twice as much. Rest assured he missed you, misses you now; will miss you.

Did it end before it began? Find that it was anchored by the worst that world offers: time, distance, money, dissent, fear, anxiety, distrust, betrayal, confusion, pain, weakness, and the whisper of the word impossible? Did you watch him leave before you knew what it felt like to watch him walk into a room, charm a party, grin and nod, play a role, and look at you with a knowing smile because you were the only one there that mattered to him?

Rest assured that anchors don't sink ships. An anchor is a pause for breath. They can be pulled up. The wind will snap the canvas into tight billows. The sails will swell. Steer towards the sun. If you mattered then, you matter now. Some things do not end. If they are true, they stay true. You do not run across those shores often.

Love is perennial. It does not have a season.