Quote

"I don't want to go to school, I just want to play with puppies!"

Creep

Dear man in 29D,
The moment is almost over
our plane has almost landed
but I still haven't stopped imagining
what might happen.
I want to lift this armrest up
and scoot nest to you
I want to touch your knee,
thigh, shoulder, chest.
Maybe caress your jaw,
neck, collar,
We could take off
our scarves, pretend
we know eachother,
only for this moment.
It's about to pass,
and that's a shame
because we will never meet
again.
prepare for landing
we've reached Houston

-Alice 29F

WHY AREN'T YOU WITH MEEEE?

(now commences my love letter to you Lady K) Darling I want to live!

Can we go to bars and concerts and art galleries and lounges? I want to sip on cranberry juice and wear glitter and I want to dress nice and have nice looking men buy me more cranberry juice!! I want to see their nice combed short hair and the crisp collared shirts. Ahhhhh and I want to link arms with you and walk down the sidewalks on our way to some glamorous party wearing pearls and red lipstick and all black dresses and tailored fur coats.

I want us to share a penthouse of some classic old building and throw roof parties where we invite all the other glamorous people we know. We'll have plush rugs and sparkling chandeliers, candlesticks and colorful vases on every surface. Fresh flowers and bowls of fruit decorate windowsills next to portraits on every wall. Pretty people framed in gold, bright images of other worlds.

I want to learn from you all about virtue and wisdom and truth. Distract me from my heartbreak and tell me stories from old literature and ancient legends. I want to smile every morning instead of crying, and I want to drink lattes all day and reapply lipstick every time it fades. I want to blush and glance at my lap when men's eyes linger to long on our laughing rosy faces. When we are happy we glow and shine, so can we just shimmer all the time? I'll twirl down the sidewalks and strangers can laugh all they want because I hardly care as long as you are entertained.

We can sketch in parks and finger paint when we forget brushes. I want to have a picnic every day of spring and pick flowers and braid them into our hair, perhaps magically they will stay long enough for us to capture pretty black and white photos, which we will blow up and cover an entire wall with! And above all I just want to live next to you happy and free in a city where we can just be natural and smiley. My friend, you already know my thoughts, so I'm sure this is no surprise, but I just want you to know, I love you!

-Lady S

image

As the distance between us digs deeper
I feel the remorse of an amputee

The Dude who forgot his coffee

He sat and typed

focused, unlike me,

on a little squashed

computer

He waited in line

pondered, then spent

4 bucks and a dime

worth every cent

cappuccino

now it sits and cools

foam bubbles pop

he searches office tools

listing numbers, stop

calculating

A sudden thought!

he looks up and coughs,

My coffee is hot!

he reaches and gingerly sips

Satisfaction

love?

The other day I was questioning something. Is love a constant process of hurting? Is it in the nature of love to feel torment? A favorite song of mine ends "Love's an excuse to get hurt, And to hurt, Do you like to hurt? I do, I do Then hurt me". It isn't until now that I am realizing how true that seems to be. No, I am not in an emotionally or physically abusive relationship, yet love seems to be my great delight and torment.

Rilke wrote a poem titled "Love Song" that seems to capture the delight and torment I now relate to love.

Love Song
How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweetest of songs.
Rainer Maria Rilke
New Poems: c. 1907

Rilke starts this poem with the imagery of two souls - two infinite beings- each holding him/her self so that they do not rest on the other and move beyond - lift up - to higher individual "other" things.

This self inflicted demand, he then follows by saying is counter to desire: "I would so very much like to tuck it away among long lost objects in the dark in some quiet unknown place, somewhere which remains motionless when your depths resound". His soul does not want to move beyond, it does not want to lift up gently above this other soul, it wants to find a home where it is not conscious of the movement of this other being. This is the torment of love. This is where the demand of love, to be loving (in the most radical and rarely understood sense of the term) and move above is necessary to stop the desire to pull away or break off and feel the release of the dark alone. This is torment.

Continuing in his work Rilke captures the great delight of love, the oneness which is felt by the harmonization of two separate strings which form together a united being. The infinite space between two lovers, the god-like being which is formed between the love of two people this is the sound, the chord that is played/created when is aroused.

At the base of all of this delight in the deepest fear of love, is the question of its absurdity. People in love play the "what if" game* to understand and embrace the absurdity of love, yet the question still exists. Why is it that these feeling exists, what is it that makes two people feel this way? Or, as Rilke worded it, "On which instrument are we strung? And which violinist holds us in the hand?"

In another of his poems (Phallic Poem VI) he continues this question:

To what are we near? To death, or that display

Which is not yet? For what would be clay to clay

Had not the god feelingly formed the figure

Which grows between us.

To answer the question of the absurd is to turn to, what for many, is the most extreme absurdity - a belief in God. Rilke was not a religious man, yet to understand how love exists pushed him to God.So yes, love hurts yet if we hold to love as what is best in us and makes us more than clay we can succeed in love.

*as in "what if I had not gone to this school" or "what if I had not gotten on that train" etc