I am a martyr. My blood twitching in my flesh, every bone, platelet and cell. I know my voice now. It is a claw. It will not let go of anything bright and illuminating. Anything that has a glare.
I understand the identity, the psychological framework of the depressed now. Let me explain it to you like this. Let me tell you of the bitter truths that I cannot escape from in my life. A man who is envious as other men who are envious of him. I am that man. I hate them just as they hate me. We may drink together but that is where the story ends. I am a latecomer. I must still learn the rules of engagement. I want to tell them that I am a fraud. I want to tell them that I am a phony but then I heard the laughter after A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I felt elated. They were laughing with me all the way. The throat is all that it is. Blue sky is found yonder. Blue sky is found in the throat.
Sometimes I am that blue sky. It swallows me whole. It swallows my mental faculties’ whole. Its melancholia. There is a certain kind of terror that I have of falling, of failure, of never being able to fall in love with the female protagonist in a play again or find a muse. I think it has much to do with the weather this time of year. Perhaps that is why I find it so difficult to write. The roads are muddy. My boots are muddy. All I can feel is despair and hardship. You are my asset. You are my flame. That is what I call my intellect. That is what I call you. A woman goes by many names by her beloved. Oh, I feel so hopeless now that I wish I were back in your arms. Your breath is like a sphere, an atmosphere, a God particle and it completes me. You are my infinite landscape. You are my infinite swell. I have the body of a man but the hands of a poet. Sensitive hands. I have the swagger of a man and the eyes of a hopeless romantic.
Except when people want entertainment then they know who I am. At this very moment, I am contemplating the entire life of thaw, loss with its gut symmetries, the psychological and physiological fissures of the female protagonists in my plays. I have found a name for my hero. I think I will call him Romeo. Romeo, Romeo where art thou Romeo. Everything inspires me. I took a walk today. I watched the current in the river, mud on my boots, my coat hardly keeping me warm (but I had to get out) and lost myself in the pleasure of looking at it. There was something almost lyrical about it. The waves beat to their own drum and I took this portrait with me to my room, sat down at my desk, and began to write in earnest about life, the fire, thinking of you, love. I try not to think about insanity too much because when it comes it comes in waves. Lest it cross the threshold, I will turn into a shroud.
Now we would not want that to happen. I am happy if you are happy dearest. If you are sad then I am sad. I try not to cry too much. One day the millennial couples will call it a long distance relationship. Writers have three identities. One is always in the past, the other the present and the identity that is the most ongoing is the one that is born in the future. That one paralyses you in your waking moments. You can dream about your past. Your subconscious has an ongoing hold over you on that. I am better than sane, love. I am ecstatic. I am elated that you love me and that I love you. I think about every woman who is exploited on the streets of London, another born into aristocracy becomes a socialite and is forever throwing parties for her friends. For every woman who has ice in her lungs, glaciers in her eyes there is another with warmth in her eyes.
For every woman who is unmarried at the age of thirty another is a wife and a mother. Does not every woman want a cottage with a garden? Does she not want to serve fish pie to her husband? Go on trips with her children to the sea. Honeymoon in Brighton. Then there is the woman who is an innocent fool. I do not know how many bright women there are in the world today. I only know that perhaps you are the last remaining one of your kind. Do men really want an educated wife? A woman who is more of an intellectual than he is? I know our friendship matters to you just as much as our love does. Try not to remember the sad things. Know this. That you were pursued. In case I have never said this before I write to educate people. It should be written on my tombstone. William Shakespeare wrote to educate people.
Your hair falls across your face and I brush it away carelessly but with love. Always with love because I am your beloved. When we first met we were strangers but are people who fall in love with each at first sight ever strangers, is there nothing familiar perhaps about the arch of your back, your hands, a young girl’s bones, place, pace, time, judgement because do not the two people in question who have fallen for each other judge each other. Without you, I am in the desert and behind the sounds of silence there, you will find my intellect and my psyche. Love fills me with terror. It blends in with the dark waters in the rivers of London where drowning visitors and cats with their kittens have met their fate. I know I have everything to lose if I lost you to children and death. Staring down at you from an immense height fills me with terror.
You continue with your work as if nothing has changed in the world. Fists, violence are undreamt up but not you. You are a bird that plummets before beating its wings magically and being elevated to glory. All I have is your ghost alongside me in London. Your language has a body and I must translate it, dismantle it, and reassemble it into almosts. Sometimes all I know of the world is agony. I am a friend from England. In autumn, my lungs can freeze to death in this box of a room I stomp my boots on the floor. Giving, living, hoping is like the morning light. It reserves judgement. I love you. There I said it. I love you. You are mine to behold and adore. I look at every line on your face with a desperate curiosity. You can call me sentimental. I call it anticipatory nostalgia. There I said it and now I can never take it back again.
