Love letters to my FB friends #19

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love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear J. (who would probably never friend me on FB, but still…),

Even a love letter can intrude. He taught it to me, he’ll teach it to you. This letter of mine knocks lightly its lacy feet at the driftwood door of a house I can’t believe is still standing, sheaves itself into the cracks I remember, put there, filled even then with missives. I imagine you sipping coffee on the porch like I used to, dawn an out breath you didn’t know you were holding. Last week when he had you drop my son off, we shook shaking hands. I saw the bruise on your leg, I guess I should say, and I won’t ignore it like your neighbors ignored me, but I won’t pretend to know how you feel, either. That you could tell me. A crush of anger clawing up your throat? Or are you stunned mute and distrustful of me? (Who wouldn’t be? He is no writer.) This little flare means well, I swear—it’s no fight, all flight. It says, run. It says, please don’t feed my son seeded berries. Mostly it says wait, I remember, don’t run, it’s worse when you run, and does he kick your puppy, too? I don’t mean to push or shame or savior complex, but my boy watches more than cartoons the few days he’s with you. I want him safe, I want you safe, and your daughters, too, and there’s no map but I have stories, volumes to read to you. The books are shadow, leather, portal, mother, shotgun. They are phone call. They are my scrawled phone number pressed between the cars between my palm and yours, unlikely high five but this shit is bigger than both of us. They are here take it while he’s not looking. They are put it in your phone under an alias. They are use it. They are use it if when you need it and I will answer.

xo S

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Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #18

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amwriting, love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear S.,

Our business is love letters. We write them sad as butterflies who only see flowers in photographs, forget-me-nots and widow’s tears. We write them with the stoic immutable hope of the orb-weaver gliding back and forth across a high-traffic threshold. We write them joyful as krill when the whale beached itself. We write them with animal imagery because we forget who we’re writing to, or I do, when my dog licks my hand and I think every being is kind, and it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since I’ve been bitten. We write them to invent kindness, or reinvent summer breezes. We write them as whispers into microphones and startle at feedback. We write them as plugs in the wall and try not to stick our fingers in. We write them with the rage dialed back to simmer so we don’t burn the words we’ll eat later through feeding tubes, because once upon a time we let the rage boil over, but watched foam and froth fizzle like July 5. We write them belatedly. We write them beckoningly. We write them to discover new colors, crystals, planets, perhaps with watered down gravity and low rent. We write them without knowing why, or we write them to find out why–why, why, mama? says my almost-four-year-old when we make letters in chalk and he likes the B better than his J and I think, of course he’s mine but how? We write them so we don’t forget how to write. We write them so we don’t forget. We write them just so. We write them to yes and to no, to nothings we dreamed as everythings. Or maybe none of this is true, maybe we are the dreams, trying to mean.

xo S.

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #17

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amwriting, love letters, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear J.,

I wish someone would explain to me how I can feel close to and protective of a person I’ve never met. I won’t ask you to explain it because you’re seeking your own phantom explanations for the world’s wrongs and ills. How are you feeling today? would be such a bullshit question, no? I won’t ask it. When I think about you, I think about poems and electricity. I think about how you messaged me daily while my microscopic early son was tied to machines, how you lent me strength, unsolicited, and never asked for it back. How does someone do that for a stranger? How does someone recognize a kindred among strangers? I’m (re)learning these things after a spell of being a stranger to myself, my bruises in all the dirty mirrors, my weird flat stomach an hour after giving birth. Here’s what I think: that at a time when I couldn’t even work a breast pump, you plugged your own heart right into his incubator, from thousands of miles away, a generator during my power outage. Heartbeats and blood, and the machines that read them; humanity is too much. Real talk: your kindnesses still reside in one of my son’s dimples, in the ring finger I use to hit PERIOD when I write I love your heart. I wish I could reciprocate with the explanations you need. I wish that people who look like me in mirrors were better. That’s three wishes and I’m out now, so I accept that anyone can be a non-stranger, that people are kind, that I can let them in again, that the absence of a formal handshake is not the absence of blood. Love letters are lessons in blood-letting. Be well, my friend, and re-charge.

xo S.

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

 

Love letters to my FB friends #16

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amwriting, love letters, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear A.,

It’s criminal we can’t talk war criminals, Neruda, and tattoos while sipping sangria on your porch. I say your porch because I need to get out more. When I was a kid I thought Florida was an island because I couldn’t say peninsula and because my aunt and uncle lived there and I wanted to visit an island. Now I have island friends, instead. I’m going to compare my whole world to the Atlantic Ocean now, and I’m trying to get to each of you before the makos smell the blood I can’t stop loving into the surf. Mostly we share poetry and motherhood—poetry and motherhood, poetry and motherhood, is there anything else?—but I remember sitting with you in a lecture hall crying about a reelection that never should have happened. We thought we had it bad then, huh? Of course we did, but I guess what I mean is, we thought it couldn’t get worse. It’s worse. Can I call you? Would you read to me over the phone? Can iambs move underwater? Can women? We’ll probably find out soon enough. Maybe the best thing I could do for you is to build you a flood shelter to preserve your art. A poet hug, then you bike away and I’ll wrap your paintings in your poems, roll up copies of your book and slide them into my empty liquor bottles, and wear all your jewelry at once, sit in the central Floridian dark stock-still like an island and dare the flood waters to try.

xo S.

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #15

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amwriting, domestic violence, love letter, Love letters to my FB friends, writing about abuse

Dear K.,

I’m writing to you from a future that hopefully exists and in which we know each other only as writing moms, not survivors of men who hated and hit us. There is a beach with sand that comes right off our pedicured feet, and crisp Chardonnay in bottomless, shatterproof crystal. Our sons are playing in the surf, taking turns begging us to look, and we do because the books are finished and sold well and there are no court dates or panic attacks or victim-blamey Facebook threads to police, hell, even the sharks and jellyfish smile at us. Yes, you are beside me in a teak Adirondack chair, but I write anyway because it’s my fantasy and I wish to close the distance but not give up the pen. We don’t ask each other if we slept well because we did. We don’t have to wear sunscreen but we lather it on the boys because it’s the most beautifully normal thing to do and because they kiss and splash us when we call them up—but not to go, because we never have to drop them off anywhere. You tell me about your trips; I tell you about a new risotto. We read aloud, Instagram our boys landscaping the beach with their bodies because there is finally no metaphor for systemic misogyny here. We are able to see the shells on the beach as pendants or paperweights, not allegories for abandoned homes. We are blissfully unaware that we made this water and everything in it—someone else dug these chasms, someone else filled them with salt and pain, gave them a tide. We put up our pink toes and take only the sun on our faces.

xo S.

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #14

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amwriting, love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear A.,

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed poetry written by a man. Those were some of my first words to you, and they hold true a decade later. You read to an Austin crowd and I tracked you down online to say that. I remember wondering what you chewed on in the Texas heat—burritos, barbecue, the sour taste of straight white males acting like they owned the damn place? I accidentally ate chorizo in a quesadilla I thought only had beans, and I cried outside a panel after an octogenarian said no one under 30 writes anything worth reading. I lost my friends at a rodeo bar and sat with your first book so close to my face that your ars poetica became my own. No, that’s not fair. Your struggles are yours. Still, our common blue ground is that we’ve waited our whole lives for them to miss us, and it doesn’t much matter who them is, does it? I’m not a misandrist, and I’m betting you don’t hate breeders; we just long to be longed for by anyone not in charge. When you wrote me back—you wrote me back!—and said you understood my comment, that you didn’t enjoy much male-authored poetry either, I felt my blood pumping night-sky-blue and safe in my veins. Ten years between my love letters to you, more books and more reasons to resist the rulers, but the message is the same. I still wonder what you eat. I still devour your words.

Xo S.

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #13

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amwriting, love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear B.,

Mostly because you never say not all men is the reason I can even consider not all men. I have a brother, a father, some friends with great qualities. Men who love honestly. Men who would kill men who’ve hurt me if I gave the go-ahead—this pseudo-power I have, like an empress holding her thumb up or down, I should be smitten by it, right? I’m not. They would go all Reservoir Dogs not out of territoriality, but because my pain nearly broke them and they don’t like that feeling. Because you’re a writer and I’m supposed to be one, too, I want this letter to be better than it’s shaping up to be—to encapsulate the strange way that I both love and loathe men, want to be protected and want there to be nothing I, we, need protecting from—but instead of profundity I get on Facebook and strip my friends list of straight men I don’t know. Some I block. Once upon a time I would accept and accept, but that little girl has been deactivated. I guess this letter exists because of why I didn’t unfriend you. Cat vids and outrage, we agree on everything. I’ve never met you but I’m grateful for how you stand beside those who hurt, those who aren’t like you, and not with a puffed chest or cocked gun. The men I block because I can’t, I can’t, you call them out, you don’t let them get away with it, you don’t let anyone forget, day after day, until the someday when I will, I will. Your never saying not all men makes you not all men. And it makes me feel safer. Like I can identify safe and not safe. Like I can keep myself safe, like I can stand, too, and be better than I was shaping up to be.

xo S.

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #12

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love letters, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear 15yo S.,

No one knows you; I’m the only one. Both of us both prefer it that way and long to give you a stage, but there will be time for exhibition later, when you have breasts. For now, since I can’t add you on FB, I tiptoe-pace outside your bedroom door, listen for the footsteps so you can sleep tonight, sweet one, press my time-traveled palm to the pine. Centuries of women need retrospective sentries. I do what I can for you, buy you the tampons she won’t so you can dance, prop the back door open so it won’t squeal when you sneak out for a smoke once they’ve all gone to bed. I know you’ll still sit in stony silence picking off your chipping gunmetal nail polish until the house rests at least an hour, because safety first. I hope you are writing poems in your spinning head again. I saved you a cookie after dinner, wrapped it in a napkin and put it between Plath and Sexton on your shelves. I almost say, maybe save Plath and Sexton for college?—oh, you will love college!—but you’ve already ghosted to the back porch, lit an anxious menthol, and anyway you wouldn’t listen to me. I feel tender about that, not slighted into rage like a mother. The coast is still clear. Finish slow, stub it out on a rock instead of your thigh, spend five minutes sliding the door back into its jamb because no one can be more quiet than you when you have to be. God you’d have loved Facebook, the thing I fantasize about quitting. I can see you in that gray flannel I wish I still had, spritzing yourself with CK One to cover the clingy smoke, midnighting at your computer, Tori aching through your headphones, logging on, snapping a moody b&W selfie and captioning it the oven’s still hot or I’d lay my head on it. We all need a stage. I don’t eye-roll your melodrama—all of 15 is cliché, but not as cliché as adults hating adolescents. If you ask me to, I’ll burn this whole house down except for that oven door, and give it to you, plus control of my FB account. It’s yours. Most days it feels like yours anyway. She can’t hurt us anymore. I am from where it still hurts, but she is not there, there are tampons and cigarettes and cookies and these things called emojis. I hid the razor, but of course you found it <gun emoji>. Don’t go too deep, love, or this letter will disappear like our blood.

xo S.

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #11

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love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear K.,

Once I flew 511 miles from everything I knew and when I landed, you said welcome home. The grass was blue. Everyone I met carried books. No one called me names except writer. I kept checking my pulse—yes, there’s the blood, surface to air, still there. I drank wine like I could afford it and danced to make new muscle memories. There was an election and I met you on the street between lectures, your voice was soft indignation, my voice was loud indignation, and we embraced because the world was doomed again but the wine had not run out. I had to leave eventually; my life is leavings, it shouldn’t hurt anymore, but, there’s the blood again. I returned. I left. Returned. I boomed and boomeranged and for once, no one called me names. Except writer. Then it happened—you came to me instead, I was living 1089 miles from everything I knew and you flew 704 miles from our first hug to be a writer, too, but somewhere new. There was wine again, there were hugs again, and the grass was brown on the plains. You were writing about tigers and I gave you a tiger’s eye in the shape of heart. Let’s resist that metaphor; my heart is not stone but so much blood. I love you–your grounding warmth and safe-bet smile–wherever I am and you are in the doomed world, and also on this page. Welcome home.

xo S

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #10

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love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear J.,

We speak not in code, but through it, the 0s and 1s cradling our missives like an ocean. So much wetness, but no meaning diluted—unlike in this letter, where I tuck the truth into the white spaces between syllables the way a spoon nestles against other spoons in a drawer. Do you know what I’m saying to you? It’s incredible, isn’t it, how people can touch without meeting? The goddamn internet—what a cipher. And music, too. Full catalogs of angst I’m not allowed to quote from, and really it’s fine because what place does angst have here, in the stolen ether of a message box dripping, positively dripping, with every form of glee? Throaty laughter, gooseflesh synchronicity, the chime of a notification that reminds me I have a body below the margins of a shared photograph—thank you for your openness that doesn’t intrude, but leads me by the hand as if onto a dance floor. It’s just that I don’t trust people in real life, don’t let them touch or see me, but like a lonely spy I watch everyone, and want to connect. Somewhere in a web made of ocean, I uncovered something that looks like trust and rhymes with it, too. The 0s and 1s carry words on their backs, zing them all over the world and into our skin, yours and mine and everyone’s. If there was a word for this phenomenon, I’d tattoo it on my wrist, take a picture of it, fire it off to you, and beg for approval I can smell.

xo S

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project