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~ I write, I mother, I try

another writing mom

Tag Archives: love letter

Love letters to my FB friends #19

25 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I mother, I write, Love letter to my FB friends

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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

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #18

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends, Uncategorized

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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 #15

03 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends, Uncategorized

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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

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends, Uncategorized

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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

20 Friday May 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends, Uncategorized

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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 #11

06 Friday May 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends, Uncategorized

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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

22 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends, Uncategorized

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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

Love letters to my FB friends #9

07 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends, Uncategorized

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amwriting, love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear P.,

I think of you as a beautiful bird who flies into my inbox carrying warmth and light, the inversion of a stormcrow, the opposite of an albatross. Perhaps this entire endeavor should be credited to you, who taught me about unsolicited graciousness—you were sending me love letters long before this blog existed. Uncanny how they always arrived when I most needed an uplift: praise for a published poem I’d nearly forgotten after the book was rejected again, or even a random kindness on a first day of my period. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but once when I was locked out of a home I wanted to burn down anyway, you wrote me to say you have a place in this world. Another time, you said when you read me, something always opens. When you open your sweet wings and make your way to my branch of the web, I un-forget soaring, blood, woman-love, and thumping-truth. Miles be damned, we are not separate, any of us, not beaten but beating—we can change the wind if we all thump in the same direction at once, gravity rolling right off our feathers.

xo S

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

Love letters to my FB friends #8

31 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends

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amwriting, love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear M.,

You called me Goat Girl for an entire semester, for reasons I don’t want to fully flesh out, though it’s true that I followed you wherever you went yet disliked being called a sheep. You compromised, and I could stop characterizing you right there, but it doesn’t feel like nearly enough. Ten years out of grad school and I still feel the warmth of your poet’s heart—wait, you write FICTION? I remember being surprised because, forgive me, the male fiction writers will usually speak only to the zipper of my jeans. You, sir, are the classiest, kindest debaucherer I’ve ever known, which is why I never backhanded you for baaahing at me. We dove down through the best bottles of bourbon and the worst bottles of beer, sure that that’s where the secret lay to staying in our life of words even after our 10 days were up. Every time, only a headache, never a key to our adopted city, so far from our real and actually lovely lives of jobs and families. Never a passport. Always a blurry photo with raised glasses snapped right before you darted off to write the night’s sequel at a bar, a drag club, any dance floor at all. We followed. It wasn’t a dream, I promise. You were like a chalice of party-starter and fuzzy feelings, and we followed. When the sun stands on a couch in a five-star hotel and beckons you to shine, bids you to shimmy until you belong to everyone you want to love you, you fucking follow.

xo S

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

 

Love letters to my FB friends #7

24 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by smfleegal in I write, Love letter to my FB friends

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love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear S.,

Everywhere I’ve ever lived, I’ve met someone with your name, and loved them. But what’s in a name? Because yours, theirs, means princess and you’re neither Disney nor diva. Plus, there’s only one of you. You are as uncommonly kind as a roughing the passer call in favor of the Steelers; football and your kindness, that’s how we first spoke. Oh and BOOKS. Our jobs were headlines and deadlines, but we tried to make every last pica hold more—volumes fat and slim, bestsellers and self-pubbers, kid lit and 50 Shades. We burned to mark pages. Anyone’s heart-words deserve more column inches than shootings, heroin, teachers molesting students, or social conservativism. Oh, the public needs to know those evils? The public needs to read more books!—and, we conceded, Sunday’s game scores. Sweet as you are, you could make me cackle with your foul-mouthed lambasting of the AFC North and archaic content management systems. Perfect-bound print is not archaic! we swore under and above our breath even while gasping for a vacation, even as we paginated under duress, defied our check-signers. Books. We fought for books, you first, then side by side we insisted in all the protest ways except hunger strikes, because the break room table always had snacks and we’re only human. Then you left. Then I left. Leavings are like closing books. Love letters are like opening them again.

xo S

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project

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