Light and heat and darkness

Dear Willard,

the lights are down, the heat is coming up from beneath the desk. This last weekend the neighbors have begun their assault on the Christmas season. It is a spectacle in the greatest sense: the million lights, the inflatable beasts, the recorded warbling songs: the curtain goes up at sundown and it runs until sometime between 10 and 11 at night when one or the other shuts the show down for the night. I don't know how much it costs. Perhaps that's not the important question. I know how much it haunts, though. I miss you here, though is that enough to say it? By saying you I conflate the you I knew and the you I think I know and the you I surely know with a thousand other yous. You stand all around me in a circle in the dark, holding glowing candy canes as the lights go out, saying nothing. It is not a dream, exactly. It is both less and more than a dream. The spectacle is real. It's saying something about America. It's saying something about our collective dreamlife, how we speak to each other, don't, or can't. It's saying something about our cant, the canticles absorbed in our brains through a dozen years of religious education. Once I said fellatio meaning education, and thought it was original. Maybe it was. It embarrasses me now, Willard, so overwrought, so meant. This note is no less meant. I write to you because you are a fiction, a screen of Is, of eyes, of the letter y, not to mention the word.

I don't know if it's safe or not. My life feels in danger. I am going to the snow country in two days and am not sure if I will return. Perhaps temptation will wreck me there and strand me, ending everything. By everything I mean everything for me. Your everything will of course go on. It's hard to know that but it's true. It's hard to live knowing that, but we both have seen it. A someone ends and then another. And yet we are still here, until we're not, obscured by scrims of snow or memory or distance, until we're gone entirely, existing only in our memories. Maybe you only exist in my memory. That's okay if so. I will keep you close and hold you there. I will speak to you for a long time, and then I will continue to do so. In memory it is so easy to hold another, to contain another. Only rarely are we pressed by others in our memory, by their drives and wants and uncontainable urges, the waters on which we are buoyed but are only able to access or divine in moments, in the past tense, if we're lucky, if we're real at all.