Marsha,
I saw someone in the 73rd Street Deli last night, who looked just like you; or I should say the way I remember you looking three years ago. I froze for a second and panicked, probably, wondering if I should say Hello. I did not, however; knowing that if you were in New York City from Livingston, Illinois, you would've probably made a phone call or let me know that you were here.
But we've been in touch, and that's important. We chatted via text messages at first and then moved to e-mails. From time to time, you sent me letters, postcards and greeting cards that I read out loud, smiled gleefully and stuck to my yellow plasterboard wall with lime green push pins. I've wanted to write back, for almost 3 years now, but every time I sat down at my cherry-maple desk I either felt lazy, or didn't know how to begin or just couldn't translate my thoughts into words. So I gave up, each time, and walked away, feeling heavyhearted and sincerely defeated, and played card games with Billie Jean in her apartment on Hastings Road. Or went to the Opera with Stanton and Alexa or the Koch Theater with Mary Jane and Martin Pillsbury.
You have been extremely particular about keeping me updated on your whereabouts, your sing-a-long's, your countryside Mad Libs and the deep, dark truths of your inner womanhood. Your stories of desire, of heart break, of insecurities and embarrassments -you have told me without reins. Your lust for life, your tingling genitals, the vapor on your breasts and the thunderous, noisy bellowing of you rain-washed vagina -you have conveyed through alliterations of words. I could sit down and make pencil sketches of the pivot points of your emotions, like a Ferris wheel in a rubber fulcrum or a wooden swing in air ballet, and scribble around the graphing sheet in severe disarray. You are everywhere at once, and then maturely collected, pocketed into a tungsten bulb, and smashed into pieces. And then you are a nothingness, you are a nobody, a theoretical non-existence. How does this happen Marsha Eckstein? Tell me, why does this happen? You are in my mind, a lot of the time, while I'm working, or swimming in the ocean or biking past Grand Central terminal. A lot of the time, when I'm reading Homer or creating art or simply walking across Central Park. It is, as if, you are bare-exposed; naked in my eye of personal knowledge and uncovered from a sheaf of deadly monograms. You wanted love, you craved to be wanted, for years and years on end, even at the cost of jobs, professions and quasi-relationships. But if there is one thing I have never told you before, is that I cannot love you.
You may, again, wonder why that is. You may, again, feel crushed like a candlewick, ridiculed and humiliated, despite the manner of your endeavors. You may feel cheated and violated at the revenue of circumstance -but I cannot love you. Why not? You will ask. I have given everything, said everything, done everything I possibly could -and yet, why are you not satisfied? You may say. The answer lies not in what you have or have not done -but in the fact that I have found love in my inner queer. An inner queer that gets projected onto the calligraphy of my desire, the faculty of my sexual prowess. It is a category, a denomination and a delineation that I have struggled with, and battled with since my age of eleven. And experimented and pretended and miraculously succeeded even, though only for a short while, to live in a cage of facetiousness. To live in a cage of theater gongs, to reside in a lie and to make promises without meaning them. Lisa Weinberg was a former, the one I knew would be my friendly wife, without the passion for romance, or the art of lovemaking. She was a friendly lover, an ex-corporate, transactional in the nature of our conversations and kissing. To be a token, scared of the single life, holding hands and wrestling, internally, the calling of lesbians and the queers.
The reason I am writing this to you today, this little sliver of my thought chronology, is that I want you to find love in a man who can love you back in the way you deserve. You are central to the development of hormonal adults, in your job and at your church, and the outcome of your perseverance and keen concern will be the epigram to success of many many people. I want you to smile, and be happy in life, flutter and float like a bird in the sky, cheer and scream to the heavens that you believe, holding hands, tapping shoulders and kissing under the canopy of eternal sunshine. With your lover on your neck, a ring on your hand and a marble of motherhood perched on your bed, you will be wonderful and invigorating and the answer to a prayer.
Let us sit and discuss, come September, Marsha Eckstein. Till then, farewell.
Best,
T.
No comments:
Post a Comment