Letter from X

(Some of my readers have expressed an interest in X – here is a suitably edited email from her.)

Hello Image,

It is November in this city where youth spreads out endlessly comprised of perfect tan skin and flawless white smiles. I think of you on the other side of the world, and wonder what the other side of the day looks like, and I guess that if the world's going to end tomorrow you'll be the first to know about it, right? I think of the distance and of such a foreign place.

...and dead can dance plays through the speakers here at good ol' spiderhouse down here off the drag. I think of the DJ at work - the one I'm secretly falling for, [name]. I think of the QS, [name], at the day job, and how we shared the drive home... I mean in separate cars whizzing past one another, back and forth, like a game. We both drive Mazda's and work for [company]. I let my hair down and turned up the radio. . I have finally figured that I am truly disturbed. Is it really your loneliness that says that you've sinned? Should I tell dear [name] that I've caught him staring at my breasts and that I don't mind? And yes, I think that I've been cut off, but the lime just makes this beer so damn yummy...

I've been working on this story. It has been going well, in the sense that its even been going at all. I want to write about my life. Is that vain? Not because I think that I have the most amazing life. We all have a story to tell. We all go through things and think, "Holy shit! That was weird."

Take [name] for example. [name] is a man in his late forties, but why is it always so hard to tell the age of a mentally retarded person? [name] has a fetish that is so common, but it is his mental retardation that alters the _expression of it. I met him at my other job. He has a fetish for blow jobs and being in control. He expects you to answer every question with "yes master". And for someone completely unaware of this... well, It proves to be pretty amazing, pretty funny, almost.

Or all the time that I was in Vancouver. Vancouver means prostitutes and drug addiction under the forever raining skies of the pacific northwest. The garbage men went on strike while I was there. It was truly beautiful in the sense that the whole place was a dumpster. The whole place was literally a wasteland. I find beauty in that.

So I broke up with this guy I was with for a year. I was pregnant, and well, I told you the rest. I am seeing this guy now. I hate to say those words. I hate the thought of anyone being close to me. I miss my ex like something so horrible. I am in this weird stage of half depression, half liberation. It is not the freedom to go out and fuck, or to be able to flirt. It's the freedom from all the bullshit. Freedom from complaining about the constant ex-girlfriend in Boston that he was soooo close to. I could go on. I miss that misery though, but it has at least gotten me out of the house. [name] was a musician. I purchased him a brand new Martin DCME for about $1200.00. He bitched and moaned about the thing non stop. I took it back and got a refund. I purchased this lap top - IBM thinkpad with all kinds internal wireless options and a bunch of other crap that I don't know how to use, and now I have committed myself to writing again, because this is the best choice that I've made in quite a while.

So this guy that I've been seeing, his name is [name]. He works for [company]. He is an electrical engineer. His father is a surgeon. He graduated from an ivy league school. This has been a complete manifestation from the previous relationship that fell to complete shit - Thanks to my unyielding ways and my uncanny ability to seek and destroy, but never mind the fact that he loved to jump on my car, threatened to slash my tires all the time, liked to throw my stuff off of the balcony, and then there was that argument that landed him in the back of a police car. I thought that money would make me happy, since the endless bitching of a poor washed-up alcoholic jazz musician led me to have yet another domestic violence charge against someone and the misery of having an abortion.

So I chose the nice guy. The guy whose friends live in a condo down town, own a boat, and her engagement ring is at least 2 solid karats accompanied by the wedding band composed entirely of diamonds. The guy who never got lucky in college, but sure is great at giving back rubs. The guy who needs to carry around a woman like a trophy.

uh... ground control, we have a problem.

I e-mailed my stuff to him, since he is always asking why I'm not going out with him and his friends to get totally trashed on Friday nights. (After all, what girl doesn't like getting all the free drinks she can stand and the luxury of a 250+ tread count set of sheets to collapse between in the rooms of an old house set behind Waterloo Records off sixth street.) The response was... he just couldn't understand. He was trying to draw all these connections between my life and the story. Granted, the story is about a majority of my life. Yes, there was a man with a pellet gun down on the drag, but no one ran after him, certainly not [name], [name] or [name]. Yes I did live in Vancouver, but I didn't have night terrors. The poem really threw him for a loop. He responded with a list of premium alcohols along with their approximate ages, that he likes to drink while reading the works of Wilde or... Fucking Shakespeare. And all the while he is still trying to figure out who Charles Bukowski is. See how I suffer?

…

Would it be too politically incorrect if I were to say that the perfect orgy would include Leonard Cohen (minus 40 years), Dave Gahan (minus 15 years - heroin addiction negotiable), Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, Morrissey, and Carmen Electra??? …
(I'd probally wake up with a really bad rash and a need for penicillin like something so awful, so the perfect orgy doesn't seem so perfect)

Hey M, ...

I AM sorry for what I did. There is no way to make things better and that is not the point, to be honest. I saw you out there on the net, and I just wanted you to know that... aw fuck... Somewhere in an Austin jail cell, scratched with a bar of soap like a stick of chalk, are the words, "God bless and Jesus save [MM]" because Karma is a bitch my friend. I know the words are there because after hour #15 of the "cooling off period" there is nothing else to do. I know because I put them there.

I was dealing with some really fucked up stuff back then. I was in a completely self destructive mode. If it weren't you, it would have been someone or anyone. Knowing you - your kind and gentle soul... It hurts all the way to the bone. To atone for your words... My God will I try, and have been for some time. [fucking writer's block] You came into my life. You came, and you gave without taking. (...well, so I stole that line from some psycho who sends me greeting cards via e-mail and I'm more than positive that he's ripped that off too. That doesn't make it better. It doesn't take away anything and never will.

Prefer to call you M, and with that you can research the parallels … - and that is one of my better kept secrets like the fact that I dream about water all of the time, or that I write in French... or even better yet: that time that I suffered a horrible case of psychosis after not sleeping for almost 2 weeks (all that time spent watching the winged angles shuffle around my kitchen, with white robes and golden tassels, as they came to give me my last rights) and the 10 days that I spent in the Hospital, one of the days spent speaking nothing but French, they had to get a translator for me, or the day after - I spent the whole day drawing the molecular structures of simple compounds on napkins... I requested water and drew out the molecular structure for h2o: H=O=H.