Letters I've Written to Women

Dear xxxx,

Death and diet soda. Remember that for me.

Love,

Me


Dear xxxx,

I'm reading a story in the fiction section of the New Yorker website entitled "Rat Beach." It's too early to tell what the story is about, but considering that I just read the line, "I was so fucking scared there, in Saigon." I have to conclude that it's about war. This is decidedly less interesting than what a story entitled "Rat Beach" could have been about. Consider the possibilities. First, there's the most obvious, and possibly most humorous: a beach for rats. But not just any rats. These are anthropomorphic rats. Rats that have all the faculties of a painfully human, beach-going, sand and saltwater junkie. Big obnoxious sunglasses. Females in the season's most up-to-date swimwear, males in the swimwear popular half a decade ago. There are some surfing rats, some sun-bathing rats, and some beach-babe ogling rats. There are rats selling grossly marked up bottles of water and ice cream sandwiches, young rats running around kicking up sand into the faces of condescending twenty-something rats who disapprovingly crane their necks to glare at the parents. They shake their dark heads as if to say, "if only these little bastards were mine, I'd show them some manners."
Then there's the much more morbid: A beach MADE of rats. Possibly the title refers to a singular image of a horde of rats that stretches farther than the eye can record, all making their way into the sea, preferring to take their chances drowning like...well...drowning like rats, than to the fate that awaits them on land. Perhaps there's apocalypse on the opposite horizon. Perhaps the earth is on fire. And the beach has become alive with the dark and undulating bodies of desperation. Perhaps a sea of rats marching toward their watery doom, is the last thing we'll see before we meet our own.
Then there's the most interesting: What if it's a beach that nobody but snitches know about? It's a beach for hopeless whistle blowers and tattlers. Mob informants and anonymous tipsters. It's a beach for aloofness and shiftiness. For mustache twisting and goatee stroking. Wire tapping and equivocating. For desperate negotiation and rifling of drawers for information. It's a beach for sycophants and cowards, all lying out in the sun or splashing in the still-cold, early summer ocean.
But no. Instead, the story's about war.
Oh well.

Here's a game we can play.
Below I will paste a few strange Irish curses. You try to guess which ones I have written, and which ones are actually Irish curses:

May your obituary be written in weasel's piss.

May the lamb of God stir his hoof through the roof of heaven and kick you in the arse down to hell.

May the devil swallow him sideways.

May the snails devour his corpse And the rains do harm worse May the devil sweep the hairy creature soon!

May your hens take the disorder(the fowl-pest), your cows the crippen(phosphorosis) and your calves the white scour! May yourself go stone-blind so that you will not know your wife from a hay-stack!

May the seven terriers of hell sit on the spool of your breast and bark in at your soul-case

The treatment of the boiled broken little fish to you

The roasting of the salmon to the very end on you

May you be broken over the masons cliff

Six horse-loads of graveyard clay on top of you

May the entrails and mansion of pleasure of this worm fall out

May the devil cut the head off you and make a days work of your neck

No butter be on your milk nor on your ducks a web. May your child not walk and your cow be flayed. And may the flame be bigger and wider which will go through your soul than the Connemara mountains if they were on fire

The curse of the crows on you

May you be afflicted with the itch and have no nails to scratch with!

I bind you by grave injunctions of magic from the river, back to the river, may you fall in a nettle patch and may savage dogs eat your one good foot on a mountain.

Finished? Good. Now make your decision. I'll paste the answers at the bottom of this email.
Read this poem I wrote a few months ago:

The Difference
Jesus—
Is blurted aloud
when a dollface shakes her thing across
Madison Ave.
Men turned to gelatin
in their Lexuses
or work vans,
all say:
Jesus.

God—
You say to yourself.
God, God, God.
In the catacomb of your apartment,
your prayers keep the phone from ringing.
Keep the voice from saying
what your heart
can't bear.

I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt that I was back in high school and I had a bully. He was this much larger guy (aren't they always?) who just delighted in tormenting me. But then I had enough of it and I confronted him, spitting and punching him in the face. Then I reached under his shirt and started pulling out prosthetics attached to what ended up being an emaciated body. He wasn't a big tough guy, he was just a little guy who was too scared to go through life as one. So I picked up his shoulder pads and began to scratch his face with them, and I said, "You don't beat up on people! because one day, they'll beat back!" and he said, "I know but I'm so very weak, I might as well have leukemia." and I said "you are weaker than you'll ever know." and I picked him up, put him in a shopping cart and rolled him down a path where he disappeared around a patch of trees. I woke up so sad. And late. I didn't even have time to reflect on it until now. How strange.

Anyway, did you know that hippos turn pink in the sun? You did. Because I told you. But it's one of my favorite facts. So I recite it often.
I think I might have decided on my next tattoo. I want a geisha holding a shotgun. It creates a good duality with my skeleton cowboy with the pistols. What do you think?
I'd also like to get a large tattoo on my left arm, possibly a sleeve, of a heart as big as a planet, floating in space. its aortic valves releasing not blood, but stars and satellites and bombs and crows and jellyfish and steam and sunbeams and humming birds and bees and balloons and darkness and light and electrons and radiowaves and crumbling buildings and boomboxes and graffiti and all the things that make up my inner universe. The concept is, we are all our own universes. We contain the cosmos. We contain multitudes. There are constellations in us. (Which is something else I'd like to get tattooed on me, "There are constellations in me.") Our hearts define us. That might be lame, but eh. Who cares?

Here's a joke I like:
A passenger in a taxi leaned over to ask the driver a question and tapped
him on the shoulder.

The driver screamed, lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, drove up

over the curb and stopped just inches from a large plate glass window.

For a few moments everything was silent in the cab, and then the still
shaking driver said, 'I'm sorry, but you scared the daylights out of me!!

The frightened passenger apologized to the driver and said he didn't realize
a mere tap on the shoulder could frighten him so much.
The driver replied, 'No, no, I'm sorry, it's entirely my fault.

Today is my first day driving a cab. I've been driving a hearse for the last 25 years.

k, that's all for now!

Bye!

Kisses,
Me

P.S. It was a trick question. I didn't write any of those, they're all ACTUAL Irish curses.


Dear xxx,

The office is almost entirely empty now. The last of xxx's things were taken away this afternoon and shipped off to Xxxxx. There are now three people left still working here. I imagine that any day now, they'll give me my own walking papers and I'll have to scramble to find a job in this convalescing economy and city crawling with the most educated and experienced unemployed workforce I've ever seen in my life. I'm scared to death to face the fact that even by extraordinarily optimistic estimates, I'm a dime a dozen. It keeps me up at night. It may be the one thing that I can do better than 95% of the population—worry. But the truth is I'm probably not even near the top of THAT heap either. For every minute of sleep that I lose, I can be sure that there are 200 more men like myself losing double that.
I should be looking for work. Possibly I'll get on that after this letter.
Xxxx was in town yesterday. She hopes to move here within the next several months. That's why she was here. A job interview. She's in the same boat I'm in, just a few months ahead (or is it behind?). And she's having about as much luck as I'm already expecting to have. What a kick in the ass it is to have your most pessimistic of expectations confirmed as being completely realistic. Oh well. She is—as you well know—one of my favorite people in this world and it will be huge for me when she moves here.
Oh hold on a minute. Xxxx just walked in. He's talking to Xxxx. God he looks like a chipmunk. I have to run.

Love,

Me


Dear xxxxx,
Thank you for that letter. I’m sure you meant every word of it. I’m sure of it. I want you to know that I have no doubt of that. As sure as I sit here now, writing these words, I know that you meant every syllable. And the sentiments are so beautiful, that for years to come I will sit awake at night wishing and hoping with every last bit of myself that I can somehow will you to have never met xxx.
But I can’t. And I can’t will you to take back the things you’ve said to him, the things you’ve felt for him. (if you’re wondering how I can be sweeping you out of my life, it’s these very things that I whisper to myself. When I can’t bear the sound of your sobs and I just want to throw myself over you and say, “forget it, forget I mentioned anything,” I whisper to myself your whisperings to him. The hushed promises of a future. Your professing of devotion. Your assurances of your body as his to do with as he pleases. Your insistence that there has never been a more perfect person in the world for you than him. It’s these things that rend my heart. And give me strength to stand my ground.) I’m so sorry you couldn’t move past him, because it has cost you me and cost me you.
I’m so sorry you never understood how much I loved you. But the heart is so much more complex than the mind, and even if I had tried for days, I could never have begun to scratch the surface of my actions or inactions. But in my heart of hearts, I know I was a good man. Better than most. And I can promise you that you had a man who loved you unconditionally and wholly, in such a muted and enormous capacity that it is seldom seen, and even more seldom understood in its restraint and reclusiveness. I sincerely—with every humming molecule in my body—hope that you will some day find another who will love you more than I did. And if you do, please, never let him go. That way, this will become less of a tragedy and more of just a brief forgettable sojourn on your way to meet him.


PS-This is the closest I ever came to expressing how I felt about you:
You’re my little twinkle. I’d put you in a jar with outer space and start a universe if I could. I’d shake you up and simulate the big bang. You’d be the first light that that little jar of infinity would hold. And you would twinkle enough to sustain life for so many multitudes of years after this event, that sightless fish in the depths of the ocean would feel you as a faint buzzing in their scales without ever knowing it was you on their skin.