This place

Dear dear,

I want things to be okay. I suppose we all do. We work and eat and shit in order to ensure that our needs are met, our bowels flushed, and our wants achieved in some capacity. Survival is not enough. Okay is. Okay is okay. It is good. It is great. It is not much and it is a lot of a little and it is enough.

You may not be okay. This letter may come late. You may think Apocalypse has happened and you’re left in the refuse. And you may be, with people you have come to know in a place you have come to know all the same.

Think of this place – one where a common yawn of equilibrating familiarity and strangeness be settling. It has warped and transfigured and jutted out into different philosophies, ideas, and zeitgeists. Germany was the hub of anti-Semitism and the worst atrocities humanity has ever known. It also has made some of the best cars. It houses a certainty of logic, a fine didactic way of doing, feeling, and working. Form combines with function, function with airtight finesse. It is also the place where human fats were made into soap.

I tell you this not to claim that Apocalypse may have already gone and past and we are the remaining angels, forced to reflect a mirror shattered and irreparable. Nor am I trying to comfort you by saying some worn limbless phrase that things could be worse, for they always can, and they can be better too.

Instead what I’m suggesting is that what we are, what we have always been is an irredeemable failure. We scatter rationality and asceticism, we distance, we conceptualize, we try to combine this with feelings and ideals and values. We fail. Entirely. Unquestionably. Always.

Here I am no more than the gap between what is and isn’t, what could be and was never, even if I manage to mean what I say what I type what I think. I’m incomplete. And you may feel the same today. You may feel like you’ve been torn asunder. And you may be, with people you have come to know in a place you have come to know all the same.

Think of this place – one where I am listening to the latest CD I made for you, my head scrunched in two layers of pillows. Staleness fills the room, the air. It smells of your hair. I take a particularly long inhale, where I can see you here just a while ago – was it two weeks or three, we were laying, no kissing, no both, and we talked about plans for Vancouver, no summer, no September, and you told me that if nothing else, you were going to write, no edit, no do art, and I said that you’ll need to focus your craft, no emotions, no ideas, and you laughed, no angered, no stagnated, and we both wondered what would happen if the answer was no, no nothing, no everything.

I tell you this not to claim that there are moments you’ll always be apart of, for they will crumble as we do, first our knees then hands then eyes. Nor am I trying to comfort you by saying that a room that serves as a vacuum culture, I have grown fonder of you, even if I may have and even if any feeling may be attributable to the room’s oxygen displacement.

Instead what I am suggesting is that you are more than where you are right now. You are a sum of the places you’ve visited. They are contained in your shadows. A blanket cropped against the wall produces the silhouette of your curves. There you are, until I move to get closer to you.

I am currently quite far, and may be farther in trying to send my heart miles. These words may seem distant and prove unable to provide the picture I want you to visualize. And you may not want to. You may wish only to read and reread what is in front on either side of what occurs. You may prefer anxiety. And you may have it, with people you have come to know in a place you have come to know all the same.

Think of this place – it waves continents your ways. Hi, dear, slabs of the Norwegian archipelago say. It’s the world. There are many people here and you are friends with some and indifferent to others and others may be indifferent to you too. I am not. I am not to anyone. I am just here. I didn’t know any better. You are too, I understand. A sum of millions of accidents, of probability. It’s a lot. A Universe’s worth. And in the end, this end, all that matters is how you are. Are you okay? Can I make you okay? Can I let you know it is okay not to be okay? It is also okay to be okay? Okay is okay and not, okay?

I tell you this not to suggest that the Earth quakes to rumble a message to you, though the wind does sometimes offer a nice picture or two. Nor am I thinking you as the pinnacle of the world, even though you are the sum of it now, the very end of abhorrent mutations and failed experiments and starvation, depraved creations, and graceful destruction.

Instead what I am suggesting is that you are incredible with a world that was made before you but that can be bent to your way. You are an elegant fashioning of wit, panache, bravery, and vulnerability. You can enrapture hundreds. You can do nothing of the sort, staying alone, private, and shut-in but not shut-out.

If this day is not okay, and you must still work and eat and shit like the other days before it even if you do not feel like it, even if you don’t until the next day comes and asks the same – more work, more eating, more shitting – then that’s okay. Not because it is, but because it isn’t, and that’s okay too.

Because more than what is said or isn’t, you had a place, you can have it again, and then, maybe you can place or place somewhere else. We’ll see. Germany is an example – the pictures look different. As does my room. As does this world. Look how beautiful it is today on our anniversary, even if some of it is in darkness.

Love you madly,
Me