between two points

Dear distant friend,

I am bustling through Spain onboard a sleek, undisturbed universe of a bullet train with sun licking the already-burnt skin and a raw, restless summer peeking at countrysides past and farmlands unseen.  My prose is the same unadulterated self-masturbatory streaking you are used to in a style shared with the likes of a neutered cat licking its balls or a plastic flower. Worn over the years, it still sticks out, hurting these fingers, barbing your eyes. Kacper writing again? What will he promise this time after too-much-time?

If nothing else, I promise to not promise. Much of what I have always thought was that these woolly words could warm where I cannot, that though I may fall and falter, they will stand unaccompanied like a blade of grass challenging the meadows, the trees, the entire, pink-coloured sky.

This is not true. Even as I scream at this page, this is all muted mumbling, a funny language of a heart radiating to one’s body alone. Sloppily, bloodily, I have not been there for you, friend.

I tend to think friendship is necessarily such a lonely venture, that is the ability to remain in silence said, captured, broken by its very existence. Friendship is predicated on itself, on the loose definition of murky, evaporating experience tied together as though with a hula hoop. Due to slippery placements of geographies and intention, we come to know each other as we slide into one another. In these collisions, we fill our own bumps. Against them, we shine our rusting paint.

Much of my youth (how unyouth [nonyouth? to be already forgetting] of me to say) has been cast in your colour. I have seen it deeply blue, reflected in despairing lakes that drown in miserable skies holding no rain. Yellow beamed at your house nearly every Thursday for years. There was green in gifts we got for another, red in how strongly we came to love, a purple sometimes among those dreamlike marching moments where we are laughing about backflips, about twins, about the unfunny bits like disaster that will come, that did, that again, I was not there for you for.

In ending in a preposition, I am both recalling a tired joke I told you many times about my fantasy band name and how the sentence begs for more, how this does too. What can we become in this accepted distance and solemn silence? What should we become?

I have no answer, maybe in a cowering realization of the darkened alternative of one. In this bastardized suckled self-preservation, I would say that I think of you as no less a friend, perhaps even as more deserving of such a title. Years have shown me how fickle this freckled existence is, how spotted with devastation it can be. There are moments when I am abandoned by the Cosmos, when I did the same to those who made my beginning: again and again, I was not there for you.

You once told me that writing is more than what is written: it is using the words that cannot be said, but are, that it is an dirty perfection of faulty focus, that it is being better than your best even when writing about your worst. For example, about an absence.

This is what I want to offer, then: more of it. My absence and yours that we have together been strikingly comfortable with. Nothing changes. But I want to suggest, too, an awareness to how this may not be enough even if it is everything we have turned into. So, let us talk. I have so much to say in a newfound way that these words cannot. It will be better for we are now.

Love,
Kacper