Constipation

Dear dear,

I fell out of love with you.

Please don’t get upset. Please don’t stop reading there. Though sometimes an entire relationship can end in a sentence. Don’t let ours halt at the period.

Instead see the white around it, and know that there is always a space after the tiny dot. It may seem like nothing – just a few milliseconds spent searching for the next word – but remember that this is enough. In fact, searching is how we started.

When we met, you had electric, black wires poking out of your head. You could be found hampered in oversized sweater. I was a drunk bumbling around with his pants. And in between then and now when the Earth spun like a dreidel and the Universe spread out like jelly, we spent the next day learning the Braille of each other’s skin.

From this hidden language, I figured out you weren’t perfect. You were an ordinary cluster of insecurities and fears, just as much as I was. You ate too much. You often drooled. And sometimes, trumpets escaped from your behind more than you would want to admit.

But this is love: farting around with someone, having them fart around with you, and still being there after the smell abates.

Know that this letter, then, is just the excrement of this butt-orchestra. So open your nostrils. Take a whiff. And look – this is not an ending. This is not the letter I could never write. Instead it is admittance that through you, I became me.

What I am saying is that I fell in love with you when we met and I have since forgotten who that person is or was. I think back and I remember a doddering fool not worthy of you – that farting, drooling mess I have discovered.

Now, though, things have changed, me most of all. No longer am I uncertain of this relationship. Instead I look forward to small miracle of waking up beside you. I wait for the moments I can see your hands stained with paint again. And I hunt for new ways to say I love you, ways that only you and I would know. One of them is this love letter from a lover of letters. Another is with a fart.

Love you madly,
Kacper