Another letter written in black

Dear dear,

Most of these letters are composed in the dark, one that is singular and shared between us. It smells of you, of a great, blistering absence. It whispers to me what it was to feel your femur in Montreal midnight and how the morning fumbled with your scapula today. The unicelled organism of black stretches itself into your fingernails, dances in the palms of your creases, sings in between your armpits. It brags and brags, bolstering to me how it is not barren but bountiful, how it is everywhere: it fattens into my eyelids, nests in my heart and its holes. It reminds my brain that it is my brain – that my mind fires in total darkness, that there is no radiance even when I think of the world in flames or I think of you in dormant desire, you burning yourself into places so vulnerable and venerated among my body.

I like to write at dark, dear. Here, there is no finger-wagging away of obscurity; it is latent, laden, pertinent in each instance. The dark is no mystery. Showing itself as itself, it promises no more than the everything it mirrors, from the hidden fact that before there was light, there was it, and it will be here after the light fades too. A familiar friend. A life itself.

With an ancient nod to the horizon, the dark goes on tonight to tell me that this tiny thing, this terrible thing, where a man can microwave their child or where the last piece of a chocolate cake is eaten already or where the disorder and disaster are always mixed up in their magnitudes, their callous indifference, is but a short citation in an ongoing, overwhelming overture. It is a note, one that barely graces the page, but it is there while the book is being made and unbound by being, too.

Dear, the dark continues its babble. It dictates that not one thing will be whole, that half the world is nightfall, that we’re all wrapped in the same loneliness we try to wade away with daily, deadening brightness. The dark says that I have not seen you yet fully. The dark says that I will not manage to ever.

I have often felt that in trying to give you me by giving you you, my words are rusty, ruined catastrophes. The sentences screech haltingly in their inability; meaningless in their capacity, neutered in their regard. They do not describe you for there is no describing you. I take the tinsel from others, bent and worn and horrible in its human-like mould.

What language do we have that is ours only? This consuming night – secret, shadowed, summoning the soul – is one. Another is the space between your pillow and your head, how there is stillness embedded in your diligent breath. Another is the silent hold, the way that even in the darkest dark, there is an easy, bursting light from you.

You may not see it, but always, it emanates. Even now, in this again-night, I just look up and feel its warmth miles and miles apart. It tells me that this soft fire of yours is a generous grammar, a new one, where the words are wet with hot birth, where there is still the heat of expansion and mistake. Like the dark, it shouts that it should not be rushed and that it is radiant and that it will wear the world if only to create another.

For now, this world building includes a longing I massaged into this night for you, a love mouthed from my dim throat, and a letter that is very black in its text and very dark in its comedy and very, very, very simply saying boldly that I miss you. At night. At daylight. At all times.

Yours yours yours,
Kacper