Promisses

Dear dear,

There are many promises we say to one another. When there is a pear being cut, you will always offer a piece to me. When I come to your house in a slight surprise to my busy self, I am armed with some small, hopeful snack or gift. When the morning sunlight rests on your face, exhausted from spanning the Universe to see you, I promise to look into your bright, brown eyes.

It is the small promises of each day, not of every day, that are lasting. The grand, usual poppycock and posturing dressed in white is hardly pure. It’s terrified. It fears the delightful dirt that grabs like happy hands during thick rain. Where is the luscious mud? Who will watch that even during the most wonderful wedding, the plates are left unclean?

I have kept an easy air, dear. I am unimpressed with solid declarations. Part of it is philosophical, bread from the Aristotelian omnipotence paradoxes. Can God create a stone so massive that even it cannot move it? Can it create a promise that even it cannot break? Can I?

Little answer swim in the numerous names that have faded, mine too that will join the freightless fray. But this disappearing, this inevitability of total collapse even in the most concrete things – the space, the words whispered, my own body feeling both on a tongue that cannot even fill its own mouth – is why I have often avoided promises. They are useless. They are deader than the dead.

And yet. With you, dear, all of this washes away in a silent, summoning reality that can be seen when I look out a window with you, when I eat a small meal with you, when I talk about some silly great idea with you, when I am simply, entirely, always with you. With you with you with you.

Now, you are away. I think I am supposed to say something like I solemnly swear that it will be okay and that you are okay and that there are no promises that you require beside these reassurances.

But I cannot. I am not with you. I offer only the tiny promises from the fruit of days we have had together, the days I have had, again, with you.

This is it. All of it. To eat those pears. To bring those gifts. To look once more on those eyes that if I am lucky, will be looking at me too.

In long loving,

Kacper