CHOSE YOUR STARTING POINT:

	a)	Why so silent, my love?
	b)	Don’t think I don’t know that you are ignoring me.
	c)	I waited five months for that day last week when I knew our paths would cross. Perhaps you didn’t even know I was there. Perhaps you think I’m still unable to talk to you… I’m ready. I want to make friends. Are you now the disinterested party?

I’M JUST SCARED

I’m just scared – scared of my own feelings, scared of their strength, scared of the way they seem to evaporate the minute I confront you. Scared of the way they rush back in with a vengeance to fill the void when I’m alone. It’s a curse to think about these things at all. Isn’t it better to leave everything unsaid?

Perhaps it’s not too late – they say it’s never too late and I think I believe that – but then what?

IT’S ACTUALLY REALLY TYPICAL

It’s actually really typical of you to retreat in the face of something scary – regardless of the fact that, if you were slightly less self defensive, something good might come out of ‘taking a risk’ and seeing me.

And so, it must be left unsaid. Whatever ‘it’ is. I feel it – a valuable something that is or was ours… remember, we so often used to find that we were both thinking the same thing at the same time…? But that was so long ago.

It doesn’t matter that we are both with someone else now, because I honestly wouldn’t contemplate suggesting yet another attempt at a relationship – everything is so tarnished in that department. Its just that I miss talking to you. And also its kind of embarrassing ‘not talking’ to you when we are both at the same party. Then again, is it just nostalgia that makes me miss ‘us’ – did the thing we had really actually evaporate years ago?

How could I know unless we do meet, and talk, just the once?

BUT THAT’S JUST THE PROBLEM

But that’s just the problem – where’s the risk if it’s already predetermined that our meeting will go nowhere except into the safety, the mediocre compromise, of ‘friendship’? Didn’t you always say that what we had together was about what we were feeling in the moment about things that we both knew all too well might not last, especially given all the external pressures our relationship was under. Or maybe I’m just imagining you said that – maybe I’m over romanticising the past – or is it just that it’s a different you I’m speaking to now? But the thing is that what we experienced together then – the telepathy, those weird simultaneous thoughts – came out of the passion and intimacy we were sharing, and neither of us can pretend that exists anymore. We’re two strangers again now, trying to work out if we want to get to know each other.

And if you’re so confident our meeting would be a good thing, why didn’t you come and speak to me the other night – I mean who’s ignoring who… what are you scared of?

MEDIOCRE OR NOT

OK. Well, mediocre or not I would have liked a friendship, and there is no other me. Whatever it was that made anything happen between us in the first place, despite all the unresolved business in your life, was the one thing I thought might have been salvageable after the inevitable, final, bust up.

I think the so-called ‘passion’ you mention was probably a distraction, although I will still admit that the sex with you was very very precious to me (so special – now so utterly ruined). All that stuff, in which I also think there was a lot of competition between us, ultimately destroyed us. It was that same ‘passion’ that ignited the fights, remember?

So – Fuck it. And OK I agree with you – you’re right – we’re strangers. That’s maybe why I couldn’t come over and say hi the other night, although the fact that you were surrounded by a group of friends – mainly young women I note – made it difficult. Actually I did deliberately drift about on my own a bit so that I might have seemed approachable – but just writing that down makes me feel – and probably sound – like a mad person. Why am I wasting my time on this silly idea? Forget I ever started this- I’m sorry to have disturbed you – and feel free to ignore me next time we are in the same room. Don’t worry – I’ll do the same for you.

SEEMS WE’RE STILL PRONE

Seems we’re still prone to get into fights with one another – does that mean there’s still some ‘so-called’ passion on both sides? I don’t understand why you’re acting the injured party – your first letter was quite accusatory. My responses have just been an attempt to explain what I’m feeling, and why those feelings are still too complex to make any meeting between us straightforward. Silly or not – you’ve stirred something up. If you want to let It lie again
now though, I’m not in a position to argue.

NOT THE DESTRUCTIVE PASSION

Not the destructive passion I hope – but neither, I fear, anything else. Question: why do the negative tendencies last longer than the positive ones? (Why do I so foolishly persist in believing something positive remains that might be worth saving? Look how quickly we got fighting again, and look how it followed the ‘usual pattern’!)

I should say, however, how extremely relieved I was to get your letter today, it was very noble of you. If it had been you who told me to ignore you, then I would have just shrugged my shoulders and walked away – even although it was me who instigated (or stirred up as you say) the hoped-for ‘sea change’ in the first place! Hot headed? I was always very prickly… I don’t mean to be. Did you really find my first letter accusatory? I though it was more mournful… I find the standstill – the utter deadness of it all – very sad.

I think that the fact that the subject of risk has come up between is interesting as it seems that a lot of the time our relationship was about power – who is going to admit they want or need the other, if they think that the other might use it as an excuse to inflict revenge for wounds dealt
to them when positions were reversed? Or worse – be simply turned off by this admission, which is also a demand, or responsibility. That’s what I perhaps meant by our competitive-ness; neither of us give in or concede to the other. And maybe that was born out of the fact that we were never ‘really’ having a proper relationship. So that’s why a meeting might be difficult, I agree.

I HAVE TO CONFESS TO NOT

I have to confess to not being sure what you mean by a ‘proper’ relationship (I don’t mean to be sarcastic) – a ‘lasting’ relationship maybe, but you can never really call a relationship even that until you get to the end of it, or don’t. Doesn’t the potentially destructive impulse (for power, possession, whatever) find its way into every relationship one way or another – surely it’s just a question of how you handle it, and I cannot deny that we handled it badly in the end. The minute I fall in love, or feel the thrill of mutual desire, the euphoria is always quickly followed by an intense awareness of vulnerability, both my own and that of my loved one, my desired one – and that for me is the most terrifying thing, that queasy recognition of the power suddenly shifting back and forth, the emotions held in the balance. When it works out with someone, it’s just because you’ve found a way of trusting each other not to abuse the power you hold – have been given – and even then the trust is a fragile, precious thing (so much the more so when you see how subtly it can be broken). But I think we never found out how to trust each other at all… our relationship didn’t exactly break up, we just egged each other on until it was driven into the ground. We reached a dead end, a point we couldn’t negotiate, because we hadn’t worked out a way of negotiating anything. I know that for me, when we reached the point where it was obvious it couldn’t go on, I just sort of gave up – I had nothing to say anymore. And afterwards for a long time I just couldn’t work out what had happened to me, why I should retain such strong feelings for someone I couldn’t – didn’t even know how to – speak to.

But – I don’t even really know how to say this either, or what I’m saying – I think you’re somehow misunderstanding what happened between us when you try to separate the negative from the positive, when you talk about salvaging something, when you speak of special things that are now ruined. To me a flawed passion seems better than no passion at all, and the sex is still tangibly special – why mourn something that simply went wrong? – it’s not such a terrible thing to be wrong… but I’m getting muddled. I think what I’m trying to explain is that underneath everything that you’re saying, I detect the suggestion that somehow “we should have just been friends, it would have been better, perhaps we still could be…” – and I’m not so sure that’s true, I’m not sure we could ever have been anything but lovers. And then I also get the feeling (is it just my imagination or some warped wishful thinking?) that that’s not all there is to it – when you accuse me (what else is it but an accusation?) of ignoring you, when you draw attention to the fact that I was surrounded by young women – I can’t help but intuit that you”re feelings are less than straightforward (whatever that could ever mean).

Call it lack of trust, but that’s why I’ve felt wary since you first contacted me again – I’m not suggesting you want anything more from me than to somehow find some point of meeting that puts a lid on the past, but I’m not sure you really know what you want, and I’m sure I don’t.

And I’m sorry to say it, but talk of sea changes and friendships and positive tendencies does nothing to relax me!

VENICE…

I’m sorry it’s been some time since I last wrote to you. But each attempt has brought on a kind of despair that, if I see the funny side of it, verges on boredom. Something about the activity of fighting my corner suddenly seems pointless. Perhaps unconsciously I am finally accepting that this thing, or its resurrection, is a lost cause. Or maybe its something I’m not admitting – that what is ‘lost’ is the argument, and that I lost it; hence my lassitude, my exhaustion, the utter, airless torpor I find myself in.

I can’t come up with any position worth defending, yet deciding not to hasn’t released me in any way – instead I’m listless, sleepy. Vague thoughts go through my head … I hear my voice; its squeakily optimism makes me cringe, the obverse – a whining self-justification – is unbearable. So I can’t speak at all. I’m completely stuck – what to say? I can’t get what I want – I don’t know what I want. Do I even have the right to want in this situation?

Perhaps I should try to respond to your last letter, as maybe it was something you said that has triggered this collapse. Without seeming mercenary, I need to recover. My work, and therefore my life, is suffering badly. That’s not to say I expect an immediate recovery – I dread to think how long I’m going to take to get over you – but I can’t continue like this…

By a ‘proper’ relationship (as opposed to an improper one, I suppose) I meant a committed relationship – regardless of how long it might last. Meaning that the individuals concerned accept the risks involved – that it may not last forever, let alone until the following week, and that someone might (always?) get hurt. Now, I’m ready to accept that I might be slightly addicted to risk, but for that very reason I would like to claim that I understand someone more cautious. I always want to go all the way, regardless of the potential consequences – I can’t resist the thrill of it, and I know that puts normal, saner, people like you under a lot of pressure. God knows, I’ve also seen where that kind of behaviour has got me in the past, and so I empathise with someone like you – I try to hold myself back, to stop forcing things, so that we don’t just leap in blindly. All the same, I sometimes got a bit irritated by your vulnerability, which became such a feature of the relationship … the little rituals I had to witness, such as the famous biting of your lip as you agonised over whether you should you stay or not. Admittedly you looked quite cute when you did this, so I at least got some pleasure, gift or reward out of it, but as was frequently the case, this acting out almost always happened after the last train or whatever had gone, and when I knew that you’d be staying as, for example, you hated to fork out for the cab fare. It was almost as if you wanted to remind me that you were vulnerable – every time. So these little performances of yours automatically placed me into the role of The Lover Not To Be Trusted – a type-casting that suited you more than it suited me, obviously, and one engineered to produce an effect that you found rather a turn-on – that of being tortured. It’s a shame that you never recognised that I too wanted a firm hand – occasionally.

You talk, rather abstractly, about power and trust. You say that we couldn’t handle these things – almost as if we didn’t deserve to – because we could never negotiate. Yet you were so nervous that I would abuse your trust with my power that I felt I had to re-negotiate the terms of our relationship on an almost daily basis. It would never occur to you to think that it might have been the situation produced by you always behaving as if you were powerless – thereby subduing me, making me feel guilty for possibly hurting you – that caused the relation to grind to a halt.

The second half of your letter confuses me even more – the only thing you got right is your ‘intuition’ that my feelings are less than straight-forward.

By the way, I’ve been in Venice. You can imagine how that was… the ‘first time‘ without you.

MY GOD…

My god, you misunderstand me so badly… Am I playing the victim again? I don’t know – yes, I’m tortured, and I sometimes enjoy it. But that’s another matter. The problem is that I don’t really recognise the me that you’re describing from our past, and I’ve no fucking idea how you’ve interpreted my letters in the way you seem to have. I think I’ve been clear from the beginning that I still have strong feelings for you that have not yet disentangled themselves from physical passion (that word you inexplicably decry – it just means sex, emotions, identification all mixed up – etc etc – the whole analyst’s witch’s brew, whatever, whatever – Christ, I get so tired of the need to explain, to complicate).

I haven’t tried to pretend I don’t still want you – as you did initially with all your talk of friendship and retrieval, and the dismal veil of disenchantment you cast over any mention of the pleasures we once shared. My caution has nothing to do with fear of risk – it’s just the opposite – it seemed to me you wanted, at least on the face of it, to foreclose any possibility of things getting out of control prior to the desired meeting between us. You frustrate me – it’s as if you have to hold all the cards, to be the great risk-taker and the one in control; you’ve portrayed yourself as open to communication in the face of my recalcitrance, yet it’s taken until now to admit that your feelings are less than straightforward. If you were able to show vulnerability more easily perhaps I would be firmer. If you had been more open about your confusion to begin with I might have found it easier to meet with you… and perhaps I still might. And then, maybe the problem is that I’ve been too open with you too quickly. Perhaps I’ve forgotten how to be subtle enough – perhaps I was never subtle enough – to play this game.

But maybe that’s not what you want – maybe this exchange is a question of simply confirming for you that something, however fucked up, still exists between us. That way , secure with the evidence you sought, you can slip back into your melancholy paradise – the imaginary museum in which you’re still working out how to catalogue ‘us’. I cannot help it if you view the past as a ruin, to be pored over for signs of life – but I don’t condemn you for that either. I honestly believe it makes you happy. Surely you cannot expect me to believe that your work is suffering because of this – we both know that this is your work. Even during our happiest times, I could never escape the feeling that on some level I was just ‘material’ for you. And – it’s true, it’s true – your capacity for detachment always excited me in the end.

Perhaps you’re furious with me by this point, perhaps you’re laughing deliriously – I honestly cannot tell what impact or import my words have anymore. But I cannot pretend your last letter didn’t make me angry, and perhaps that shows. I know also that my anger isn’t justified – and then again it is. You said some sweet things – I was both truly shocked and comforted to know that Venice still means something to you, and to say that you don’t know how long it will take you to get over me is more than I have admitted. But then you can’t resist the opportunity to parody our past, and I cannot imagine that you are unaware of how painful those words are – indeed I find it difficult to conceive of those words being written without the intention of hurting.

My turn perhaps to see the funny side of it: to be portrayed as a penny-pinching, manipulative little boy is less than flattering – but I’ve been called worse. Seldom though by someone who is falling only slightly short of admitting to being still in love with me. There it is – the difficult word. It’s so much easier to wrangle about the meaning of ‘passion or ‘friendship’ or ‘relationship’. But what is love? I know when I’m falling in love simply because it feels different to anything else. I knew it with you and losing you was harder than it has been with anyone else. But I did lose you. I did.

ACROSS MY BREAST

I’m laughing deliriously, while across my breast anger spreads. My cheeks are burning, but my heart is icing over. I wonder why that is. Is it because I’m scared, or because I’m a control freak? The more I seem to lament my loss (your loss or the loss) the more you accuse me of a kind of theatrics. What are you saying – shut up, its not dead yet? Well – if so – it’s your move now, mate. You’re the one who’s been stalling this meeting, not me. I know that these are only words, picked out of the great pile of clichés – or the museum, as you might have it – that the written language consists of but, in the absence of each other’s person (or body) it’s all we’ve got right now.

Yet, perhaps I respond, as always, too readily to your bait. I back off in fear that what you are saying might be true, so I try to deny it, convince you otherwise, with my wily words. In order to protect myself from feeling, I’ll have to make this correspondence into one of my famous little ‘projects’, as you used to say. Keep my distance, think hard about what I’m saying, stay in control – win the game. That would be easy if I did have all the cards. But I don’t and I do feel, deeply, and it’s not just a mental thing, such as wounded pride. I feel it in my body; in my stomach, in my knees and in my mouth – it hurts. (It all bloody hurts but my mouth hurts the most. That’s odd don’t you think? It feels is if it’s trying to twist itself into an upside down smiley… I have to struggle with it)

Now, you have no need to explain to me what passion is. For me, the physical side of our relationship, the sex itself, I mean the actual fucking, was almost sacred – dare I say pure – because it was so uncomplicated. I thought that it was the one thing that would save us… it didn’t. There was another kind of passion peculiar to this relationship, which imprisoned us, and perhaps eventually destroyed us, and you touched on it when you used the word identification in your ‘explanatory’ list. It’s to do with the way we acted when we were in each other’s presence – without the written word to protect – or shield – us. (Although this current exchange does seem to be taking a similar course, in terms of power games: risk, defence and possible surrender.)

In Venice, sitting next to an empty seat (outside, of course…) on the Vaporetti, I became, while unoccupied by your presence, particularly occupied by your absence (unsurprising – yes?). I started to think about how each of us reacted to being ‘with’ the other in strange and difficult ways – triggered by the fear that currently keeps us apart, I guess. One particular turning point – a damage or cut – in our relationship occurred when you asked me to stop ‘clawing’ you – when I thought I was cuddling you – in bed as you went to sleep. The shadow of the subsequent row – my tears, your apologies – marked the rest of our relationship, as you know, and it’s still painful to recall (I’m sorry to remind you of this again, yet I do hope you are blushing). And just writing down this episode makes me sound really stupid, but its funny how blind (and dumb) happiness can be. With half your senses gone, can the lover be anything other than inherently clumsy –
insensitive to the other’s needs… lost in a false – and possibly quite aggressive – contentment?

Knocked senseless, stupefied – what a horrible thing a lover is – no wonder you pushed me away.

I can see a couple in the street from ‘my’ window… He’s a big guy, shaven head. He hugs her close. I see what he doesn’t – its not aimed at anybody, its her unconscious secret; her smile, the way her eyes close against his body. It’s as if she’s stroking him with her eyelashes. She snuggles into his coat, her nose is red. He kisses the top of her head, and pulls up her hood so she looks silly. And then he bends his head to reach her face, and gently kisses her lips… but its the eyes – that barely perceptible gesture with the lashes – that moves me most.

Out of love (which doesn’t preclude my suffering from it) I feel lonely and cold. Yet I also seem to produce coldness. It’s my condition; my defence. The conflicting currents of warmth and coldness that run through this turbulent relationship produce a force that repulses rather than attracts. I approach you – you seem repelled by me. I back off – you appear (,) to draw me back. Everything comes down to an interpretation – which I seem to have got wrong. (Try the latter six italicised words both with and without the comma, then you decide whether it needs to be there or not.)

I remember when Stephen and Caroline came to stay, how the morning after their first night you said that you didn’t like Caroline because she talked too much, whereas I had found her really pleasant. Then the following evening you complained that I talked too much. I wondered if you’d remembered that you’d said the same about Caroline, and I thought how frustrating it was that, while you and Stephen seemed to be being prevented by your partners from talking to each other, you had both absolutely insisted that we join you. I know that there was no way that I would have got away with saying that I needed to work those three evenings, and Caroline might also have felt ambivalence over the company she was both forcing on us and being forced to keep – for Stephen’s sake. I didn’t want to be there, but not because I didn’t love you – I loved you! – it’s just that your friend bored me. And I had to work (you see, you weren’t always – or necessarily ever, actually- only there to provide me with material – there were other veins to suck, you know.) Anyway, whatever deep and meaningful thing it was that you two blokes wanted to get on with by yourselves that time, well, why didn’t you just do it? Why demand that two women who didn’t particularly want to be there come and decorate your table? Why blame us for then finding that we enjoy each other’s company?

You pull me in if I seem to be straying, which suffocates me. You wonder off if I demand attention, which hurts me.

So… your feelings, complicated by the entanglements of your demanding body, stop you from seeing me. Or are you trying to force something uncontrollable out into the open first? Words ‘written in order to hurt‘. Just to, you know, make sure that, if we ever do get to be face to face again, we really tear each other to shreds – just like we used to. Which you used to (sometimes) enjoy. Sorry. I like to provoke. It’s that hot and cold thing again, isn’t it?

Anyway, your letter ends with some finality so I guess I have to take it as a goodbye. One last comment, however, though this is not an attempt to claim the last word: this ‘dismal veil‘ – ? What I want back – and I’m finally prepared to admit that this might be the (our, my?) problem – is the rose tinted bits, my darling.

NOTE TO MYSELF

Note to myself, or to be sent?
I’m lost for words – or am I just lost?

The sudden openness thrills me, the sudden openness thrills me… your sudden openness. I’m shocked by the unintended pornography of that statement, but then again why should we always gloss over the erotic with porn’s tarnished and shoddy aura? … perhaps all that I want is there: two bodies moving into alignment, however distant from one another. Eyelashes brushing against the fabric of a coat… fucking… or just a coincidence of thoughts.

Thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking… it’s pleasurable to drift, and to forget.

Above all I’m surprised that words can bring us to this point. Yes our letters have been a game, sometimes cruel – but in surrendering to the confusion of language, to the stubborn resistance feelings pit against it, I feel as if we’ve reached an unexpected clarity of sorts: unaccountably the words connect to the voice again, and the voice connects to the body, and draws me closer. For once… for now at least, which is enough… I feel released from the wretched game of interpretation, of double guessing and bad faith.

The finality of my last words was unintended, except in so far perhaps as I anticipated you might not reply. As much as anything they amounted to a realisation, or perhaps an admission finally to myself and to you – that not only did I lose you, but that in doing so I lost, was the loser: forever the poorer for my inability to keep fighting for us. You see when it all ended I felt as if the odds were stacked against me, and my sheer ineptitude at doing or saying the right thing tortured me (and I found no pleasure in that). And yes I gave up, and yes when all is said and done the confusion perhaps came from not knowing what I really wanted. However hard I’ve tried to evade confronting it, in my heart I have felt that the end was my fault. From the other side of the gulf that opened up between us I looked at you and saw everything I have always wanted (everything that anyone could reasonably hope to find in another person), and I saw that precious thing fading off into the abysmal prospect of my own solitary future.

If I sound idealistic, deluded or pitifully romantic I probably am. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s as simple as desperately wanting what is suddenly unavailable – of idealising you in your absence (or more wretchedly, of only being able to love you in your absence): it was in fact more painful than that. What I saw when you had gone, when I couldn’t reach you anymore, was simply you as another person (not a different person – just you separate from me). It’s not that you were suddenly transformed into an impossible vision – I think I just suddenly saw you for what you had really been to me: the person above all the others I’ve met in my life who I had related to in the ways that I so desperately wanted to. And in that realisation all the arguments, all my comparisons with previous lovers, my petty disappointments with you – revealed themselves as the fucked up and narcissistic misapprehensions they were. What an ugly mirror I found myself staring into
then – and how much the more ugly I looked in comparison to you.

You did talk too much my sweet – you did and you do, but how I missed all those surplus words in the silence.

For all that I wanted to love again I could not. No one could touch me – I pushed them all away. A few came and went, but the more my self-pity consumed me the uglier I became, until no-one approached me anymore. You may have seen me surrounded by admirers at that party but you were mistaken – I know that they’re all after something else.

 

But a least you still want me.
You do want me, don’t you?

GRATIFYING…

Thank you for your letter. It begins quite graphically, I have to say; a brief moment of gratification …completely gratuitous… but admitting that I take pleasure in your words does make me feel slightly embarrassed – ashamed even, as its like admitting a dependence on something. I wonder what it is that is going on that makes me feel so excited…

The image your words brought forth was that of a cut, a gash – something cuts across me, opens me up, precisely at the point at which I was unaware of being (so) open. What is it that comes about unintentionally between us, given that both of us are such control freaks?

The unintended – the something that emerges by surprise. Where does it come from? Has it been lurking there from the start? In the very beginning, the realisation that there was something between us came so suddenly, and only after a long night of polite (though entertaining) work-related chat. Five minutes before I moved towards you to give you the obligatory goodnight ‘social’ kiss at the door, I had thought ‘I’m tired, it’s late …I’ve got to get up tomorrow‘ and suggested that we call it a night. Then, as I wearily but contentedly said my goodbyes, something radically changed in the atmosphere between us. So much so, that I think I turned my head away – did I even (nervously) laugh? I was overwhelmed and thrilled – and I’d just asked you to leave! This had never happened to me in my life before. Were you as blind to its coming as I was?

Strange, when I went to bed that night I thought, he’ll phone soon – it was 2.00am – and sure enough you did …nothing peculiar about that! We both knew that something had to be said, had to be done – the thing was raw, immediate: there was nothing between us but desire. Say that again and you can tell that trouble wasn’t far away. Since then, every exchange between us – through text, spoken word or gesture – has betrayed a strange undercurrent; there is something unpredictable at its core. And, apart from that clumsy moment at my front door, there has never again been any real correspondence between us …do you ever really know what it is that you might be saying while writing to me? Do you ever really know how I might respond?

It is of course the nature of the beast. While writing to you, I struggle. I think that I am saying one thing, but the text takes me elsewhere. It seems as if I don’t know what I’m even trying to say – I grope about, I chose this word over that, but each choice leads me astray. Before I know it, I’ve stumbled upon something unexpected, and possibly quite shocking. My intention can never be foreseen, predicted or known. What lies beneath the sentence? What lies drive the text along? One word, chosen over its close equivalent, sets the momentum going. The next word appears automatically, following paths or networks of speech and language that circle around… what? What is it that I want from you – what do I want you to produce (for me) out of this?

Perhaps, for me, what emerges, from me, is to do with my inability to forget (unlike you – you always find it so easy… to drift, as you say, in which I know there is some forgiveness). My head is clogged up with all this unresolved stuff, which in ‘self-help’ speak, I know I should ‘let go of’…

The ending of your letter was slightly less easy to consume than the beginning; a direct question that I may need to evade… do I want you? It feels as if I could say yes and you might materialise beside me. We would be ‘together again’, and I would not fear you, nor your capacity to hurt me. So why do I feel myself withdrawing? Now that you suddenly seem to be so close? It’s strange that you should find clarity in our words, though, while I discover yet more confusion…

Don’t panic – this is not a cruel game, though we have played many. I am terrified, and for reasons I feel yet more shame over. Because, while I know that there is, to an extent, always a perverse sense in which I enjoy being shamed, right now I simply want to cover up. And it’s my body- not yours – that terrifies me: I have aged. I’m very thin – perhaps I’ve never really recovered from that so-called ‘flu I had when we broke up. I wonder if I simply prefer to float in your memories – to disappear into the text – the play of your words. Certainly, standing naked in front of the mirror last night I felt fear. Again, I have to reassure you. Firstly, I’m not a monster. I still have a pretty good ass, and secondly; this is not just some kind of insurance strategy. If you really were repelled by my decrepitude you would leave anyway. I know I can’t attempt to bind you, contractually speaking – I can’t try to say as you leave: you were warned. So why don’t I risk it? You have obviously got older too…

It seems, however, as if the excitement we have for one another has shifted into this nebulous immaterial domain – the text itself is all that remains. The difference between what you and I were (when we were together) and what we are now can be represented, I think, by an enormous gap – which, however, is not a void. There is something that swells and fills this gap, like the foam that you put between the walls of houses to keep the cold out. And the air.

I’m excited by men who hold back – who appear to hold a secret. Come on too strong and it kills my desire… treat me cruelly and I walk away. It’s a fine line, I know. If you do as I ask I won’t want you – yet I ask you seriously not to hurt me. I want you to give me what you have: the secret – which to make it attractive must remain a secret. Do you remember I once asked you how it was that I always felt so insecure about my looks when I knew for a fact that I was better looking than you? You are – lets be honest – quite an ugly looking thing, yet you have something attractive (not only to me). What is it? What were those women after, for example? You knew that they wanted something else – but what is this something else? Maybe its just your immense narcissism that produces the feeling in me that you have something that is being kept in reserve, that you have something yet to be said. And if we did know what it was – if it revealed itself – would it disappoint? I don’t know for sure …but I think I’m in love with what is hidden.

It wasn’t so complicated at the beginning, perhaps because we were, in the end, blind. Now, scarred by the experience of each other, we have an impossible relation to each other, which is, as we both seem to admit, to do with presence and absence…

I’m not prolonging the agony. My body aches for a lover – perhaps someone like you, even. Yet, despite what I thought, I’m not actually ready to meet you in person. I do want to continue to anticipate you however; to enjoy the pleasures of your textual meandering. I don’t know if this is (dangerous) enough for you – but please, keep writing…