Intimate Stranger

READER, SWEET READER

Reader, sweet Reader — I know I ask much of you. You have been very patient with me, waiting for the meaning of my rambling (if any, if ever). But the longer I hold forth the closer you will come to me until, at last, you sigh in my arms.

This is my dearest desire. I start to sense you through the words, the way they bounce off you. You are still young and so beautiful, you have a curl to your lips, you sometimes look askance at me through your eyelashes. Dare I think that your heart thumps a little quicker as you turn the pages? How well you know me by now! (Or think you do.) At night I toss restlessly when I dream of you and in the morning there’s the odor of your sex on my pillow.

And yet, I do not want to tie you down; for us love will be in leaving, just as it is without end or design. For this story to move forward to closure there must be the two of us — like Huitzilopochtli, the white sun god as personification of day and summer and south and fire, and the black Tezcatlipoca, s/he of the set sun and of night and firmament and winter and north and water. Yes, eventually there will be parting.

The presence of both of us for now will ensure that the book remains in equilibrium. Where are you? I certainly need to continue talking to you, I search for you from day to night. Maybe I am looking for myself, maybe because I only exist in your mind. But I start to sense myself through the words, in the way your reading and looking bounce off me. This book will be our meeting ground and our shared existence. Of course, I’m making of it the bed in which we shall lie for me to whisper stories in your ear. I don’t want to be forward, but perhaps then you’ll turn and look at me and the sun will set in the water.

Will you? Without the one the other cannot exist. Today I heard about two twin ladies in their great old age, having lost both their husbands and the memory of orgasms and names, sitting together in a room warmed by an evening sun, and the one turning in utter uncertainty to the other to enquire plaintively: “Tell me, am I alive?”