one of love's symptoms: an unsent letter

Dear Emma,

The games I play are both necessary and inexcusable. They are necessary in the sense of understanding the possibilities in what people go through. Am I somewhere new? Has this been felt and experienced before?

I caught this bug. Perhaps I’ve always had it, and it just needed the right signals to trigger. Antagonism and attraction. Reality and fantasy. Truth and lies. When one chooses not to oppose these dualities in their mind but integrate them and let them spin off, it is a dangerous proposition. If I think, “I want to see you” and “I don’t want to see you” at once, both intensely, both so sure to disagree that these counter-desires scream at each other and make either choice unbearable, where does that place me?

What I am striving for is clarity and honesty. I want to understand your position and understand my own. I used to think a glance and a smile are enough but without the sense of affection they aren’t enough. Enough… Perhaps this bug is a desire that cannot be sated, cannot be ended with an ‘enough.’ At parties of old in France the ladies would place their gloves in their wine-glasses to indicate that they would not drink wine, but several adventurous women would not. They did not have enough. Dionysos did not have enough. Nor Napoleon, nor . . . Have you considered the consequences of a desire unbridled? I have considered. It is madness, destruction, a voracious lack . . . and yet clarity, creation, the excess of life itself. Aristotle was right to revere moderation. Moderation sustains. It keeps us even, it keeps us alive. We’re moderately happy, moderately sad. This interplay and struggle between excess and moderation, between letting go and holding tight, has weighed heavily on me for several days now. And it’s because of you.

It began with a conversation. It will also end there. An encounter is a circular thing. Not a thing, an event. An event of great importance to me though I do not remember what we talked about. What I remember is what was unsaid. One cannot speak a glance or a feeling. Every shared event afterward between us will be a continuation and repetition of that event. To speak of particulars would be to miss the point.

What I seek is clarity and honesty. I’ve said words and meant the opposite. I called you mad once and that is a mistake, for I am the one that is mad. I see myself not as a human being but an amalgamation of perceptions mentally formed into a cohesive whole. As I exist, events happen to me. They change my perceptions and they change me. An imperfect metaphor is a river, with tributaries as events. I, too, am a tributary, I am your tributary. Perceptions are like water, they flow and have a force of their own. But again, I’m me, you’re you, that should be enough . . . but I get carried off. Madness consists not in being carried off but choosing to be.

In short: be on my side and I’ll be on your side. Understand that much of what has happened between us has happened in our minds, but that it is no less real because of it. Know that the sun will rise tomorrow, and us with it. Know that I would not change a thing.

CS