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It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet.
To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you.
You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time.
But I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe.
It’s not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It’s that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood.
My eccentricities are tolerated: my love of cities, of poetry, my appreciation for being rootless, for being, in some ways, more Gardener than Garden, or Gardened. My appetites, that being flooded with Garden can’t seem to sate.
You, though, Red— ••• My Apple Tree, my Brightness, Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying. I wanted to say, I want to make you tea to drink, but didn’t, and you wrote to me of doing so; I wanted to say, your letter lives inside me in the most literal way possible, but didn’t, and you wrote to me of structures and events. I wanted to say, words hurt, but metaphors go between, like bridges, and words are like stone to build bridges, hewn from the earth in agony but making a new thing, a shared thing, a thing that is more than one Shift.
Do you laugh, sea foam? Do you smile, ice, and observe your triumph with an angel’s remove? Sapphire-flamed phoenix, risen, do you command me once again to look upon your works and despair?
But your last letter . . . I am so good at missing things. At making myself not see. I stand at a cliff’s edge, and—hell.
I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.
I sought loneliness when I was young. You’ve seen me there: on my promontory, patient and unaware. But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.
Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you. I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell; I’ll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs; I’ll— stop, here, I’ll stop. This is probably not how this is done. I want flowers from Cephalus and diamonds from Neptune, and I want to scorch the thousand earths between us to see what blooms from the ash, so we
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“You root in the air, my epiphyte. It’s no hard thing to trace the new growth to you, singly. You have always,” says Garden, planting the words into Blue’s smile like strangler fig, “been too fond of signing your work.”
Your letter, the sting, the beauty of it. Those forevers you promise. Neptune. I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me—I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.
She peers behind the faceplates while the experts work, and whenever she can see them, they are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily. She does not think they always looked so calm.
I love you. If you’ve come this far, that’s all I can say. I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the depths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up—and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.
Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.
Dearest, deepest Blue— At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.
Red screams at the sky. She calls Beings in which she does not believe to account. She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.
No death sticks but the one that matters.
Red falls, flies, down threads she’s never dared touch, into Garden. She enters as a letter, sealed in Blue.
When you said you wouldn’t write again, when you said—that is the only letter of yours I’ve wanted to obliterate from myself. If I’m honest, that’s part of why I took the bait. To be unmade, that last written over—to be destroyed by you was easier, truly, than living with what you proposed. But I’m greedy, Red. I wanted the last word as well as the first.
You’ve always been the hunger at the heart of me, Red—my teeth, my claws, my poisoned apple. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I made you and you made me.
