Alec

by William di Canzio

Alec read: 6 Jan 1917 I’d always found writing a chore. But not to you. Because when I’m writing to you you’re here with me, the two of us together, alone with each other. I made that discovery when I started writing you on the ship sailing to you-know-where. Even though there was no chance of privacy at all, when I wrote to you I was alone with you. Maybe that’s why after all the misery, madness, drugs, being tied up and talked down to, or talked over as if I neither heard nor understood nor was even in the room, it actually made me feel happy to get this journal back, which they’d kept with the belongings of the other MIAs. I’d forgot what happiness felt like. So when I felt it, I wept and laughed at once. That was dandy with the medics because it confirmed their erudite diagnosis that I was crazy. Which I was. But they didn’t know that getting back my battered copybook with the torn cover and script so smudged and crabbed that only I (and you) could read it was like being with you again! He looked up from the notebook. Maurice was sleeping, spread-eagled across their bed. For a couple of days they’d hardly gone out, making love again and again. They were staying not in the hotel but in Alec’s room, right over the water. The same sea, he thought, that had nearly drowned Maurice now soothed his sleep with its gentle lapping. He went back to reading: 7 Jan 17 When they finally ID-ed me, they danced a jig, I’m told, because then it was official: the evacuation had been effe...