love | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

6/Dec/2013

Fifth Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: I Will Start This Love Letter in Medias Res because Otherwise I Will Never Dare to Say This

You held my hands above my head and I was helpless and this forced something in me to change, the penny finally dropped, and I swear you could hear it from my open mouth. Something shifted, like quicksand, and I saw you with new eyes. Do you understand what was going through my head at that time? It was the only time you rendered me speechless, bizarrely. And I closed my eyes and let you take me and I forgive you.

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5/Dec/2013

Fourth Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: Hypocrisy

Your clothes hugged you tight and I wondered how the muscles on your back would look, but I closed the door on your rainstruck face in the middle of the night and I said, “I have things to do.” I felt like my heart had sunk to my stomach and was being dissolved in its acid. You were so sad, you would have done anything for me, for a cup of hot chocolate and a listening ear. We trembled for different reasons.

Yes, of course I hate myself. There is no reason you would even open this letter.

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4/Dec/2013

Third Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: I Miss Your Accent

How you opened the floodgates and let every little influence through, just to sound like you came from somewhere other than your hometown. I liked the way you would get plastered; they would trickle back then, all the regional words, all the hang-ups you had worked so hard on to shrug off. I miss the way you could talk about a place you’d never been to, and make me feel like I’d been there with you. Your half-finished novels, your half-drowned poetry. I know I was just a phase for you. I miss that phase.

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3/Dec/2013

Second Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: I Know You Said Not to Write

I’ve been thinking about you. The weather’s been in a sour mood. There’s a causal link there but I can’t figure out which way it goes. You said once, smiling, that you were cursed to umbrellas, good coffee, and books.

Did you know that the rain was lukewarm and perfect on that night you bailed on skinny-dipping? I imagined your shoulderblades.

Sorry. There’s no easy way to say this; I need to ask you a favour. In person. Come to the pub the day after you receive this letter. I’ll explain everything.

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2/Dec/2013

First Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: Something I Imagined

There is interference on the line, and a delay to boot, and I feel like I’m in love with an entity the other end of the galaxy. Two distant stars radiating outward, hoping that the signal-noise ratio is high enough to have a conversation. But I mean every gesture, every thing I repeat three times hoping one of them will get through, and I cherish what I hear from you, and when you say,

“I love you,”

I feel like I am touching you for just a split-second, all distance in the world be damned.

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18/Nov/2013

2013 NaNoWriMo Excerpt #13

She left, barefoot, but left the door open, which seemed to suggest that he follow. He followed, leaving his own shoes, but closing the door behind him. They walked through the fog a for a while until they came to the bridge. It still looked new, and he smiled involuntarily at the sight of it. Rakel turned sharply right and started walking along the shore. They found a boat, and Rakel got in it. Mos hesitated, then followed after her. She started rowing.

“I love everyone,” she said, when they were out at sea. “But especially you. It hurts. It hurts so much.”

“Loving me?”

“Yes, loving you.”

“We didn’t really meet via online dating, did we?”

Rakel shook her head. “It hurts.”

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30/Sep/2013

The Sweetest Dead Girl

He was young, and he believed in destiny. One day he woke up with an idea, and he bathed his dark, smooth skin in citrus oil until it glowed crimson, and set out. The first tattoo parlour he found sounded like angry insects and had the colours of a poisonous flower.

He said to the tattoo artist, who was a muscular man who seemed to have bulked up solely to get more skin to draw on, “I want to know the name of the sweetest dead girl that you ever knew, and I would like that tattooed on my arm.”

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26/Sep/2013

Forever

Both the words chronic and permanent seem to mean forever at a first glance. The dictionary defines them not as forever per se, but kind of, sort of, basically. This is counter-intuitive, but like many counter-intuitive things, they make sense the more you think about them. A permanent resident is one with no plans to change that status, and as long as they do not change, they are functionally different from forever. A chronic illness can go away, but probably won’t. It is incurable. You understand.

This is just to say,

I said I would love you forever. I lied.

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24/Sep/2013

Death with Benefits

She was in love with Death himself, and figured that he must have a thing for her to some degree too, because she kept seeing him out of the corner of her eyes.

He was there – tall, dark, and … courteous, when she was bleeding out on the kitchen floor. He was the one who called the ambulance, she remembered the clacking of bleached bone against the slider on the rotary phone she had got as a gag.

He looked at blue things streaming out of her, touched them with his scythe, and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

based on an idea shamelessly pilfered from the mind of the author of girlshapedguitar.wordpress.com :)

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23/Sep/2013

Correspondance

A fog rolls in, billowy and fistful, and an ocean follows it. Rivulets of water race each other across my yard, surrounding my house. As soon as the water has covered an area, it goes still like a mountain pond, and I see a perfect reflection of the sky in it. My house starts sinking, I rush to the rowboat perched on my roof. I manage to climb into it and then I am alone.

(Somewhere far away, you tell me that you love me.)

(I left the words I wanted to say to you behind, now all is fog.)

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Tag: love