Love Letters, No. 9

Sleep comes.

Sweet calm, rescue, and if God exists then I am nestled warm in her womb tonight. The universe folds for me a hammock, a cocoon, and I drift soundless thoughtless hopeless between the stars, if only for a few hours.

I wake heavy, osmium in my blood, eyelids glued and a knife in my neck, but I slept. I wake to something missing beneath my arm. You’re not here. Empty bed, I toss in the flat gray twisting field and remember why I hated sleep to begin with: every moment spent sleeping is one less spent with you. Making you laugh, feeling your warmth. The way you see the whole world as beauty defined is how a God should see it. As a painting that just needs a careful touch, tender, and your hand is a love-colored feather if ever one existed.

How many times have you stayed my heel from an unsuspecting spider?

“Don’t! He’s not hurting you.”

You pout, and I can’t honestly say I agree, but it makes me think. How would I like it? That was your plan all along.

If I take this one out, that takes the gamble out of wondering if he’ll be the one to crawl down my throat tonight while I’m asleep. You know, we eat so many spiders in a lifetime. They must eat even fewer of us. But that neither warrants nor excuses my impulse to crush it just for landing in my path. Oppenheimer had the right idea, destruction and something. But in my case, without all the remorse.

That’s where you come in.

You make me a gentler giant. A better man. A philistine, too. My heart swells like the Grinch. Misshapen now, sculpted by Dali himself, and all you’ve done is change out of your work clothes. You’re still in bra and panties walking through the living room, and I’m in heat, I’m in moaning, swelling, stiffening pain, wanting. You set your sights on the pup first, young as he is, his psyche is more delicate, you think. You don’t know the half of it. He’s been fine all day licking his own asshole, chewing on a soggy rope, but I’ve been here smoldering sickened panting gripping white knuckled sweating desperately wanting your touch from the moment I woke to another empty bed on another empty morning and I need you this very instant.

A tree falls in the woods. No one is there to hear it. But that’s not the whole story. There are other players in this game. A spider built its nest between two limbs, jutted out and hanging brave over the precipice, and it felt every horrifying second of the fall. Saw the aftermath. Devastation. According to you, we should start a committee to help rebuild, like FEMA, only better. You know, really doing something.

You’re saving the world one broken web at a time, starting with my own.

I’ll never find the words to tell you how much I love you for it.