- "i shall confess to you that i'd been growing complacent. bored even [...]. but then you turned up. my margins vanished. every move i'd made by rote. i had to bring myself to fully. you brought soe depth to you'r side speed, some staying power, and i found myself working a capacity again. you invigorated your shift's war effort and, in so doing, invigorated me.
- "my most insidious blue,"
- "my perfect red"
- "do you always play things safe, then? run the numbers so precisely that you can reject out of hand any scenery that has projected sucess rate of less than 8- percent? it grieves me to think you'd make a borking poker player.but then i imagine you'd cheat, and that's a comfort. (i'd never want you to let me win. the very idea!)
- "'and then we'd be at each other's throats even more' oh, petal. you say that like it's a bad thing."
- "tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all."
- "even infinity needs to start somewhere."
- "if w're to be at war, we might as well entertain one another."
- "yours, red"
- "it was very cold out on the ice. your letter warmed me."
- "and then you write me, you write in furnace and in flame."
- "it feels harder to write than it should. it feels easier to write than it should, as well. i'm contradicting myself. the geometers would be ashamed."
- "i, whatever i was, whatever i am"
- "dearest 0000ff"
- "it is difficult - it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask do i have you still, when they end a letter with yours mean it in any substantive way."
- "but red letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her finger's tips, between the lines of her palms. she presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks [...]. she thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name red in her next letter [...]. vermillion lie. scarlet tanager. parthian thread. my red, red rose."
- "it's amazing how much blue there is in the world, if you look. you're different colors of flame: bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germaniums, and arsenic. see? i pour you into things."
- "i like writing you. i like reading you."
- so in this letter i am yours. not garden's, not your mission's, but yours, alone. i am yours in other ways as well: yours as i watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as i debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as i review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. yours."
- "she collects blues and keeps them."
- "her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. she stained the page with herself."
- "every evening i see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us."
- "to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room."
- "i keep turning away from speaking of your letter. i feel - to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small. i don't want to do that. i suppose in some ways i'm more garden's child than she knows. even poetry, which breaks language into meanin - poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. what's supple, whipping soft, and fresh grows hard, grows armor. if i could touch you, put my finger to your temple and sink you into me the way garden does - perhapes then. but i would never."
- "i have built a you within me, or you have. i wonder what of me there is in you."
- "letters are structures, not events. yours give me a place to live inside."
- "you are yourself, and so remain, as i remain, yours, red."
- "she used to love such fire. now it only reminds her of who's not there."
- "red trusts her so far down in the bone she has to ponder a long while to realize what distrust might imply - what these seeds might be, what they might do to her if she's wrong."
- "dear price greater than rubies,"
- "i feel you, the needle of you, dancing up and downthread with breathtaking abandon. i feel your hand in places i've touched. you move so fast, so furious, and in your wake the braid thickens, admits fewer and fewer strands, while garden scowls thunderclaps and bids me deepen my work. i like to think of all the ways i could have stopped you, were i so inclined."
- "i like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which i think of you. it feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while i drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet."
- "my blueprint"
- (i taste the letters still. they linger. they undermine all other flavors, pipe them full of you.)"
- "i sing myself out to you, and my talons clutch the branch, and i am wrung out until your mext letter gives me breath, fills me to bursting."
- "i feel almost invincible in our battles' wake: a kind of achilles, fleet footed and light of touch. only in this nonexistent place our letter weave do i feel weak. how i love to have no armor here."
- "i dream of you. i kepp more of you inside my mind, my physical, personal, squishy mind, than i keep any other world or time. i dream myself a seed between your teeth, or a tree tapped by your reed. i dream of thorns and gardens, and i dream of tea."
- "dear strawberry."
- "i want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as i long to sastify them, one letter-seed at a time." i want to tell you something about myself. something true, or nothing at all. yours, blue."
- "all good stories travel from the outside in."
- "dear raspberry,"
- "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. not that it didn't before - garden loves music with a depth impossible to sound - but now it's song for me alone."
- "i was only my own body, only my own senses, only a girl whose parents were running to her because she had a bad dream. i touched their faces, and they were mine; i touched the bed i was on, smelled apples stewing somewhere outside. it was as if, in my own small way, i'd become garden- so me in my wholeness, me in my fingers, in my hair, in my skin, whole the way garden is whole, but apart."
- "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, bur didn't, and you wrote to me 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 hurts, 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. but i didn't, and you spoke of wounds. i want to say, now, before you can beat me to it - red, when i think of this seed in your mouth i imagine having placed it there myself, my fingers on your lips."
- "love, blue."
- "i write in fire across the sky, a plummet to match your rise."
- "i love you, blue, have i always? haven't i?"
- "there was, i a sure, a time i did not know you. or did i dream that was me, as i've so often dreamed of you? have we always fulfilled one another in the chase? i remember hunting you through samarkand, thrilling to think i might touch the loosening strands of you hair. 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 besid 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 it's 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 promotory, 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."
- "love, red."
- "my heart's own blood."
- "i dance to you in a body built for sweetness, a body that tears itself apart in defense for what it loves."
- "i dance _ this will be a very boring letter - because this thing in e, this piping heat, this rising sun that hardly fits in the sky of me won't stay put. to know you my equal in this, too - this beat of my blood's drum, this feast that won't diminish no matter how i ravage it - red. red, red, red, red, i want to write you poetry, and i am laughing, understand, as i teach this small body my joy, laughing at the joke of me and the relief, the relief of being supine on a stone slab with a knife above and seeing your hand and eyes guiding it."
- "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 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 can discover it hand in hand, content in context, intelligible on to each other. i want to meet you in every place i have loved."
- "listen to me - i am your echo. i would rather break the world than lose you. i see one solution. it's - it should be - easy, let me go. and i'll let 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 them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's writeen in all the strands it will be to you."
- "you'll have to burn this. i hope you can keep it. i keep the memory. i imagine your hands on the paper. i imagine your fire. i wish i could hold you. i love you."
- "to think this letter being read sickens her, but she writes it anyway, because whatever happens next, this is the end. because this is the end, she cannot resist the urge to make this deadly thing beautiful."
- "forever yours, red"
- "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 winfs, in stars. in the depths of lonely woods where i wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. you slide back through my life, and i have known you since before i know you. i know your solitude and poise, the clenched fist of you, the blade: a glass shard in garden's green glowing world. and yet you'd never fit in mine. i wish i could have shown you where i'm from, hand in hand, the world i set out to build and protect - i don't think you would have liked it, but i want to see it reflected in your eyes. i wish i could have seen your braid, and i wish we could have left all those horror shows behind and found one together, for ourselves. that's all i want now. a small place, a dog, green grass. to touch your hand. to run my fingers through your hair."
- "i would have fought you forever. i would have wrestled you through time. i would have turned you, and been turned. i would do anything. i have done so much, and would have done as much again, and more. and yet here i am, a fool, writing you one last time, and here you are, a fool, reading me. we're one, at least, in folly."
- "love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down. you gave me so much - a history, a future, a calm that lets me write those words though i'm breaking. i hope i've given you something in return - think you would want me to know i have. and what we've done will stand, no matter how they weave the world against us. it's done now, and forever. what will i do, sky? lake, what? bluebird, iris, ultramarine, how can there me more when this is done? but it will never end - that's the answer. there is always us."
- "dearest, deepest blue - at the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, i love you."
- "it's everything i wanted from an enemy. i wish you could hear me clap."
- "i love you. that was true. with what's left of me i can't help but love you still. this is how you win. red: a long game, a subtle hand played well. you played me like a symphony, and i hope you won't mind me feeling a little proud of you for such a magnificent betrayal."
- "thank you, red. it was a hell of a ride. take care my yew berry, my wild cherry, my foxglove. yours, blue."
- "red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something."
- "i died thinking that if anyone could keep me alive, it would be you. it was, i confess to you here, a smug thought, that i died by my own hand, and was raised by yours."
- "i made you and you made me."
- "but maybe this is how we win, red. you and me. this is how we win."
sep 2 2020 ∞
sep 8 2020 +