love letters and alt.gothic

[thejunipertree]

Browsing through my past posts on Usenet, I found this post I'd written on 06-22-02 on alt.gothic. Amazingly, I still like what I wrote. It may be something I expand at a later date.

Love letters are a virus, a sickness.

I used to compulsively write love letters.
Hundreds upon hundreds of daily missives
written either with tap-tapping fingers
on a keyboard or a slowly scrawling
pen on paper. I promised the moon and
stars, I debased myself. I begged to be
Jerusalem. I painted an apple gold and
mailed it with a little scroll reading
"for the most beautiful". I wrote cotton
candy stories. I sent a platypus and an
armidillo in a box.


I put so much of myself into these actions.
I breathed life into my words and shed
blood for the same.


Every word put onto paper was an effort
to show the receipient how much I loved
them, that my words could be believed.
If I could have torn my heart from my
chest and lived, then you damn well know
that it would have been wrapped up in
a neat, little parcel and shipped off Priority
Mail.


I made myself a fool with those words
and offerings. Writing gave my thoughts
a permenance that speech never could.
Writing made it more powerful, more
palpable.


And in return, I received other words. And
other gifts. I still have all of those things,
despite the fact that the men who sent
them are no longer my lovers.


"Words endure, flesh does not."


Truer words have never been spoken.
Which is why I no longer write love letters,
much to my present lover's terrible
apparent dismay. I don't trust words
anymore and therefore refuse to inflict
them, in a love letter sense, upon anyone
ever again.