Song Cards; or, Love Letter Shuffle【歌ガルタ；恋文をシャッフル】

We wrote each others’ dreams down on paper exactly the same, down to the punctuation. It was a game. A middle school syndrome that the two of us did not outgrow until after college.

We’d pass the slivers of our late night films around the table in a great shuffle with friends. Sometimes, it was like dealing a deck of cards. Other times, we would play it tournament style: one against another until only two of us were left. 

How well did we know one another? Even down to our dreams? Were we one-minded even down to that collective unconscious?

He kept mine and, of the ones we did together privately, I kept his in a box with movie stubs, playbills, and his love letters in high school; and in college, I moved our dreams and his love letters in together with my math research papers.

I don’t know if he still has mine. He’s married now, so I assume not, but who’s to say? Up until his child’s first birthday or further, he’d still come up to me, asking if I thought about him? Did I still think about us?

He would ask me so many questions that I cannot possibly recollect them all nor record all the ones I remember in this, my briefe account.

It is hazily, like the faded pencil in his childish hand on the paper, I recall the final memories of meetings in a train station, of half or full arguments on stairs as I was walking away from him.

“Why do you keep coming to see me if you’re dating someone else?” I asked.

Slowly and painfully turned with the twisting of a knife into me crying out, “Why are you still seeing me when you’re engaged?”

And into what, at the time, was my greatest nightmare, “Why are you telling me you love me right after you’ve married someone else? How dare you tell me you made a mistake and then take it back a week later and say you think you made the right choice?”

I cried myself into the water he always worked me up into: a Pygmalion of tears, 

divorced from my own heart, 

torn into pieces like the lone swan on the lake: dying inside 

for a man who had never treated me like he loved me

and vowed he never would by saying he did.

I felt stripped down to the wind. The wild panic of heartbreak that made the world spin and like a double edged blade cut back on me knowing he would not steady me.

It crashed down completely when my living nightmare was made flesh. I wounded myself afresh as I asked, “Why do you still kiss me when you have a child?”

There were so many questions and never any answers between two as incompatible as we were and as emotionally cruel as he was.

His sweet, last kisses burned like the letters in the fires of my hate:

All torn up in the funeral pyre of love, 

like incendiary flowers, 

the white petals of their pages arose, 

held themselves up like brightening angels 

of death rising first in the mourning, 

for adoration of their fatal work at the Matins.

crumpling heads bowed in prayer,

glowing one final, girlish blush

alike Eos’ dawn with all men,

the last light in her heart fading

to darkness, Heaven’s egg and fallen feathers,

lie a wast: cold shell, broken promises.

I watched them all go up as I sat on my knees next to my parents’ fireplace, stoking the flames in my private h*ll, only to see them fall. 

I know not what to do. String of fate cut by a man who never did anything, but string me along year after year.

My childish hand in his and his in mine; him begging his parents to let him see me and I begging mine to see him. And the whole first year of life, he did come to see me near every day. His face both like an eclipse and trees’ shade from every light, his eyes: my only sight. His face beamed alike to God’s shining face over me.

Reflections for many rainy days after were filled mit Ungeduld and an aimlessness ennui which muttered German poems from my youth under my breath:

Ich bin nicht gern, wo ich herkomme.

Ich bin nicht gern, wo ich hinfahre.

Like directionless hands in darkness:

I searched for my phone amongst the rubble of tissues and twisted covers with swollen red, sightless eyes, seeing less with the side-clicked, sudden brightness of the screen:

3:28 AM glared at me with an almost relentless rage that subsided as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

The fragments of dreams still repeating themselves in my half-asleep head:

Ich liebe dich

Du liebst mich nicht

Ich bin die Nacht

Du bist das Licht

Ich der Schmerz

Du bist das Glück

Drum schaue nie

zu mir zurück

Ich weiß und fühl es

bitterlich

Du liebst mich nicht

Ich liebe dich

Ich weiß und fühl es

bitterlich

Du liebst mich nicht

Ich weiß und fühl es

bitterlich

Du liebst mich nicht

Du liebst mich nicht

Du liebst mich nicht

My nightmares trail off into a frightful sleep. It is only in these dreams that I see him now, but in them he still leaves me.

His mom and mine are speaking again. My ears are up whenever I hear one of them speak his name over the phone or at brunch in my mother’s house. 

My heart is in a constant pain praying for one to mention the word divorce, troubles at home, anything at all. Please say he cheats on her, too, so I can feel the least bit less bitter. Please say he breaks her heart every day. Please say that hers hurts worse than mine.

He comes over one day, out of the blue, to visit his mom. We’re sitting on the deck together and while they’re chatting about something in the kitchen; he asks if I want to try again and puts a pen and paper down on the table.