You ask for very little.
Historically, this is true.
Hi, I was calling to
Hi is better than hello. It’s smaller.
Hi.
Or hey. Hey delivered as a smoother version of hi. A dab of sound.
They will recognise your voice.
Even from that dab.
They’ll know it’s you.
They will know you are you, but quite possibly misunderstand what that implies.
Hey.
I was not calling to say that you are endless information. My palms against your back have touched unmistakably the way that you’re built out of shouts and whispers, croons — you have these areas that croon.
You have sweet shapes.
You have places about you that shift my senses and make me have to understand your heats as flavours. You lead to kissing. Always.
You lead to blatant inadequacy and the fear of death, and the kissing blesses all of that away. You unharm me.
And I will never get used to the times when your breath splinters, or to the necessity of cradling. It is correct to cradle you.
There have been times when I have heard you and wanted only to run and cure whatever was wrong, whatever could be wrong, whatever might be wrong.
I am not calling to say that.
So I won’t say that.
It would be, to a degree — not that you’re ungrateful — an inventory of things you’ve never asked for.
Hey.
I couldn’t predict what you would give me.
And you’d have to agree, I didn’t ask for it.
You’ll only tell them the one thing, small sound.
Hey.
After which they will have recognised your voice and then they’ll want to chat and you’ll need to be savage and get in there first like a cold-calling salesman.
Doing this will be vile. Completely. How completely vile of you.
And thereafter they’ll have their own points they need to make and comments, of course. You will end up having a discussion, conversing.
You’re already upset, as it is.
So when they start talking you’ll really be in trouble.
Hey, I
You won’t make a call, then. Not any kind of call — not ringing to leave them a message and ducking the issues arising, which would be cowardly to a degree that you might not survive. You might remain despicable to yourself for the duration after that.
You’ve established — because you intend to live decently, always have — this habit of testing your actions in advance. You ask — will doing this leave me with permanent regrets?
It’s a not unreasonable question.
In this case, simply dumping your decision as a fuzzily recorded message, talking when you’re sure that they can’t answer back, would be impossible. It would be too wrong.
Dear.
A letter defeats itself from the very start.
Dear.
It would be like confessing what you no longer should.
To Whom It May Concern:
Which would mean pretending you can’t name them and do not hold them dear.
You do hold them.
Dear God.
To whom we will offer no prayers, because we neither deserve them, nor understand how they would work.
No letter.
No.
No here are your fingers where mine have rested and not been at rest, where they’ve howled, to be more accurate, in the usual manner for you for you for dear you, tendrils of darkness and liquid wishes rippling along the little bones, slowing minorly at each joint and at each thrum where you have previously kissed and the paper was warm when I left it, warm where I paused, where my skin was waiting, and tends to wait and has learned to wait and croons — I like to think it croons and you have found this in me, touched and heard this in my skin — and if you read what I put for you in ink, old-fashioned ink, it will show you the blurs and hesitations in my hope and the shrinking when I get uneasy and my horrible desire to push through and reach you where you will be, where you will be holding my mind in this, my most soft things in this, and you’ll be fragile there and breathing delicate and not enough loved because I have not enough love because there is not enough love because you make sure that my self and my love are both not enough. I mean to be more, but I am not.
Believe me, I didn’t ask for that.
And no one meant to give it.
You do realise.
And a letter would be inappropriate, because you shouldn’t continue to be opened and unfolded in that manner, it would give the wrong impression.
Dear.
Very dear.
You could instead consider the many electronic options which will keep you eternally untouched. Clean.
But you can’t type some absence or presence of light across a screen and hope to send it without your self-esteem intervening.
It would be like wrapping your note round a stone and then throwing it in through their window.
I just wanted to say.
There is no easy way to say.
I have to say.
You might hit them, hurt them.
But you’re not a vandal.
I’m contacting you in this way to tell you I’ll never contact you again.
You’re not the person this would seem to make you.
I would love to. I did love to.
You’re not the person you seem to be when you’re with them.
You’re not that frail little list of attempts to do better than you have and be better and act better when eventually, you realise, you won’t. You’ll be disappointing. You’ll do worse.
I think it would be better if you could go.
I think I would be better if you could go.
I think I could revert to being worse in a way that would be better if you could go.
Please go.
It will make no sense to tell them how much this appals you.
Unless they are also appalled, which you suspect, and which means that soon they will appal you, which will be completely unbearable and when you ask for their support you won’t, and shouldn’t, get it.
You can’t let that happen. You can’t wait for that to happen. Not any longer.
You’re worn out.
You’re worn out and away.
Very dear.
Your only realistic option is to do nothing and to say nothing, to answer nothing and eventually they’ll work out what’s going on and, by then, they will hate you enough for matters to be simpler.
You don’t want them to have any difficulty. You really, really don’t.
So very dear.
Not at any time.
This Man
THERE’S THIS MAN and he’s telling you a story. Only he’s not.
You’re sitting together on uneasy, weatherproof chairs. He’s dragged both of them out here to benefit from the sun, hauled out the table too and nobody from the café made any objections. He seemed authoritative when he said, ‘First good day of the year. How lovely.’ And he left a pause beyond lovely during which he did not look at you.