A Love Letter To No One

The thing about Los Angeles is that it feels embryonic. I have been to San Francisco and it lets you know its chill full and well and without pretense.

It’s brisk and when the sun sets it has no fear of affecting you with its chill. I’ve been to the coast, too. Monterrey, Big Sur. Even back East in the Carolinas, Florida, islands in the gulf. They all have their extremities. This is different. It’s a womb—an ether hanging there not telling where your being begins and ends in the world around entire.

The ocean is there precipitously in the distance, but not violently insisting on itself like the others. The rest of the places are simple iterations of a single wound. Violent, jagged, arresting. Los Angeles is an anesthetic. It’s a geographic narcotic that whispers in perfect humidity and even more perfect hair.

She was the same. She floated and tempered like an emulsified nectar. She was neither clashing, violent, or catastrophically tectonic. But neither was she placid or tired. She hummed in that resonant frequency of textured sunsets. She was the vibration that you paid no attention to until it turned off, and you wondered how you’d ever manage that hollow discomfort after the sun set and humming quieted.

She didn’t intoxicate like libations or numb with her piercing light. No, she was redemptive. Restorative. She was nothing momentary or immediately gratifying. She was like health. Like aerobics. Like green, leafy vegetables. She was kale and cytoplankton and wheat grass. Nitrogen. Phosphorous. Chlorophyll. She was nourishing and substantive.

She wasn’t decadent or indulgent. She was good in the most crystalline and pure sense of the phrase. She was like free-basing sunshine. But in a way that took time and exhaustive effort. .She was everything and she vibrated in the very smells I yearned and the taste…She tasted like a wound. Like the primal earth. Her mouth and her lips and concupiscent curve of her coalescing cheeks with salty remnants of the day.

She was the conduit of the taste for life itself.

Others could be electric and crack and flaking warmth of life. They could titillate and they could wound and they could draw blood. And she could too but it felt and tingled with a force that went beyond. The others: life, women, drugs, sex. They were all unencumbered by the force of time. But she was time’s master. It was her entity. Because for her, the glowing being of my everlasting, for her, you had to wait.

And it was worth it. Because we would dance. And whisper something sweet in her ear that made her slightly ashamed to be hearing it in public, but the warmth of her chest and mine would make it okay. And the preternatural sparkling of her eyes would be our leeching roots to the pulse of the world to come.