Pure Land

Hey.

Short post this morning. I think my muse is loose sexually - I've come to her the past couple of nights asking for a blog entry and she barely had the energy to pull the dried cigarette from her lips. I'm rubbing her feet now, sneaking a few words out while she isn't looking.

Jessie was rifling through boxes today and found literally hundreds of the e-mails we exchanged in the first year of our relationship. I was in Florida, she was in Meadville, PA, and so it was an exercise in IM, e-mail, and the occasional phone call. It's hard to remember what it felt like early on - we're very different now, of course - but I remember that we had perfected the art of e-combat. Somehow fighting over e-mail and IM would make us feel closer, give us something, even something sour, to keep the taste of each other's company in our mouth. We'd talk for an hour and a half over IM starting at 10 PM, and then by 11:30 we'd be getting tired so we'd fight about something stupid, she'd go to bed angry while I wrote a furious 2-page e-mail, she'd write back in the morning, and by noontime we'd made up and apologized.

Rinse. Repeat. It's a miracle we made it through that first year. I was a lost cause as a boyfriend for lots of reasons, most too interesting for a blog of such stunning mediocrity, but she stuck it out with me, and so far so good :)

As fun as it is to find old letters, it's dangerous to read old e-mails. A friend once warned me that old e-mails, like old spirits, were best left undisturbed. Unlike a handwritten letter, an e-mail is so casual, so intimate, like a bandage over a fresh wound or wet saliva sealing an envelope. They are little pieces of you splattered about, and the old ones, loving or hurtful, draw blood on their way into fresh air. Mourning for a lost friend, nostalgia for a young love, promises unkept... add as many melodramatic instances as you care to. Old e-mail is risky business. The little rivers that seemed like raging floods, the grand proclamations that were really semi-colons... It's a miracle anyone is afloat, no?

I wish my muse had a name. Mat's is named Caissa, which is lovely, and I've borrowed her many times, usually returning her naked but satisfied. My own muse hasn't told me her name yet. She usually crashes on the couch long after I'm asleep. I haven't minded not knowing until right now, watching her ease softly into sleep. Names are really the only things connecting us sometimes.

sweet dreams,

martin