Confessions

Dear Jon -

I have always loved lists. There is a line from a Bukowski poem:

the power and
the glory of
two slippers under
a bed

It's stuck with me since I was in high school doing performance pieces at the cafe and sleeping with drunk journalists and the undercover narc guys. It stuck with me because we live in a holographic universe, where the smallest detail is a reflection of the whole. I didn't know that, then, and I'm not sure I know it now, but isn't that what psychology is about? Taking people's pieces, their fragments, and extrapolating from those parts their wholes?

Lists are a way to do this. Lists are a way of cataloging those beautiful and seemingly insignificant moments which contain within them the power and the glory of the whole.

I want to list you. I want to make a list of all of those insignificances which add you up for me, but I think about that client we discussed in who is engaging in those stalking behaviors and I wonder if I don't get close to that line, sometimes. I know I'm batshit crazy for you, but am I a stalker? Before I got married, I drove past your house a few times. In my defense, I was single and my house was four blocks from yours. It was easy to take the little longer way home to see if your car was in the drive or to just admire the hops growing in your front yard.

Hops growing in your yard
Freckles on your lips
The way you tighten half of your mouth to non-verbally communicate that you are thinking and that you might disagree but are too polite to say that
The lines at the corners of your eyes when you smile or laugh
The way you preface everything until it's meaningless
Your incessant leg tapping
Shrugging your shoulders with your hands in your pockets and shivering in the cold
How aware you are of all of your movements and every word you say
You blink slowly, and look far away, as if everything is painful to look at or think about
The cadence of your voice when reciting song lyrics as if you're reading performance poetry, ending every line with an upturn of the voice as if it's half a question
Oh, your voice when you sing, Jon... when you sing...
Driving and talking with a cigarette in the corner of your mouth
At least once a week you tell me you're going to the bathroom. I'm beginning to think you have irritable bowels or something.
Your brown leather note pad, beat up, like a 50's poet would take to a cafe
Hand gestures in rhythm to speech patterns
You narrow your eyes when you mean what you say
The awkward grace with which you remove a cigarette from a pack
Your little cat walking on your shoulders while you try to recite poetry
Your old man sweaters, especially the golf one. My goodness.
Suspenders at spring banquet
You always have the silliest notes written to yourself on your hand
When I tell you a story, your eyes watch my eyes until I meet them
That stupid, beat up, green hat with the asymmetrical fray on the bill and the buckle that makes you look like such a hipster

Should I go on? I could.

Enough. I have several unfinished businesses dealing with you thus far:
1. Have to touch you. Sometime. Somehow. Maybe Monday. Or if I txt you and convince you to let me come over tomorrow (Sun) night. Though I'm not sure I'll have the balls to do it.
2. Have to post about "that night." Need to get it out.
3. Your CD. See 1 about drunken txts.

And now, it's 3 am, and I'm going to sleep.

- M.