Isabelle, I should write this to you. Let this be my reply to your previous letter, since you are the only one who reads this thing and because I desperately want to jumpstart some words into the Universe. Remembering that summer day at your aunt's house in the Valley, it must have been 100+ degrees and I was lounging on the outdoor furniture like a lazy dog. You were making us a beet salad. Meanwhile my brain was wandering with a foreboding or maybe arriving at an answer from all the years of clutter and clamored experience gone by, those instances carving my formation while blowing past. We are not our histories. My friend once told me that on the phone. It was a dream of a day. You and I were in a jacuzzi. You were suspecting yourself of being a bad person in your relationships and I was disagreeing. You had been making such a human time of it in Los Angeles with those months, even after the first parts of your arrival began flat on the beach with every afternoon. Healing. The significance of feeling like sand, then heating to a solid creating a new window through which to see the world again. Those days at the beach, you were identifying with the contours and individualities of the sand to reform. All those friends you made in those meetings and beyond were, you, decorating a renewed whole, changed cells in all different colors and arrangements. The end of a romance humbles us in the most primal of ways but allows opportunity for a fantastic rebirth in spirit. At some point in water, under the sun, you said I seemed older than I was, but maybe you should've seen me without my beard, what's reflected now is an even stranger age. I remember the staggering temperature of our afternoon. It's no coincidence to note that to cast a sword, the blacksmith first melts iron into a mold then begins hammering it into shape.
I tried typing this via email but it's only working here. Hammering and being turned over, hammering, like in the movies. Thick metal on heat and artistry. I am enduring.
Then we lay down in a bedroom cool and calm. A topless friendship. Gentle and lazy. Sometimes when we talk, you occasionally suggest that perhaps it's better to follow my own lead and go with an abandon into the physical realm, but not always. Never black and white. In our case, you've been right. You were smart that day to keep us closer to innocent. I say that not to insult the sparks that may have lain down the other road but to compliment the enduring quality our friendship.
I went to the bank last night and ended up drinking alone at a nearby bar. The music was great. A DJ with a shirt that said "Venice" and a bunch of songs we've all heard before set to endlessly intoxicating arrangements of unique rhythm and beat. The Lakers were beating the Celtics. Each team is at the bottom of their divisions this year. The bartenders were all dancing and I was wondering where women all learn to dance like they do. And then I imagined a ballerina behind a bar, elegantly lifting and gracing herself in movements of purpose and pose and then a surf movie came onto the televisions and I watched the waves for awhile and drank beer until I'd had enough. I came home and took a pill that wasn't mine, to sleep longer and farther. With bleary eyes, off balance, I woke up and began again. Ate alone at the French Market Cafe while reading George Saunders. Checked my phone. Thanks for your Anais Nin quote. I read Henry and June years ago because Miller was/is one of my favorites. Those words were spot on, spot on, infused again in a bit of what I just wrote you. Oh, and that beer thing you wrote about was entirely yours. It had shades of things that I like, but it was all yours. We're all one sweeping influence. In that spirit, I want to type that quote from this morning and preserve it here because it's so especially true to the moment.
"Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."
