Love letter to you, reading

This is for you, as all else is.

We are strangers to one another. 

Even if it were my partner reading (you have seen me birth twice) there is an impenetrable space that we will never touch in the other. Thank goodness for that.

To you, beautiful stranger, my sister, my brother, to you my hearty thanks for sharing this space with me.

Inexplicably, we share the space which we cannot touch in the other. And you know what is fundamental about me as well as you know yourself. The details of my life are mine and barely so (I have forgotten things, become new people). The deep truth of what I am you are inside your own life of particulars.

We share this space into which we can call our soul.

Look, me: I live in the city, in the confinement of angular structures; and I live inside the purple grip of love. I live with a few people I watch grow, whose lives I water and feed, whose lives nourish me back. That me in the little house in the city has all she needs.

But in solitude I get out of the house and climb a steep hill. I climb on all fours for balance and for fun. I sweat a salty rain on the hill, and make it damp and pliable, and then I rise, beastly and ugly, and soiled with mud. I become another kind of woman. A woman forgetful of her roles and abilities and shortcomings; forgetful of her purple love. I am generalized and (so) purified. I walk into the temple. It’s an old rummage of rock and weed atop the hill. I walk there and invite my soul. And then, maybe, you arrive too.

What is there to say to you who left your house in the city? I could say “sit,” if you haven’t already, and then, what? I know about you. I know you left the straight lines and your particular box of treasures. I know you came to the shattered temple.

You’ve been longing for silence too. That is what called us here. I simply sit nearby and listen, with you. We will sit together and listen and breathe in something clean. Until a distant bell calls one of us back down.

Until we meet again.