Accidental Love Letters

Yesterday I posted an add on Craigslist offering my services as a “Modern Cyrano.” The listing promises to deliver a highly customized appropriate and enduring expression of your affection for a negotiable price, which does not exceed the value of the work. As of yet, no inquiries. Will repost tomorrow.

I’m doing this because I’m broke. In my mind, I am broke because it’s winter. I know the amount of money one has isn’t actually a climatic phenomenon; it’s causally related to one’s job and how often one goes to the job and the concentration of compensation one receives for one’s work in relation to the rate at which one fritters away said compensation. But to me, because we measure money with numbers and I speak not that language, I associate my bank account with the states of nature. I was broke last winter. Winter is coming again. The trees will be bare and so will my cupboard. My financial planning strategy is paganism. Is it working? Yesterday I posted an add on Craigslist offering my services as “Modern Cyrano.” So. No.

But also I’m doing this because I’d be good at it. Anyone who knows me might politely tilt their head to one side and point to my romantic history, which, though hilarious, is not anything we’d call “successful.” And, to the chorus of friends and family who populate my psyche, I’d say, yes but I have specific, relevant experience. I don’t want to be a relationship coach. I just want to use pretty words to give other people a look at the basket, a step up to the plate, [insert another sports metaphor]. Despite having a patchy romantic record, I have written many beautiful love letters. Mostly by accident.

Thirteen is an awkward age for camp. It wasn’t even the last summer I went. I also went when I was fourteen. During the fourteen year-old summer, about six other pubescents and I populated the oldest girls cabin at a camp sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese and talked of nothing but blow jobs for seven days. Our counselor that year was a slightly older teenager, torn between reining in our sinful midriff baring and trying to get us to like her. I don’t know how adolescents detect social status (it’s so apparently arbitrary, but so also definite, like it’s governed by pheromones) but she knew and we knew: she was our boss, but we were cooler kids and could do as we pleased. So, our midriffs were out, our cursing was loud, and we used prayer and reflection time to demand she answer all our pressing questions, such as: is a the Ouija board a portal into hell (yes), do boys expect us to shave our pubic hair (no), is homosexuality a sin (for sure). Obviously, not a reliable source.

But how different was the summer of thirteen. Most of my friends were there that summer, but I landed in a different tent, with only one girl I knew from school. She and I got close over that week, to each other, and also to our counselor. We smelled her and we knew she was cool and we did as we were told and reveled in our status as her favorites. Because South Carolina is literally the size of a matchbook, it turned out that my father and our counselor ’s father were high school classmates. I thought she was perfect. Unbeknownst to me, I was in love with her.

The night before we left, I held her and wept. She held me back. I think this is something specific about the female queer experience. You can go pretty far before anyone raises an eyebrow, including yourself. But then I wrote letters.

I believe when we write (and create art in general), we should show our scars not wounds. But I also want to stab a pen through the heart of everything that made me ashamed and vanquish it that way. I’m still figuring out if these principles are in conflict.

There were four letters in total. I don’t remember much of the content, but I know they were multiple pages, illustrated, and peppered with references to country music songs. One was signed with Xs and Os, followed with a foot-note, explained that I’d done this in honor of the then popular Trisha Yearwood song, American Girl (she used to tie her hair up in ribbons and bows/sign her letters with X’s and O’s). I gave it another listen today. Still catchy. Still kind of resonates.

These letters never professed romantic love outright. It would have been impossible for me to do that. Lesbianism, historically the love which dare not speak it’s name, was then, to me, a love who’s name I didn’t know. Gay men were this weird fetish object in the early 2000s (visible at a cost) but gay women were still either invisible or Rosie O’Donnel or, in my world, Big Tracy, the daycare worker with a rat-tail and a piano tie (but even that was only a rumor and no one knew for sure). Nevertheless, the sentiment of the letters was clear, I think. Our counselor, who’d rabidly preached about keeping in touch, never answered them. Her silence gave me a vague sense that I’d transgressed. I didn’t know why, but I knew I was to be ashamed and I never told anyone about it and I didn’t let myself think about it either.

Then, two years later, I was in high school and the subject came up in a keyboarding class. And I’ll get to that. But first. The exemplary of insanity our keyboarding teacher forces me to digress. She was a proper Southern lady, who’d been teaching for 800 years, and who would snap you straight out of your swivel chair and into the hallway for a lecture if the slump of your shoulders indicated a lack of moral fortitude (or if the voices in her head said something smart and she thought it came from you). There was a bad batch of hurricanes that year and the day after one hit in Miami she started the class by saying Children, do any of y’all have relatives in Florida? A few kids raised their hands. Oh children. I’m sorry. They are all gone. It’s all gone. Now open your exercise book to page 37… She also introduced me to Langston Hughes though so, thank you for that (if you are ever thinking of jumping off a ledge, read Life is Fine, it will help).

Anyway. We were all in keyboarding, staring at our screens, our hands and the keyboard covered by shoeboxes to keep us from peaking, and the friend who I’d been to camp with two summers before asked if I ever heard from our old counselor. I immediately stopped breathing and responded blithely, casually, No….why? My friend told me she occasionally got email updates from her. And I don’t know what compelled me to reveal this, but I told my friend about the letters I’d written after we got home that summer and how our counselor never wrote me back. This surprised my friend, who told me she’d driven up for a later session that same year, to drop off her little brother, and had stopped by our counselor’s tent to say hi. And there, on our counselor ’s bed, she’d seen a spread of letters. Being nosy, she’d looked at the signatures, and saw my name scrawled at the bottom of all four.

I don’t know what my counselor made of those letters. I don’t know what she was trying to discern from them when she spread them across her bed. I can’t explain her silence. I don’t know how they made her feel. I do know how I felt about her. Though my desire is often as inscrutable to me as mathematics, through much therapy and self-reflection, I have re-learned to apply the term crush correctly (apparently it references those people you have romantic feelings for, not versions of masculinity you find less offensive). Perhaps I might convince myself I wasn’t really so transparent, that she didn’t respond because maybe she disliked me all along, for other reasons, but this pattern, of composing effusive missives that reflect feelings I haven’t yet identified in myself, repeated, repeats. I think I wrote an accidental love letter last week. I know I’m falling into this trap via sheer ego. I write these emails or poems or real actual letters and I’m pleased with my work and I eagerly send them off and then only later realize it was that kind of letter…again. Then I have to go read Langston Hughes (So since I’m still here livin’/I guess I will live on).

Which is why I’d like to harness this skill: for financial gain and as a way to redirect it from wreaking havoc on my life (that’s hyperbole, it doesn’t wreak havoc, but it is embarrassing). I was telling my friend Mary about this scheme. She supported it and agreed I’d do a stellar job, but also wondered if it was perhaps unethical; she said, won’t people just be falling in love with you? To which I responded: Au contraire. Roxanne doesn’t love Cyrano. I know she says she does in the final scene, but it was all very emotional and he was bleeding from his head and what would you have done? She loves Christian; the letters gave her an excuse to let herself. That’s the way love letters work, even if you write your own. No one falls in love with a letter. A letter isn’t a person.

I’ve written a few love letters on purpose. Good ones. Too good. One’s that have elicited this response: Your words are so beautiful, why don’t I ever see this part of you. I understand the confusion, but the answer is because this, the letter (the poem, the email, the essay), isn’t a part of me. I made it. I wrote it. But love letters are like any creation. They come from us but they aren’t us and they also don’t mirror anything we have inside us in an exact way. The heart and soul aren’t laid down in words or colors or decoupage. It’s all a rough translation and, frankly, if I am the one translating, I’m going to toss out accuracy for aesthetic appeal every time. Because I am a poet, and that is what we do.

Since love letters are translations, I don’t see a problem with my doing the translating for someone else. My past love letters, intentional and otherwise, didn’t lead to particularly successful romantic conquests, but that wasn’t an artistic failure. The letters were fine (ahem, fantastic), the circumstances surrounding them were…questionable. I’m not good at dating and, without veering to far into something bleedy, I’ll just say the reasons why include mortal fear. Even if we’re always pretty sure something is bullshit, it’s hard not to absorb it if we hear it over and over and I am and remain a particularly porous individual. I’m just saying, you will never catch me fucking with a Ouija board.

And yes, there is the possibility that my potential clients will get a look at the basket and choke, but that’s maybe closer than they would have gotten otherwise and, maybe, they’ll make the shot.

There is no shame in needing the services of a Cyrano. If your love is so great as to out-strip your linguistic abilities, that is good, preferable even. Don’t let a lack of literary confidence hinder your adventures of the heart. We will tell the truth together. 
 
 Serious inquiries only. Success intended.