Sincerely Lucy,
Beach Music by Pat Conroy, begins with this story of a man wandering through the streets of Venice one evening. As a masked woman grabbed his hand, covered his eyes and led him to her apartment. She placed her finger over his lips gently and made love to him in silence. She led him back to the street where she found him, still masked and without a word. She left him with a perfect memory of a moment, untainted by anything other that what he chose to make of it…
That, to me, is just breathtakingly beautiful. Sometimes, in a word full of fact and reason, we need little harmless secrets to ourselves. Stories of others that we have to write ourselves to get to know them. Sculpt a perfect picture of people we will never meet, just because people have become too real. I don’t want to know that Alice in Wonderland was written by a pedophile, can’t some things just be great?
And I’m not referring to world problems or condoning false identity. All I want to extend to you is a feeling. Why can’t we let moments remain untainted by excessive information. Silence is so essential in such a loud world. And I don’t mean, get lost in other worlds and leave reality, but rather to have some thoughts to yourself— eternal and perfect.
You won’t go and narrate every aspect of an acid trip to someone whilst it’s happening. No, let it be, soak in the strawberry fields. It’s your little secret, your perfect Lucy in the sky with diamonds moment, because no matter what words you use they will never do it justice.
So what if I begged you not to make me human? Would you understand me if I said, I’d hate to be animated any further by the truth? Would you read my words as if they were a lost photograph and wonder who I was or tell your own story about who I am?
Perhaps I’m a lonely old woman dreaming of the good old days. Perhaps I’m just a child with premature words. Or perhaps my story is just too lame to give my words the kick they need. One detail could shatter the glass sculpture that is your experience of me. My point is, I could be all these things or none at all, but what does it matter? Who I am to you is art made by you, don’t break a moment due to curiosity.
For once, I beg that in a connected world where we meet people we have no right meeting, I could be a perfect stranger, a traveler’s romance, where none of my humane glitches make their way to you. Just a photograph and the hands that write — that is all I want to give to you. The rest is your little secret.
