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johnlocklives · 6 years

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A Christmas Miracle

ignore the cheesy name asgshjfka very original. much wow

DISCLAIMER: These characters are NOT based on real-life people. Any similarities are purely coincidental. (just taking precautions, okay? I mean it)

@i-am-the-brunette and @mstandsformoon here you go ladies :) I hope it’s not too much of a crap :D

She arrived in the afternoon of 23rd. A bit later than expected because her train was delayed. Ugh. Why must the railway company always mess up? I almost bit off my nails in anticipation of her arrival. Well, nevermind. She’s here now and all is fine. All is great. No – that’s an understatement. All is absolutely fantastic.

We haven’t been friends for too long. Maybe a year? (who am I kidding, I know exactly the date, the time and the alingment of the planets when we first started talking). Point is, when I invited her to celebrate Christmas Eve with me and my family, the very last reaction I expected was „Abso-fucking-lutely!“ Her enthusiasm and willingnes to come and spend the most cheerful day of the year with me surprised me but I must say the dominant emotion was absolute excitement. Pure happiness, joy and, most of all, deep love.

I am not in love with her.

We are close. Closer than two purely platonic friends probably should be. Her friendship might be the most important thing to ever cross my path. I’m very happy it happened though; because my path was thorny and lead to a dead end. And then she swept in like a wild wind, throwing me off my original destination and changing the path for good. I still walk the thorny road – but this time I don’t walk alone and I also can’t see the end of the road.

She knows. She knows I’m queer. I outed myself to her during one of our drinking sessions without minding the consequences. She‘s never discussed her sexuality but that’s fine. Not my business. She’s a friend, okay? I have no right to dig into her personal life. If she wants to tell me, she will. In her own time. Everything is up to her. Everything is completely fine.

All I know is that whatever happens, whatever she reveals, it will never change the way I see her. Until the very last breath I let out I will consider her the most fantastic human being in the whole damn universe. Nothing and no one will ever convince me otherwise.

I am not in love with her.

I’m getting a bit dreamy right now; better move on with the story.

Christmas is pretty much the same as every year; no, that’s a lie. This time it’s more exceptional then ever before. She shows up to dinner and takes my breath away – completely. Her hair set free frames her face in the loveliest way possible. She’s wearing her snug blue Christmas jumper and I swear I’ve never loved the colour blue more. A pair of black jeans is just a cherry on top.

Most people would consider this a not-so-special outfit.

For me, this is the most perfect view I’ve ever been exposed to.

She looks utterly magnificent.

I am NOT in love with her.

Gift giving is full of emotions, teary-eyes and huge smiles. I got her a set of brushes, watercolours and a canvas. She hugs me so tightly I can’t breathe; I don’t mind. I would give my last breath to her if she wanted me to. I’m going to teach her the basics because I’m an artist and because she wants me to. She’s a writer. Her great skill is putting poetry onto a paper; I am the one who brings the poetry to life with pictures.

She gives me a pretty red Christmas jumper and I swear I was this close to kissing her right there but…I stopped myself because of several reasons…..aaah, who am I kidding, mainly one reason. I can’t do this to her. She’s my friend! What kind of friend wants to kiss their friend because the love they feel is so overwhelming they don’t know how to express themselves other than with a peck on the lips? Stop it! You can’t feel this. She trusts you and she considers you your close companion. How do you think she’d react if she learned what goes through your mind? Get a grip, dammit!

Yeah, absolutely NOT in love with her.

11pm. My parents and siblings have already gone to sleep. I left Her in my room because she dozed off in my bed. That’s fine. I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. Too many thoughts are going through my head, too many feelings that are not supposed to be there. I sit in our living room staring at the candles on our table while the rainbow lights of the Christmas tree blink at me blurrily in the background. I cling to a fluffy grey pillow I received from my mum; my cuddly companion for this night, it seems.

Quiet sounds of padding feet on the wooden floor; someone’s coming.

It’s her. We lock eyes – my stormy ones mix with deep chocolate irises. A perfect mix, if you ask me. She settles herself next to me and doesn’t say a single word. Silence is good, silence is appreciated, silence…..can be heavier than words sometimes. I can feel there’s something unspoken. Something that desperately wants to break free – but none of us wants to provide it with the key it needs to unlock the cage.

5 minutes pass by. Nothing changes. I abandon the pillow.

She leans her head on my shoulder and nuzzles. My breath hitches and I have to remind myself how to breathe. Relax. It’s all fine. Open your eyes, unclench your jaw, ignore your body. It’s alright. Except….it isn’t. Her arm goes over my belly and settles itself on my waist. I can feel her fingers drawing tiny circles as if she was comforting a spooked creature. I am one hundred percent positive she feels my wildly beating heart.

Good thing is, I can feel hers as well.

I am……not……in love with her. No.

I get brave. Turning my head a bit, I bury my nose in her hair and just inhale. Nothing wrong with that, right? Right?? She seems to approve because she nuzzles even more into me and her mouth is touching my neck now. My breathing pattern is changing rapidly with every passing second. She must’ve noticed.

We stay like this for what feels like an eternity. One candle on the table burns out. I don’t light it again.

A kiss below my ear. I close my eyes and don’t find the courage to open them. Hot breath on my skin, a whisper of promise. A promise of forever.

I do it. I open my eyes, look into hers and see approval and a permission in there. Before I know it, we’re kissing. A series of pecks at first that turn braver as the kiss progresses. My hand has somehow found its way into her hair and it feels like the most natural thing to do. My lips tingle but they never get the opportunity to stay exposed to the cool air for too long. I could kiss her all night. I could live from the taste of her lips forever. I kinda want to. Nothing can compete with this.

When I move down to kiss and gently bite her neck, we realise we need to stop, otherwise this would end in a way both of us haven’t really predicted. We stare at each other for a while and dive for a bear hug.

Everything is perfect. Everything is as it should be.

I am in love with her.

#ficlet #lesbians #my work #lgbt+#merry christmas #be gentle with me i am not a writer okay :d

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smallpressdistribution · 7 years

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Feast your eyes and your shelves on October’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten still-so-relevant titles selected by our very own Matthew Hedley!

1. Cold Genius - Aaron Kunin

Have you heard Aaron Kunin get excited about Milton yet? In love with things that are funny because he loves them, like Milton’s bible fan fiction, or Chiquita banana, or language meaning a particular thing. Is it fair to say Kunin’s quote clusters are a joke, a reflexive reassurance, a kindness that doesn’t force words down your throat, a presentation, a kindness, so that his book feels deeply kind. I appreciate the Ben Lerner blurb – “it occurs to me often to be grateful for his work.” Because I am, also, deeply grateful. Reviewers seem to delight in calling him a genius – because it’s in the title, maybe – but this book is so much more interesting than that. He’s a genius, who cares, “genius” is really a silly thing, don’t you think? It’s a brand, maybe, or something a lover says and is misunderstood and misunderstood until he figures in a Kunin poem.

2. Trances of the Blast - Mary Ruefle

This book of Ruefle poems is an odd gem. Its title is given the lie by the duration of its gaze. A stanza for the thing, a stanza for the feeling about the thing, a stanza for life after living with the thing. Remember Inception? That movie all the memes come from? This book has all the immediacy of an explosion in that movie, as time dilates wider and wider, until we’ve forgotten we were running from an explosion in the first place. What was that movie about? Or – wait, what’s this book about? It’s not exactly still, since there’s so much life ahead to get to, and it has pace, some yearning to be turned on, left on, but its movement comes from turnabout, the unwieldy and furry shift of a person looming in the midst of a poem.

And so I have had to deal with wild intractable people all my days and have been led astray in a world of shattered moonlight and beasts and trees where no one ever curtsies anymore or has an understudy. So I have gone up to the little room in my face, I am making something out of a jar of freckles and a jar of glue

I hated childhood. I hate adulthood. And I love being alive.

3. Monk Eats an Afro - Yolanda Wisher

This book is embodied poetry, the talked about but rarely seen kind. It’s important that the book is anachronistic in its sensitivity – Cry of Jazz came out in 1959, Monk Eats an Afro in 2014 – but Wisher loves jazz, and is good at it. The Sonia Sanchez blurb should be a giveaway of how in scene this book is to Philadelphia, to Philly jazz, to clubs where Sonia still holds court at a central table, with similar tables around, Wisher at another, someone, maybe Dawn Evans holds down a third, there aren’t that many tables but they’re mostly full, with men and women who make Philly great. Sure, I’m being overly romantic, because this is a literal memory I have, being in that room, being in my hometown, sometimes it feels like it might disappear, also – this book is romantic. Its romance poems are downright sexy, and god, when Wisher swings into a rhyme at the end of a stanza it rings out. There’s a body at risk here, recounting personal experience with a heady sense of its own cultural touchpoints. There’s something conservative about a jazz fanatic in this day and age – to go through every day hearing what the radio does while still pulling back to Monk and fam takes work, a love of the way things were – which, in context with the rest of this list, makes a deep commentary on how conservative poetry as a whole really is. Because this book feels novel and standout amidst the others of the list for how separate its references are. No other book on this list is more than one degree of separation (in terms of debt owed) from John Ashbery, and this book might be two, and that makes all the difference. It’s not that it’s “anti-academic,” because that term posits the academy as the thing, and everything else as lying in opposition. But I remember a creative writing professor ask a creative writing graduate student what she could possibly talk to a slam poet about. Monk Eats an Afro is incommunicable with that sort of thinking. Not opposition – a powerful voice, sure in her self.

4. Stories in the Worst Way - Gary Lutz

This book makes me want to write better. Lutz’ style should be ponderous -- the whole text appears at a glance almost as marginalia, like liner notes on liner notes, but nothing is frantic. Somehow it feels calm, even, impossibly, focused. Which can be a little frustrating -- the game of the title STORIES IN THE WORST WAY always cycling through my mind as I am shocked by the talent. Because they are really well written and make you jealous and more than a little productive. Lutz makes me write. Because he really can write, and his overcrowded margin of a text feels absolutely effortless and easy for him, which is also impossible, and also untrue, and it’s – god, it’s frustrating! But if I didn’t have this book around, what other book could I use to make myself write. I admit, I throw this book around a lot. It’s a really nice weight and size to be thrown, and then picked up, mumble a bit, read the same story again, somehow write four pages, go for a walk, turn around mid-walk, come home and read the same story, write some more. It’s a book I love and picked from thousands of titles here at SPD -- and if you can’t handle being jealous and productive, I just don’t even know you.

5. Videogames for Humans: Twine Authors in Conversation - edited by merritt kopas

This book of playthroughs, essays, contexts, games and game-ified writing is unique and complex. Twine as a digital platform stands alongside all my other distant dreams of choice mediums for preventing academia and the state from incorporating language and work into their narrative. But, unfortunately, the space remains uncurated in meaningful ways to further that vision, which, as Wikipedia will tell you (by omission or deletion mill), perpetuates the same power structures as the world outside. So: CRY$TAL WARRIOR KE$HA (made pre-$ removal) is on the sample page today (looking absolutely amazing), while the most recent review is some undergraduate freshboy’s takedown of its writing structure. Which is to say that the academy is always uncomfortably present in the history and training of creators, players, readers – and even in the essays in VIDEOGAMES FOR HUMANS. The tension in the book’s movement back and forth between Kesha and undergraduate with a grudge is what makes the book so incredibly worthwhile. Beyond just a book for digital language nerds like myself, this collection feels so important for asking questions of how to create positive art spaces. Teenaged entertainment proposes an answer, negated in the misogyny of Lil Yachty, reconstituted in the queer narratives of Twine, complicated in the reactionary nature of write-ups… How will any of us make art in a time where to be an instrument of the state is such a bald-faced violence? But magic and a joy in loving self-sabotage shows a glimmer of hope:

“There’s this assumption that if you stray from The Scientific Method into actually caring about things like lying on the floor of your room in the middle of the afternoon with black canvas hung over the curtains to keep the sun out with a single candle burning, wearing lipstick—even though you pretty much don’t wear lipstick any other time in your life—sort of meditating and sort of tripping off sensory deprivation and sort of falling asleep, that you had better take that weird stuff just as seriously and humorously as scientists are supposed to take science. Like basically magic can’t be weird or fun or fucked up or stupid on purpose. Which is wrong!”

6. Event Factory - Renee Gladman

Event Factory – There’s a setpiece of science fiction where worldbuilding, forced to include some cultural background for the book, treats us to speculative songs and poetry that are, let’s be honest, always awful. The cantina songs, the God-Whispers of Han Qing-Jao, the water songs of the Fremen – let’s be real, these are painful moments. Even Delany – sorry. But then you have Gladman, a luminary poet, writing her Ravicka novels, and suddenly, writing becomes speculative in parsing and content. There’s all the textured concentration and phrasing her talent begets, combined with a character-driven, engaging and difficult science fiction novel. So that our transportation occurs on every level – not escapism, because the density of idea and descriptor doesn’t admit such an easy movement – as we are other before it. It’s a deeply disturbing book, to be sure. The disassociative trip of finding things already happening to yourself makes the book a Ketamine nightmare in its darkest, half-sexual, half-prone. That’s a warning, I suppose, or as much of a warning as I can give for a book I’d like you to read. It’s a book of recollections, and it often recalls the worst. Go read it.

7. In the Time of the Blue Ball - Manuela Draeger, translated by Brian Evenson

This is the only book on this list I didn’t know beforehand, but god DAMN. It reminds me of Kathryn Davis, but with a different set of idiosyncrasies. Or Monica Furlong’s deeply strange cousin. Or it’s not really like another person, but an outstanding talent all to itself that speaks in an unusual voice, with a style and focus all her own. Still, it’s hard not to try to put it in context, because I hadn’t heard of Draeger previously. Shelley Jackson wrote the back cover blurb, and if you’re not down with Shelley Jackson, there’s nothing I can say to convince you to read this.

“I’m warning you, Potemkine,” said the tiger. “Now, here we are together in too small of a space. It’d be better if you didn’t wiggle in front of me. In the darkness, I could imagine that you were running.”

“I don’t look like a wharf rat,” I said.

“When someone starts running in front of me, it’s too late for distinctions between species,” said Gershwin.

Half-accessible, half-mystic fantasy that flirts with various reading levels, IN THE TIME OF THE BLUE BALL is a gorgeous book of fiction. With thanks to Brian Evenson for a stellar translation.

8. This Lamentable City - Polina Barskova, translated by Ilya Kaminsky

He lies naked on something white, She laughs above She covers him With her pearl, her body her Star, her body her snow, her body On top of the word “strange,” On top of the word “fright.”

Barskova wanders the city and chronicles, and edits, and edits, and edits what she sees. This book is beautifully refined, calm, sure.

“In our village where small animals live slowly And humans jump on them.”

I’d like to do this little feature with only quotes, quotes and gasps afterward. The above a reaction to finding the scattered remains of snails in the lane. I hope it snows where you read this, in the evening.

9. The Feel Trio - Fred Moten

Fred Moten. Glory, Fred Moten. One of the most talented writers of a generation who makes the balance of phrasing and legibility feel effortless. Not that every line is beach-read-legible, but that his word clusters are drop-dead gorgeous, and always feel intentioned and deserved. Throughout his published works, Moten remains a cheat-sheet for debut writers – “how do I get away with putting this really fabulous but loud phrase in my writing” – but THE FEEL TRIO is a monstrosity of confidence, even for him.

“this a service on the surface for frank wilderness and carl flippant. my absolute beauty studies feelings in an open afterlife. I hold him and I’ve lost and I feel it in my hands and the sharp distance of his little bother, explosive flower of I’m not ready and don’t want to.”

10. That They Were at the Beach - Leslie Scalapino

My favorite book of poetry has somehow never been on a previous SPD Recommends Backlist. The narrator of the book fascinates me – defensive in language, insecure in relative positions, honest in gaze – in her movements between mechanism and pathos. The formalization of language, centered around the em dash – pretending to be a device of clarity – reminds me of coding languages, its Turing-complete, it’s a half step from language, but in this case not towards clarity but something else, something that masquerades as clarity but is poetry. Which isn’t an opposite of clarity, but it’s not the same thing either. I find it impossible not to copy this book’s phrasing for months after I reread it, so I’m trying to be good here. It’s the book that made me love poetry.

#instar books #fence books #wave books #hanging loose press #tupelo press #letter machine editions #north point press #dorothy a publishing project #calamari press

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glittership · 7 years

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Episode #36 — "How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War" by R.B. Lemberg

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War

by R.B. Lemberg

for Bogi Takács

At the budget committee meeting this morning, the pen in my hand turns into the remote control of a subsonic detonator. It is familiar—heavy, smooth, the metal warm to the touch. The pain of recognition cruises through my fingers and up my arm, engorges my veins with unbearable sweetness. The detonator is gunmetal gray. My finger twitches, poised on the button.

I shake my head, and it is gone. Only it is still here, the taste of blood in my mouth, and underneath it, unnamed acidic bitterness. Around the conference table, the faces of faculty and staff darken in my vision. I see them—aging hippies polished by their long academic careers into a reluctant kind of respectability; accountants neat in bargain-bin clothes for office professionals; the dean, overdressed but defiant in his suit and dark blue tie with a class pin. They’ve traveled, I am sure, and some had protested on the streets back in the day and thought themselves radicals, but there’s none here who would not recoil in horror if I confessed my visions.

[Full transcript after the cut]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 36 for April 13, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story for you. Today we have a return of R.B. Lemberg, whose story “Stalemate” was published in episode 7. This is the last story for the Winter 2017 issue, and Spring 2017 is right around the corner! We also have a guest reader, Rose Fox, for this episode.

R.B. Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. R.B.’s work has appeared in Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Unlikely Story, Uncanny, and other venues. Their Birdverse novelette “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and longlisted for the Hugo Award and the Tiptree Award. R.B.’s debut poetry collection, Marginalia to Stone Bird, is available from Aqueduct Press (2016). R.B. can be found on Twitter as @RB_Lemberg, on Patreon at http://patreon.com/rblemberg, and on http://roselemberg.net.

Rose Fox is a senior reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and the co-editor (with Daniel José Older) of Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. They also write Story Hospital, a compassionate, practical weekly advice column about writing, and run occasional workshops for blocked and struggling writers. In their copious free time, they write fanfic and queer romance novels. They live in Brooklyn with two partners, three cats, the world’s most adorable baby, and a great many books.

How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War

by R.B. Lemberg

for Bogi Takács

I do not twitch. I want to run away from the uncomplicated, slightly puffy expressions of those people who’d never faced the battlefield, never felt the ground shake, never screamed tumbling facedown into the dirt. But I have more self-control than to flee. When it comes my time to report, I am steady. I concentrate on the numbers. The numbers have never betrayed me.

At five PM sharp I am out of the office. The airy old space is supposed to delight, with its tall cased windows and the afternoon sun streaming through the redwoods, but there’s nothing here I want to see. I walk briskly to the Downtown Berkeley BART station, and catch a train to the city. The train rattles underground, all stale air and musty seats. The people studiously look aside, giving each other the safety of not-noticing, bubbles of imaginary emptiness in the crowd. The mild heat of bodies and the artificially illuminated darkness of the tunnel take the edge off.

When I disembark at Montgomery, the sky is already beginning to darken, the edges of pink and orange drawn in by the night. I could have gotten off at Embarcadero, but every time I decide against it—the walk down Market Street towards the ocean gives me a formality of approach which I crave without understanding why. My good gray jacket protects against the chill coming up from the water. The people on the street—the executives and the baristas, the shoppers and the bankers—all stare past me with unseeing eyes.

They shipped us here, I remember. Damaged goods, just like other states shipped their mentally ill to Berkeley on Greyhound buses: a one-way ticket to nowhere, to a place that is said to be restful and warm in the shadow of the buildings, under the bridges, camouflaged from this life by smells of pot and piss. I am luckier than most. Numbers come easy to me, and I look grave and presentable in my heavy jackets that are not armor. Their long sleeves hide the self-inflicted scars.

I remember little. Slivers. But I still bind my chest and use the pronoun they, and I wear a tight metal bracelet on my left arm. It makes me feel secure, if not safe. It’s only a ploy, this bracelet I have found, a fool’s game at hope. The band is base metal, but without any markings, lights, or familiar pinpricks of the signal. Nothing flows. No way for Tedtemár to call, if ever Tedtemár could come here.

Northern California is where they ship the damaged ones, yes, even interstellars.

Nights are hard. I go out to the back yard, barren from my attempts at do-it-yourself landscaping. Only the redwood tree remains, and at the very edge, a stray rose bush that blooms each spring in spite of my efforts. I smoke because I need it, to invoke and hold at bay the only full memory left to me: the battlefield, earth ravished by heaving and metal, the screech and whoosh of detonations overhead. In front of me I see the short, broad figure of my commanding officer. Tedtemár turns around. In dreams their visor is lifted, and I see their face laughing with the sounds of explosions around us. Tedtemár’s arms are weapons, white and broad and spewing fire. I cannot hear anything for the wailing, but in dreams, Tedtemár’s lips form my name as the ground heaves.

I have broken every wall in my house, put my fist through the thinness of them as if they’re nothing. I could have lived closer to work, but in this El Cerrito neighborhood nobody asks any questions, and the backyard is mine to ravage. I break the walls, then half-heartedly repair them over weekends only to break them again. At work I am composed and civil and do not break anything, though it is a struggle. The beautiful old plaster of the office walls goes gritty gray like barracks, and the overhead lights turn into alarms. Under the table I interlace my fingers into bird’s wings, my unit’s recognition sign, as my eyes focus resolutely on spreadsheets. At home I repair the useless walls and apply popcorn texture, then paint the whole thing bog gray in a shade I mix myself. It is too ugly even for my mood, even though I’ve been told that gray is all the rage with interior designers these days.

I put my fist through the first wall before the paint dries.

Today, there is music on Embarcadero. People in black and colorful clothing whirl around, some skillfully, some with a good-natured clumsiness. Others are there simply to watch. It’s some kind of a celebration, but I have nothing to celebrate and nothing to hope for, except for the music to shriek like a siren. I buy a plate of deep-fried cheese balls and swallow them, taste buds disbelieving the input, eyes disbelieving the revelry even though I know the names of the emotions expressed here. Joy. Pleasure. Anticipation. At the edge of the piers, men cast small nets for crabs to sell to sushi bars, and in the nearby restaurants diners sip wine and shiver surreptitiously with the chill. I went out to dates with women and men and with genderfluid folks, but they have all avoided me after a single meeting. They are afraid to say it to my face, but I can see. Too gloomy. Too intense. Too quiet. Won’t smile or laugh.

There is a person I notice among the revelers. I see them from the back—stooped, aloof. Like me. I don’t know what makes me single them out of the crowd, the shape of the shoulders perhaps. The stranger does not dance, does not move; just stands there. I begin to approach, then veer abruptly away. No sense in bothering a stranger with—with what exactly? Memories?

I cannot remember anything useful.

I wish they’d done a clean job, taken all my memories away so I could start fresh. I wish they’d taken nothing, left my head to rot. I wish they’d shot me. Wish I’d shoot myself, and have no idea why I don’t, what compels me to continue in the conference rooms and in the overly pleasant office and in my now fashionably gray house. Joy or pleasure are words I cannot visualize. But I do want—something. Something.

Wanting itself at least was not taken from me, and numbers still keep me safe. Lucky bastard.

I see the stranger again at night, standing in the corner of my backyard where the redwood used to be. The person has no face, just an empty black oval filled with explosives. Their white artificial arms form an alphabet of deafening fire around my head.

The next day I see them in the shape of the trees outside my office window, feel their movement in the bubbling of Strawberry Creek when I take an unusual lunch walk. I want, I want, I want, I want. The wanting is a gray bog beast that swallows me awake into the world devoid of noise. The suffocating safe coziness of my present environment rattles me, the planes and angles of the day too soft for comfort. I press the metal of my bracelet, but it is not enough. I cut my arms with a knife and hide the scars old and new under sleeves. I break the walls again and repaint them with leftover bog gray, which I dilute with an even uglier army green.

Over and over again I take the BART to Embarcadero, but the person I seek is not there, not there when it’s nearly empty and when it’s full of stalls for the arts and crafts fair. The person I seek might never have existed, an interplay of shadows over plastered walls. A co-worker calls to introduce me to someone; I cut her off, sick of myself and my well-wishers, always taunting me in my mind. In an hour I repent and reconsider, and later spend an evening of coffee and music with someone kind who speaks fast and does not seem to mind my gloom. Under the table, my fingers lace into bird’s wings.

I remember next to nothing, but I know this: I do not want to go back to the old war. I just want—want—

I see the person again at Montgomery, in a long corridor leading from the train to the surface. I recognize the stooped shoulders and run forward, but the cry falls dead on my lips.

It is not Tedtemár. Their face, downturned and worn, betrays no shiver of laughter. They smell unwashed and stale and their arms do not end in metal. The person does not move or react, like the others perhaps-of-ours I’ve seen here over the years, and their lips move, saying nothing. I remember the date from the other day, cheery in the face of my silence. But I know I have nothing to lose. So I cough and I ask.

They say nothing.

I turn away to leave, when out of the corner of my eyes I see their fingers interlock to form the wings of a bird.

Imprudent and invasive for this world, I lay my hand on their shoulder and lead them back underground. I buy them a BART ticket, watch over them as even the resolutely anonymous riders edge away from the smell. I take them to my home in El Cerrito, where broken walls need repair, and where a chipped cup of tea is made to the soundtrack of sirens heard only in my head. The person holds the cup between clenched fists and sips, eyes closed. I cannot dissuade them when they stand in the corner to sleep, silent and unmoving like an empty battle suit.

At night I dream of Tedtemár crying. Rockets fall out of their eyes to splash against my hands and burst there into seeds. I do not understand. I wake to the stranger huddled to sleep in a corner. Stray moonrays whiten their arms to metal.

In the morning I beg my guest to take sustenance, or a bath, but they do not react. I leave them there for work, where the light again makes mockery of everything. Around my wrist the fake bracelet comes to life, blinking, blinking, blinking in a code I cannot decipher, calling to me in a voice that could not quite be Tedtemár’s. It is only a trick of the light.

At home I am again improper. The stranger does not protest or recoil when I peel their dirty clothes away, lead them into the bath. They are listless, moving their limbs along with my motions. The sudsy water covers everything—that which I could safely look at and that which I shouldn’t have seen. I will not switch the pronouns. When names and memories go, these bits of language, translated inadequately into the local vernacular, remain to us. They are slivers, always jagged slivers of us, where lives we lived used to be.

I remember Tedtemár’s hands, dragging me away. The wail of a falling rocket. Their arms around my torso, pressing me back into myself.

I wash my guest’s back. They have a mark above their left shoulder, as if from a once-embedded device. I do not recognize it as my unit’s custom, or as anything.

I wanted so much—I wanted—but all that wanting will not bring the memories back, will not return my life. I do not want it to return, that life that always stings and smarts and smolders at the edge of my consciousness, not enough to hold on to, more than enough to hurt—but there’s an emptiness in me where people have been once, even the ones I don’t remember. Was this stranger a friend? Their arms feel stiff to my touch. For all their fingers interlaced into wings at Montgomery station, since then I had only seen them hold their hands in fists.

Perhaps I’d only imagined the wings.

I wail on my way to work, silent with mouth pressed closed so nobody will notice. In the office I wail, open-mouthed and silent, against the moving shades of redwoods in the window.

For once I don’t want takeaway or minute-meals. I brew strong black tea, and cook stewed red lentils over rice in a newly purchased pot. I repair the broken walls and watch Tedtemár-who-is-not-quite-Tedtemár as they lean against the doorway, eyes vacant. I take them to sleep in my bed, then perch on the very edge of it, wary and waiting. At night they cry out once, their voice undulating with the sirens in my mind. Hope awakens in me with that sound, but then my guest falls silent again.

An older neighbor comes by in the morning and chats at my guest, not caring that they do not answer—like the date whose name I have forgotten. I don’t know if I’d recognize Tedtemár if I met them here. My guest could be anyone, from my unit or another, or a veteran of an entirely different war shipped to Northern California by people I can’t know, because they always ship us here, from everywhere, and do not tell us why.

Work’s lost all taste and color, what of it there ever was. Even numbers feel numb and bland under my tongue. I make mistakes in my spreadsheets and am reprimanded.

At night I perch again in bed beside my guest. I hope for a scream, for anything; fall asleep in the silent darkness, crouched uncomfortably with one leg dangling off to the floor.

I wake up with their fist against my arm. Rigid fingers press and withdraw to the frequency of an old alarm code that hovers on the edge of my remembrance. In darkness I can feel their eyes on me, but am afraid to speak, afraid to move. In less than a minute, when the pressing motion ceases and I no longer feel their gaze, I cannot tell if this has been a dream.

I have taken two vacation days at work. I need the rest, but dread returning home, dread it in all the different ways from before. I have not broken a wall since I brought my guest home.

Once back, I do not find them in any of their usual spots. I think to look out of the kitchen window at last. I see my stranger, Tedtemár, or the person who could be Tedtemár—someone unknown to me, from a different unit, a different culture, a different war. My commanding officer. They are in the back yard, on their knees. There’s a basket by their side, brought perhaps by the neighbor.

For many long minutes I watch them plant crocuses into the ravaged earth of my yard. They are digging with their fists. Their arms, tight and rigid as always, seem to caress this ground into which we’ve been discarded, cast aside when we became too damaged to be needed in the old war. Explosives streak past my eyelids and sink, swallowed by the clumps of the soil around their fists.

I do not know this person. I do not know myself.

This moment is all I can have.

I open the kitchen door, my fingers unwieldy, and step out to join Tedtemár.

END

“How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War” was originally published in Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction issue in June 2015.

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Episode #36 — “How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War” by R.B. Lemberg was originally published on GlitterShip

#GlitterShip #lgbtq fiction #queer fiction #short stories #science fiction and fantasy #podcast

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The 16 Most Beautifully Touching Love Letters From Famous Writers And Artists

1. Allen Ginsburg to poet Peter Orlovsky:

Dear Petey:

O Heart O Love everything is suddenly turned to gold! Dont be afraid dont worry the most astounding beautiful thing has happened here! I dont know where to begin but the most important. When Bill [ed: William S. Burroughs] came I, we, thought it was the same old Bill mad, but something had happened to Bill in the meantime since we last saw him…but last night finally Bill and I sat down facing each other across the kitchen table and looked eye to eye and talked, and I confessed all my doubt and misery and in front of my eyes he turned into an Angel!

What happened to him in Tangiers this last few months? It seems he stopped writing and sat on his bed all afternoons thinking and meditating alone & stopped drinking and finally dawned on his consciousness, slowly and repeatedly, every day, for several months awareness of a benevolent sentient (feeling) center to the whole Creation he had apparently, in his own way, what I have been so hung up in myself and you, a vision of big peaceful Lovebrain…

I woke up this morning with great bliss of freedom & joy in my heart, Bills saved, Im saved, youre saved, were all saved, everything has been all rapturous ever since I only feel sad that perhaps you left as worried when we waved goodby and kissed so awkwardly I wish I could have that over to say goodby to you happier & without the worries and doubts I had that dusty dusk when you left Bill is changed nature, I even feel much changed, great clouds rolled away, as I feel when you and I were in rapport, well, our rapport has remained in me, with me, rather than losing it, Im feeling to everyone, something of the same as between us.

2. Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera:

Diego:

Truth is, so great, that I wouldnt like to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, outside time and magic, within your own fear, and your great anguish, and within the very beating of your heart. All this madness, if I asked it of you, I know, in your silence, there would be only confusion. I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth. Id like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.

3. Oscar Wilde to Lord Alred Bosie Douglas (Wilde’s eventual muse):

My Own Boy,

Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.

Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first.

Always, with undying love, yours, Oscar

4. Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickok (Eleanor’s long-speculated lover):

Hick, darling

Ah, how good it was to hear your voice. It was so inadequate to try and tell you what it meant. Funny was that I couldnt say je taime and je tadore as I longed to do, but always remember that I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you.

5. Emma Darwin to Charles Darwin:

I cannot tell you the compassion I have felt for all your sufferings for these weeks past that you have had so many drawbacks. Nor the gratitude I have felt for the cheerful & affectionate looks you have given me when I know you have been miserably uncomfortable.

My heart has often been too full to speak or take any notice I am sure you know I love you well enough to believe that I mind your sufferings nearly as much as I should my own & I find the only relief to my own mind is to take it as from Gods hand, & to try to believe that all suffering & illness is meant to help us to exalt our minds & to look forward with hope to a future state. When I see your patience, deep compassion for others self command & above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to Heaven for the sake of your daily happiness. But I find it difficult enough in my own case. I often think of the words Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee. It is feeling & not reasoning that drives one to prayer. I feel presumptuous in writing thus to you.

I feel in my inmost heart your admirable qualities & feelings & all I would hope is that you might direct them upwards, as well as to one who values them above every thing in the world. I shall keep this by me till I feel cheerful & comfortable again about you but it has passed through my mind often lately so I thought I would write it partly to relieve my own mind.

6. English poet Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf:

…I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldnt even feel it. And yet I believe youll be sensible of a little gap. But youd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shant make you love me any more by giving myself away like this But oh my dear, I cant be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I dont love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I dont really resent it.

7. E.B. White to his wife on the occasion of her pregnancy, “written” by their dog:

Dear Mrs. White:

I like having Josephine here in the morning, although I suppose I will get less actual thinking done as I used to do my thinking mornings in the bathroom. White has been stewing around for two days now, a little bit worried because he is not sure that he has made you realize how glad he is that there is to be what the column writer in the Mirror calls a blessed event. So I am taking this opportunity, Mrs. White, to help him out to the extent of writing you a brief note which I havent done in quite a long time but have been a little sick myself as you know. Well, the truth is White is beside himself and would have said more about it but is holding himself back, not wanting to appear ludicrous to a veteran mother. What he feels, he told me, is a strange queer tight little twitchy feeling around the inside of his throat whenever he thinks that something is happening which will require so much love and all on account of you being so wonderful. (I am not making myself clear I am afraid, but on the occasions when White has spoken privately with me about this he was in no condition to make himself clear either and I am just doing the best I can in my own way.) I know White so well that I always know what is the matter with him, and it always comes to the same thing he gets thinking that nothing that he writes or says ever quite expresses his feeling, and he worries about his inarticulateness just the same as he does about his bowels, except it is worse, and it makes him either mad, or sick, or with a prickly sensation in the head. But my, my, my, last Sunday he was so full of this matter which he couldnt talk about, and he was what Josephine in her simple way would call hoppy, and particularly so because it seemed so good that everything was starting at once I mean those things, whatever they are, that are making such a noise over in the pond by Palmer Lewiss house, and the song sparrow that even I could hear from my confinement in the house, and those little seeds that you were sprinkling up where the cut glass and bones used to be all starting at the same time as the baby, which he seems to think exists already by the way he stands around staring at you and muttering little prayers. Of course he is also very worried for fear you will get the idea that he is regarding you merely as a future mother and not as a present person, or that he wants a child merely as a vindication of his vanity. I doubt if those things are true; White enjoys animal husbandry of all kinds including his own; and as for his regard for you, he has told me that, quite apart from this fertility, he admires you in all kinds of situations or dilemmas, some of which he says have been quite dirty.

Well, Mrs. White, I expect I am tiring you with this long letter, but as you often say yourself, a husband and wife should tell each other about the things that are on their mind, otherwise you get nowhere, and White didnt seem to be able to tell you about his happiness, so thought I would attempt to put in a word.

White is getting me a new blanket, as the cushion in the bathroom is soiled.

Lovingly, Daisy

8. Charles Eames’ marriage proposal to Ray Eames:

Dear Miss Kaiser,

I am 34 (almost) years old, singel (again) and broke. I love you very much and would like to marry you very very soon.* I cannot promise to support us very well. but if given the chance I will shure in hell try

*soon means very soon.

What is the size of this finger??

as soon as I get to that hospital I will write reams well little ones.

love xxxxxxxxxx

Charlie

9. Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir:

My dear little girl

For a long time Ive been wanting to write to you in the evening after one of those outings with friends that I will soon be describing in A Defeat, the kind when the world is ours. I wanted to bring you my conquerors joy and lay it at your feet, as they did in the Age of the Sun King. And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today Im doing it to feel the pleasure you dont yet know, of turning abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. This happens much more often than I admit to you, but seldom when Im writing to you. Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the things around me and the things around me alter my love.

My dear little girl, as Ive told you, what youre lacking is friendship. But now is the time for more practical advice. Couldnt you find a woman friend? How can Toulouse fail to contain one intelligent young woman worthy of you*? But you wouldnt have to love her. Alas, youre always ready to give your love, its the easiest thing to get from you. Im not talking about your love for me, which is well beyond that, but you are lavish with little secondary loves, like that night in Thiviers when you loved that peasant walking downhill in the dark, whistling away, who turned out to be me. Get to know the feeling, free of tenderness, that comes from being two. Its hard, because all friendship, even between two red-blooded men, has its moments of love. I have only to console my grieving friend to love him; its a feeling easily weakened and distorted. But youre capable of it, and you must experience it. And so, despite your fleeting misanthropy, have you imagined what a lovely adventure it would be to search Toulouse for a woman who would be worthy of you and whom you wouldnt be in love with? Dont bother with the physical side or the social situation. And search honestly. And if you find nothing, turn Henri Pons, whom you scarcely love anymore, into a friend.

[]

I love you with all my heart and soul.

10. Honor de Balzac to Countess Ewelina Haska (June, 1835):

MY BELOVED ANGEL,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment say to myself, Come, I am going there! Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not a life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were here. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself She is mine! Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!

11. Napoleon Bonaparte to Josphine de Beauharnais:

I am going to bed with my heart full of your adorable image I cannot wait to give you proofs of my ardent love How happy I would be if I could assist you at your undressing, the little firm white breast, the adorable face, the hair tied up in a scarf a la creole. You know that I will never forget the little visits, you know, the little black forest I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields. Kisses on your mouth, your eyes, your breast, everywhere, everywhere.

12. John Keats to Fanny Brawne:

My sweet love, I shall wait patiently till tomorrow before I see you, and in the mean time, if there is any need of such a thing, assure you by your Beauty, that whenever I have at any time written on a certain unpleasant subject, it has been with your welfare impressd upon my mind. How hurt I should have been had you ever acceded to what is, notwithstanding, very reasonable! How much the more do I love you from the general result! In my present state of Health I feel too much separated from you and could almost speak to you in the words of Lorenzos Ghost to Isabella

Your Beauty grows upon me and I feel A greater love through all my essence steal.

My greatest torment since I have known you has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid; but that suspicion I dismiss utterly and remain happy in the surety of your Love, which I assure you is as much a wonder to me as a delight. Send me the words Good night to put under my pillow.

Dearest Fanny, Your affectionate J.K.

13. Lord Byron to Teresa Guiccioli (August, 1819):

My dearest Teresa,

I have read this book in your garden;–my love, you were absent, or else I could not have read it. It is a favourite book of yours, and the writer was a friend of mine. You will not understand these English words, and others will not understand them,–which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian. But you will recognize the handwriting of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which was yours, he could only think of love.

In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours–Amor mio–is comprised my existence here and hereafter. I feel I exist here, and I feel I shall exist hereafter,–to what purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, eighteen years of age, and two out of a convent. I love you, and you love me,–at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events.

But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us, –but they never will, unless you wish it.

14. Voltaire to Olympe Dunover, written while in prison for their affair:

I am a prisoner here in the name of the King; they can take my life, but not the love that I feel for you. Yes, my adorable mistress, to-night I shall see you, and if I had to put my head on the block to do it.

For heaven’s sake, do not speak to me in such disastrous terms as you write; you must live and be cautious; beware of madame your mother as of your worst enemy. What do I say? Beware of everybody; trust no one; keep yourself in readiness, as soon as the moon is visible; I shall leave the hotel incognito, take a carriage or a chaise, we shall drive like the wind to Sheveningen; I shall take paper and ink with me; we shall write our letters.

If you love me, reassure yourself; and call all your strength and presence of mind to your aid; do not let your mother notice anything, try to have your pictures, and be assured that the menace of the greatest tortures will not prevent me to serve you. No, nothing has the power to part me from you; our love is based upon virtue, and will last as long as our lives. Adieu, there is nothing that I will not brave for your sake; you deserve much more than that. Adieu, my dear heart!

Arout (Voltaire)

15. Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn:

TO MY MISTRESS. Because the time seems very long since I heard concerning your health and you, the great affection I have for you has induced me to send you this bearer, to be better informed of your health and pleasure, and because, since my parting from you, I have been told that the opinion in which I left you is totally changed, and that you would not come to court either with your mother, if you could, or in any other manner; which report, if true, I cannot sufficiently marvel at, because I am sure that I have since never done any thing to offend you, and it seems a very poor return for the great love which I bear you to keep me at a distance both from the speech and the person of the woman that I esteem most in the world: and if you love me with as much affection as I hope you do, I am sure that the distance of our two persons would be a little irksome to you, though this does not belong so much to the mistress as to the servant.

Consider well, my mistress, that absence from you grieves me sorely, hoping that it is not your will that it should be so; but if I knew for certain that you voluntarily desired it, I could do no other than mourn my ill-fortune, and by degrees abate my great folly. And so, for lack of time, I make an end of this rude letter, beseeching you to give credence to this bearer in all that he will tell you from me.

Written by the hand of your entire Servant, H.R.

16. Leo Tolstoy to Valeria Arsenev (November, 1856):

I already love in you your beauty, but I am only beginning to love in you that which is eternal and ever previous your heat, your soul. Beauty one could get to know and fall in love with in one hour and cease to love it as speedily; but the soul one must learn to know. Believe me, nothing on earth is given without labour, even love, the most beautiful and natural of feelings.