TTS

I was digging through old photos when I stumbled across an old love letter. Funnily enough, I mocked how I purged everything out of my life after things end. But I found that I kept one. The last one. The Dear John letter. From one of the most insanely intense, poetically inclined, lovers in my life. He even sent it to me three days after my birthday. It sent me into a frenzy, I couldn’t sleep all night, I tore through my closet wanting to know if I had kept any more. Overwhelming emotions, of need, of breath catching, and butterflies stirring, arose to the surface to blind my thoughts. I needed to know where this person was, what they were doing, I had to reconnect. But the hitch...I knew him ten years ago. It was a whirlwind affair, across states, and continents. His nickname was TTS, he called me Blumchen. He would carve letters out of wood, and stitch them together with red thread. I would illustrate him my day. We were madly consumed by each other. And now years later, for the life of me, I cannot remember what TS stands for. I simply remember his first name Timothy. It has been racking my brain for days. It is amazing, how we can have these intense moments in our lives, that we shove away, and then become overwhelmed by again. Where oh where has he gone. All I have left is a beautiful poetic note, and a photograph, and the same consuming desire that once haunted me enveloping me again. Reading through the last goodbye letter, I am remind harshly, how nothing in LA has even come close to the intensity of that relationship. And perhaps that is why they all keep failing.

Where are you Timothy?

"Oh, how I wish I had all the right thoughts and, further, the most effective words to express them with. Sometimes even the best of friends, words in this case, are so unprepared for the present moment that they only make one feel all the more alone, isolate, and barren. If I were more musical perhaps I could find the proper melody to play and ponder over and over again until there were no longer the need for meditation. If I were more artistic I would form an abstraction of wood and clay to shape, stroke, and reform until the materials reach their stress limits and crumble and crease into new self-definition. Thus, I carry light from a recalcitrant black void plane with a sharp blade and hope all the while that I will find some loose threads and fabric swatches with your patterns on it. Perhaps you will see bits and pieces, flecks and static, finger prints of me mingling amidst you. Clearly there arises a tension and confusion from the lines and void. I see flashes of you in it, Jessica; However, it is presently too confined and like you, needs a more expansive (perhaps limitless) "horizon" along which to grow and express itself. You are not designed to be statically held in place. I do see you in a fixed place fidgeting and carving your space, anxious to hatch into a new world (your world). I think of exuberant red flowers, willing to explode into an impermanent beauty for one perfect day rather than remain tightly enclosed as a bud for another week to ensure a full spring of blooming. If I may editorialize further, I will tell you that I am drawn to and also fear and am jealous of this unwavering commitment to the course of greatness. This is not to say that I fear and am jealous of you. No, I would be unable to trust and care for you as I have if I feared you. I wish that I could be compulsive like you rather than merely impulsive, as I presently am. As resistant as I am to change, I actually desire and relish it. I’m on my way to changing- my chrysalis is formed, yet I'm not ready to hatch. Perhaps someday Jessica, we'll be ready to fly together in a more elegant synchronized way. I think of large waves, which are the product of many smaller waves of different velocities and periods that happen to synchronize and become absorbed into one another. I think of Alice, the nigh blooming white phoenix tree. I think of Voaness, the Gothic flapper from the Edo dynasty. I dream of your Tokyo antiquarian bookstore and all the sartorial busts and swatches within it.

Imperceptible.
It withers in the world.
This flower like human heart.

-Ono no Komachi, The immortal great beauty poetess (what do the beautiful know of beauty?)

Yours. Timothy"