Tag: longing

I sent a card.

Karl Elvis

I don’t know if it will make any difference.

I don’t know if it will bring any comfort to her family, to have a random stranger who was in love with their daughter, pick a card, paste a stamp. Cards are stupid, but it’s what one does.

I hated every card I could find, on the racks at my local CVS, but starting from a blank page was more than I could manage. I don’t even remember what it said, but at least there was no odious religion.

Mostly it was an enclosure for something I typed out – my handwriting is awful – telling them who I was (the friend who once worked at Apple, who helped them with my employee discounts), that I am heartbroken at the loss. That she was my best friend.

I gave them my contact info and asked if they might tell me anything; at least about burial or cremation. It’s not knowing, I think, that makes this so fucking difficult for me. To have her gone with only three words – she passed away – and nothing else.

I chose a Disney stamp, because I know Disney was important to her family. anything to earn goodwill.

I mailed it today. It will be in Florida in a day or two, maybe by the weekend. I do not know when or if it will be opened. So I wait and hope I hear something – text, email, call, something.

I tell myself not to expect anything. But the gaping hole where she used to be needs some little thing to fill it.

need, love, longing

Karl Elvis1 Comment

“You should be inside me right now,” she said, and I agreed.

“I just need to be crushed beneath you tasting only your kisses and being filled and consumed by you.”

Words like these will light a fire in me, will make me forget anything other than a need to be there, now, doing exactly as described.

But a message like this from far away, in situation not just in distance, bings with that fiery, burning need, also a melancholic longing.

Love and desire are something most of us well understand, but it’s that ache of the forbidden; Juliet on a balcony, a barrier both physical and metaphoric (and then later, Juliet across the gulf, seemingly, between life and death.

Rapunzel in her tower, Ned in Pushing Daisies, Guinevere unavailable first to Lancelot, and then, as it turns out, unavailable to Arthur. Buffy and Angel, Tony and Maria from West Side Story; Literature and pop culture are filled with tales about loves forbidden, somee fulfilled with consequence, some unfulfilled and tragic, some ending, against odds, well and happily. Because any trope that common is explored in all its variations, both in life and in fiction.

But common themes always are both the pain of longing, and the burning need.

Burning need is something i’m all too familiar with; i’m a creature who feels needs with huger intensity, but also, a creature who loves, when I love, with complete commitment.

So yes, indeed, I should be inside you, now, and always. That thought is present in my mind more and more, as time passes.