Bottled Spirits

Written July 2010

                She doesn’t talk about books anymore. 

She doesn’t write anymore either -- did you know that?  I asked her about it the other day and she showed me the most recent thing she had written: a flat, dull story that was supposed to be about you.  But it lacked . . . her.

            I don’t expect you to know what I’m talking about.  Back when I knew her, we conversed for hours on end about books -- writing -- reading…those were passions we shared.  Those, I could tell, were integral parts of her being.  Her eyes lit up when she talked, and when she wrote, her words bled with her heart. 

            Every time I talk to her, she mentions how happy she is with you, but I don’t believe it.  I want to --- really, I do.  She’s so convincing that I can see it so clearly, as if it really happened: one day, like a secret emerging from the back of a closet or deep in a desk drawer, she will call me and proudly show me an inspired poem she had written.

I want to believe that she was writing about you all along, and writing beautifully.

But for now, that poem will be put at the back of the closet, filed away in drawers like secrets from a past life that no one is supposed to find.  That’s not the proper place for her pieces.  She writes in order to bottle up her spirit in that present moment, so that one day she can take a vial down from the shelf and look back on it with a nostalgic tenderness.   She’s not writing for YOU, she’s writing for herself.

 

 

 

She wrote a poem for me once, and to this day, it still brings tears to my eyes.

 

Reviews

[Creepy Swine Guy]

This reads like a prologue, as if it is introducing us to some tortured character in a "Great Gatsby-like" story. Ii find myself wondering who she is? Wondering who knows her so well (I suspect a past lover) And whom it is that she claims to love but whose presence has sucked the life from her words.

It it possible that this might grow??

[Ed Hart]

it's a kind of magic, to create complex dimensionality with a few brush strokes...the orientals carry it in their cultural genes...in our world is passes almost unrecognized