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From:
To:
Sent: April 22, 2007 1:16 AM
Subject: RE: Hello?

n
As in: never again, never again. That phrase with its cardiac cadence. Slight arrhythmia. A certain tunnelled clump of muscle misbehaving, missing steps or taking clumsy extras, a drunk at the top of the stairs in the dark. When you used the abbreviation before, that n, it was an intimate act, an adoring diminutive, as though to make the beloved compact enough to carry with you secretly. You always found me tall for a woman (too tall?). Now it’s as though you want to avoid repeating my full name: Arnella. Nella. nel. n. To deduct the name down to nothing. Nobody, no one, nowhere, nothing, nought, null, nil.

yes yes
The one thing you would never say in the act was Yes! — it was always O no O no O no O no! when you were getting close, and when I asked if it was because something was wrong, this “thing” was wrong, or was your pleasure (I would like to think so) intense to the point of pain, you went shy and said it was “just what came out — you know” (your favourite lazy phrase) “like when a song shows up in your head and you just, like, let it out?” I didn’t press the point. I sensed you retreating into your separate memoir of intimate events. I didn’t ask if that was what always “came out,” or only with me. Separate memoirs, former loves. How crowded our bedrooms are these days. (Or not. Not my bedroom. Not these days.) For over a century there was a tunnel extending from the crypt of the main cathedral here, down to the Hotel Dieu, the old Catholic hospital, so the priests could stay indoors in winter when they were called off to see sick parishioners or perform the last rites. A few weeks ago I read about it and for some reason kept wanting to tell you. Why not now. Forty years ago they decided the tunnel was becoming unsafe. They sealed it off at both ends, but the passageway is still there, thirty feet under Brock Street, totally dark, of course, and empty. Sometimes now when I’m alone it hits me.

reflect a little
Five days of this little reflecting. Here is what gnaws me, besides the after-effects of five days of little reflecting on your part and much waiting on mine. What gnaws and haunts me is: whatever passed through your mind in those five (plus) days, all the stuff you decided not to voice, reconsidered, revised, rejected then retrieved, reneged on again, at last deleted. I want it back, the full census of your reflections, a crammed CATscanful, all those references to me, I can’t accept they’re gone, neural flickers like email never sent or lost in transit somewhere in the digital ether we’re all adrift in now. Or: whispers of a couple passing in that tunnel before it was sealed. A pair of nuns, let’s say, lovers on the down low, erotically revved up by the proximity of illness, death. Death’s weirdly elating ultimacy. Did they have torches? A medieval image, cinematic to the point of camp: dark figures hunched, capes wafting, torches in hand, flapping down limestone corridors propped with timber stays for safety, as in a mineshaft. Our lovers must feel unnerved, even so. They are crossing so many lines. The anxiety of the crime makes one notice other dangers everywhere. And safety measures always seem to whisper: some day we will fail! It feels safer where there are no measures. And either way, in their presence or absence, no safety.

i’m sorry
Sorry, maybe, because there were no reflections? You’d made up your mind? You’re sorry that you stalled about breaking the news, is all? They say that from the bottom of a deep hole, you can see the stars shining even at noon. I never trust those little factlets from the Globe; still, it’s good news for the dead.

and I do think it might be best
Italics mine. But even without the italics (it’s my ethnic privilege to overuse them) your implication here is that I made the suggestion in the first place! Actually, of course, I did: “If you need me to pull back now, I will.” Naturally I didn’t mean it, though. Didn’t want you to accept. Wanted you to say O no O no O no O no! What’s more, you must have known I didn’t mean it — you just pretended to take the words at face value to give yourself a convenient out. Lovers are the world’s only honest people, according to certain poets and sages. Ho ho ho. I’m nostalgic for the salad days, grad and postgrad in the late ’70s and early ’80s, York and ubc, when it was an article of faith (if not experience) in our circle that straight lovers, bourgeois lovers, were the only dishonest ones. T[he] on/lie dys/honest ones.
    That stage of life when confidence depends on culprits.
    Oh, to have both back.

i seem to need some space
But, but I thought we were bitter opponents of platitudes, you and I; we agreed that our love was not like any other love (italics mine, quote yours, email 64, line 17: I am now chief archivist of your intimacies), and to consecrate and, as you would say, “honour” this singularity, we agreed that we would never speak of our love in clichés. We smogged the air with exalted vows like that. Teenage summer lovers in a song by The Boss. So, maybe a return to cliché is a neatly symmetrical way to shut things down… to deconsecrate our love, the way they do with those churches whose flocks have died off or moved to Palm Beach, so the buildings can be converted to meeting halls or museums or daycares. Ever wondered how they deconsecrate a cathedral? I really should know, after a quarter century in my field. (A century, one learns, is a small thing.) A choir assembles for the last time, chanting in discord, an infernal chorus. At the altar a bishop exhausts the full roster of religious obscenities. The organist, wild-eyed, riffs on anthem-rock standards, Queen, Gary Glitter, the Sweet, as if playing at a hockey rink.