Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Monday, October 15, 2007)

Dear Leticia,

You’ve been a frightfully horrible Valkyrie this week, this month, this decade; leaving me subjected to spells of paranoia about the nature of our continued friendship. I feel winter approaching, a hoary ache in my molars, an atavistic feeling that someone’s old age is approaching, maybe even mine… though nobody can ever really be sure whose old age they are feeling. Maybe that of some unlucky paraplegic from the Spanish Civil War, or mayhap of some old London pensioner, or of some American poet with British pretentions, if you dare to live in your imagination.

But when I share these thoughts with you, you are the one who always has the upper hand because you are the silent critic, and your diffidence gives you the facade of strength undeserved, like it does all beautiful women, Leticia, especially the ugly ones. I’ve written to you many times and shared with you silly poems I wrote about love when I was 14, to which you, in your reticent silence, said, “Oh, Brav-!” Brav? Was that supposed to mean “Bravo?” You did not even grant me the dignity of my second vowel, you c—! I have lived in New York for 12 years now, and when I first got here, I wrote to you of snow and hot coffee and warm bread and old friends. We said to each other that Williams Carlos Williams was right, because he had, in turn, said Raleigh was right, when both insisted, in verse: “The country will give us no peace.” And by that they meant: We must stay here in this cold city and face our neighbors/persecutors/others, because they are actually us and we are actually them … and all of us are behind on last year’s taxes. It’s not enough to get lost in an idyllic life and crawl up what Swinburne called one’s ass. That’s no kind of life for Eurotrash like us, even the ones of us who are unfortunately born in Tulsa.

So I say to you, Leticia, this will not be my last letter, but the first of many, in which I tell you my ongoing travails of being a failed Southern writer in the big city. My work for the specialty magazine I call “Sump Digest.” My continuing dedication to a life of anomie and joy and sadness and pain and loss and all the things that the Kardashian sisters call a life well lived.

You are my feminus salvator, because you believed in me when others saw only the man who sliced the pickle for them in quarters. And so let this be my philippic and my ongoing appeal … to you. My inspiration who is so far away.

As we used to say in Montmartre, may a smile be your colostomy bag.

To be continued,
Salo