Purpurea

Dear Purpurea,

Hi again. It's me. The normal course of things would keep me quiet, keep me from going out of my way to contact you. But you've stuck in me, Purpurea, so I'm reaching out. Reaching back. If it were not igniting so much passion, so much raw, flesh-skinning passion in me, I would call it devious. But it is a kind of passion I could never regret immersing in. It is thick with the weight of my body and ignites at the temperature of my dreams. It feels proper and tastes astringent and delicious.

But that persistence, the obsession, the glory, is my own doing, not yours. For that reason, I am writing not to you, the flesh-and-blood, real you, but to someone I have named Purpurea, who resides somewhere through the internet, at the other end of my blog. Purpurea is your afterglow, the fingerprints left from an encounter in history. Purpurea is your after image, impressed so strongly in me because of what is already there, what is eager to find you and hold onto what I can experience of you, as if I am a predator who has evolved to waken and tense at your scent.

Where have you brought me? Something old in me has woken up. Something I felt I had put aside a long time ago. It has to do with that burst of infatuation that is sometimes irresponsibly called falling in love. Which I could be tempted to call what is emerging right now. But that is not the surprising thing being dredged up.

It's less personal, less gritty. It is a feeling; it is images; it is a sense of something mysterious and great, something that is not love but which compels me to fall in love, over and over again. To lend my heart out. Yeah, it's a good thing.

A lot of images appear in my mind. Sometimes I get the image of cities and deserts; wheat-colored houses in clean, colorful villages off somewhere in the plains and deserts of Asia. Sometimes it looks like something similar: Santa Fe, which you have given me the occasion to really miss with my gut for the first time. It is nights spent wandering around the streets, hoping to find something that would change my life forever in mundane things, a statue glimpsed through a gallery window. A fountain in the back of an apartment complex. The gentle blue glow emanating from a car stereo. The post-twilight darkness over the Jemez.

I am left feeling torn, longing. I feel the dumb, obvious pain of not being able to be close to you physically. I know this is not what it's all about, and that I am particularly bad about perceiving the difference between a real and false opportunity - what would actually satisfy me. Still, I have to mourn a little bit. I know you are set in a strong, beautiful pairbond, and the best I can do is signify my respect in the most formal way possible. Though I carry a wound, I will not tear at what you have created.

How did this start? You got my attention with your tall, lithe, doe-limbed body and beautiful face. I will not hide the fact that this carries weight with me, no matter how superficial I tell myself it is. One can love a body.

Personality, as much as it is a mask, can count for something. At one moment, when I happened to overhear you talking to someone else, I noted to myself how much the rhythm of your thoughts and your choice of words resonated with my heartstrings. I liked your melody and rhythm. You speak from a place of strength and repose that is rare. You are thoughtful, insightful, modest, curious and self-aware.

Each time I looked into your big, warm, brown eyes, I wanted to swim in them. So open, wide and welcoming. Your hand trembled in mine, stirred by some feeling whose name I will never hear. For one moment, yours grasped mine firmly, searching for encounter. It arrived.

So now I am unraveling this package, the result of that encounter. A feeling settling inside me, making itself at home, expanding into something else. Leading off into the distance.

Purpurea, I want to go there.

I want to continue writing to you, so you can stroll your fully-blossomed form, so I can see what you really are.

I think we will leave the breathing you, the flesh-and-blood you, to her happy pursuits up in Santa Fe, and I will learn how to approach you in the furnace of my loneliness, invite you to take your place in that seat from which you cannot rise again, deep inside me.

Let's do this.

Eternally yours,
Peliens