Poetry
Love Letter Day X.
In 2002 or 2003, my boyfriend at the time recited a poem to me in Chinese.
On the tip of my tongue, spider.
Or was it a cloud on the tip of his tongue. I honestly can’t remember. I try googling to no avail. Each time I attempt to piece together more of the moment, I conjure other memories of the time I spent with this lover of poetry instead of the facts of the moment. And so I agree to tell the story of the moment in pieces, because it is the moment that mattered, and not the tongue, the spider or the cloud.
My friend tells me of a date that turned into a lost weekend, where she recited passages of Susan Sontag to a new lover for whom public intellectuals were not familiarity, who admitted it was hard for her to dive into Sontag’s text without help. Or was it Grace Paley. I can’t remember that, either.
It is in the forgetting of details that I’ve decided to reinvent myself, principally so I can call my life a fiction and have some deniability when you come crying to me about how unfair it is that you and I can’t sit in a room together alone anymore.
Except you will never cry to me about this, and what I call fiction, you call poetry.
Maybe I am the one crying about how unfair it is. Like I said I’m shit for details. I lie to myself so when I get caught and am interrogated, I can say in all honesty that I do not know the reason I ran. I don’t know why I ran. I don’t know why I resisted.
Except you will never catch me and I will never run and what I call resistance, you call poetry.
