when i returned from our meet i unwrapped your gift and it is sitting with me on my hospital bed right now. i send you this, about us:
dear maddy, today is the first day i met you. as you rolled up in your car a bunching of grit and organic matter lodged itself into the enormous hole in the back of my jeans and i thought i was being invaded by spiders. i looked up from swatting my ass and searching my thighs to see you waving through the windeshield to me. i got into the front seat, repositioning your oxygen tank on my thighs and you handed me your present. a fluffy, soft white bunny with a visor on that says “love”. beyonce was playing which was perfect because when you called and woke me to remind me about our date today i was dreaming about a beyonce that was aquatic and pearlescent and flight gifted and roaming the edges of sky like dome we were exploring. as your voice entered B’s face remained in overlapping vanishings. this was the first time we heard each other’s voices.
there were things i saw and felt that i thought would have made me sad, but because of the brightness of your will and honesty of your heart i took them in stride. the way when we arrived in the kitchen you wheeled the tank around retrieving and diplaying and offering food for me, showing me the cabinets and telling me to welcome myself - when i realised i didn’t have any creon forte medication for the food i was going to eat you made me take an entire bottle, offering to give me more because you knew that you had a huge stockpile in the closet and you are under private health care that i can’t afford - when i saw the treadmill you offered to give me any advice/money i needed to help me get the care and equipment i needed. you said you wanted to sit and watch me eat because it would make you happy to take care of me. i saw in you purified urge to give and care for someone you love, who shows you love. the house was warm, oscillating with habitability, clean, well stocked with food and medicine, photographs everywhere. it was the kind of home i used to dream about as a child. a wood and plaster womb.
leading up the carpeted stairs was a series of connected lines that lead to constantly running oxygen converter at one end and nose peice at the other with enough length to give you free reign around the top floor. you stopped me at the top of the stairs to show me a painting you had done of flushing flowers vogue-ing and baring self help mantras in a precise, curling ivory font along their wide leaves and petals. you took me to your projects room where you keep your piano, work desk and movie collection and also where the c02 converter is planted, humming. you took me to your room and you showed me your purple board and the photographs on it. you told me about the people in them, your friends, your mom, your father (figure) who passed away last year. you showed me the photos from the machine that glitched when you were getting pictures on your 18th, the type that places graphics over your hands and face to make you look like and alien or frames you in a love heart, you showed me the lagged repetition of your face in the lower bottom corner.
you showed me your supply of foods and candies, pointing to shelves and baskets, offereing me any that i would care for ( i took starwberry poptarts/wild berry poptarts ). you gave me, from your purple board, a necklace with a painted wood cutting of an owl that says “be happy”. i gave you a book two hundred pages thick that took me two years to finish, “the history of everything ever by grant gronewold”, it was the beginning of my drawings and it is an early facsimile of what i am. the owl is bumping against my clavicle as i write this, the little attached tassle of plastic crystal clicking against the painted wood.
we climbed into your bed and took our first photos together on your webcam, joining our fingers together to form a heart icon. we compared our clubbed fingers. we talked about end stage - euthenasia/suicide - systematic rejection of our coping mechanisms -being aware of every movement in our bodies from having to suffer bouts of immobility and sensory depravation for years - niki minaj - expressive speech and rapping - our moms. i have never been too close with ayone else who had “my” (our) illness.
i wrote this so we could both remember today even before today was done. i am sitting here remembering how it is that i came to know you and how you crystalize into a deeper permanence within in me everytime i log online and upload our letters. and i’m thinking of our beginning touch in the front of your car, hugging around your tank while dirt and thistle tumbled down my pants. the seat covers were pink and beyonce sang triumphs all over “the first time”.
