Love Letters to the Void Pt.1
Singing my life with his words…
It’s true what my friends say that I fall in love too quickly. A crooked tooth alone can crank me open like a tin of sardines -feed on me! I am chock full of omega 3 oils and healthy fats!
But then, after swimming in their waters for some time I find myself tired and looking for a rock to crawl up on to. I look down and see my body has been evacuated. My healthy fats and oils are no longer there, only teeth marks from the feedings. My bones are sticking out, when was the last time I ate?
This is when and where I first heard your voice. I was a shell of myself, slowly replenishing off the lichen and barnacles that grew off the rock I found myself sitting on. You were a floating storehouse of the most gorgeous food, carried on currents that played the inner curl of my ear like congas. No gauntlet of awkward dates required. No shaving or putting on makeup.
I ate and was amazed at the flavours and textures. Never the same combination twice. I could feel the nourishment entering my blood stream like water to a thirst. It occurred to my revived cells to do some of the things they’d been neglecting. I wrote a story after not writing fiction for 3 years. I masturbated. I bought flowers for my kitchen table.
But one morning I woke up with an ache that stretched from my chest to my skull. And with this ache came a vision of me, alone in your storehouse having eaten everything, all 417 episodes. There was nothing left. All my delicious squishy fat disappeared instantly and I was emaciated again.
I started depriving myself in the present to somehow push this event horizon as far into the future as I could. I rationed myself on one episode a day. Your books were taken off the nightstand and put on the shelf next to the two heaving tombs of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Diary of a Writer’ where I’d be sure to avoid looking (having bought them years ago with ambition to read that far outweighed my attention span). I looked my cat gravely in the face and told her we had to prepare for a dopamine hungry winter.
My friends told me to get on the apps. I retched. Speed dating? I passed out cold.
What I can’t seem to sufficiently explain to anyone is that to be in love with a voice is a beautiful kind of in-love. Its not a loneliness that needs curing, its being in love with the knowing that there is a human out in the world who reflects my best bits back to me and is in no way asking me to contort myself into the service of his insecurities. Still, most people seem to have something against this kind of love and call it names; unrequited, limerance, dellusion, as though the only valuable investment of love was one that resulted in mutual surveillance and endless take-away negotiations.
No, I was going to Charlie Bucket nibble my way through your entire Acast offerings instead.
But then, in writing this very letter, I came across a portal of sorts, a perpetual spring. Transmuting the one-way love I feel into fuel for my own creative impulses eases my hunger for your creations. Still feeding on your work but more like it were sun-ripened wildberries and less like eat-fighting my sister for the chip bowl. In doing so I become a crush conduit, a catalyst for all human chemistry. The storehouse will never empty because I am filling it too and now the flavours and textures are combining in ways as yet untasted by mankind.
It makes me want to grow things that don’t exist yet, to roll in fecund mud.
Knowing there are others in the world made up of the same strange and wonderful stuff that I am lets me feel what Roberta and Lauryn did when that guy killed them softly. You carry the whole world in you like I do and your voice leads me, not into a watery grave but back to my burgeoning self.
Para-socially yours,
Heather