A letter to my first lover (who dumped me twenty years ago) that I am thinking of sending but probably won’t - David Luntz
Hey there – yeah, it’s me, massively awkward after all this time, I know, but I was thinking about when we got caught in that storm coming down the mountain pass, our teeth chattering so hard it was impossible they didn’t crack and some sinew passed between us that could never be cut, even after you said it had been a mistake and you’d gotten rid of it, and anyway, I’ve wanted to tell you something for a while now, but now that I finally got the words, I don’t have the feelings, well, that’s not exactly right, I have the hole of those feelings, the space of their absence, and maybe it’s that hole I’m trying to fill or maybe it’s those feelings I want back, because that’s when I felt most alive, not just when we were together, but afterwards, too, when I was lying fetal in the corner and then belly crawling to the toilet to throw up because I missed you so bad, but look, I’m not writing to tell you everything sucks because it doesn’t, in fact things are fine, I got a nice house, two kids going off to college, but why should you care, I mean I don’t know shit about your life and, honestly, I’m not interested in getting coffee, catching up, and seeing if you’ve let yourself go, it’s just that, after you left, I kept having these dreams about you whose remains were everywhere, spotting the floors, whispering up and down the walls, flapping on the laundry line smelling of lilac, and I would sit on the bench by the fountain kneading shafts of sunlight between my fingers, siphoning those dreams, drinking them down, willing you to cross over, because you stood on the other side of them by the edge of the lake we spent the weekends at, so, I just wanted you to know the morning you left I patched the crack in the rock on the patio you’d always asked me to, took it to the lake and planted lilacs around it, and I figure right about now, the rain that had got inside it, the rain that heard our chattering teeth, has leached down into a single drop, hanging above a crevice, quiet and still, like a tiny heart about to start beating.
Originally published by South Florida Poetry Journal, August, 2023
Work is forthcoming or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, trampset, Vestal Review, X-R-A-Y Lit, Bull, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david
