The Postcard

For all its ups, downs, side-to-sides, and French-film-complications; ours has always been acquaintance of words. Poems, stories, quotes, and the occasional song lyric. Secrets, conversations, whispers, proclamations, and cocktail-laced rants. Obvious and subtle messages, some real, some imagined, embedded in our manipulations of language.

I always saw how you spoke in the non-liner tongue of Burroughs, whilst I would try and speak in the riddle tongue of dragons. Somehow, we didn't require translators. Although, there were moments of mutual kangaroo? in what we did with the words.

You always sent the postcards. Notes of your travels along the jetstream and temporal dreamtime nexuses between worlds. Suppositions of what could come to pass. Mournful tones of what would never be. Chronicles of a life, perhaps one of the most interesting stories of all, and I am a sucker for a good story. Even a bad one, if it grabs my attention.

I've read and re-read them all, as I've done with any of your words I've had access to. Those postcards always get a reaction from me. Joyful smirks at hearing from you. Hopeful smiles and fearful thoughts. Anger and sadness toward the perceived forlorn. Comfort as your life moves apace, and, no matter the distance, you still include me in it.

Snake chases its tail, and things come full circle. I receive a postcard from you and the excitement wells up at hearing from you; reading where you are these days. Your messages, no matter how brief, have always illicited a reaction from me. After all, the nature of our acquaintance has always been the nature of words, and there's just no escaping that.

You speak of jumping off the ends of your world to come visit in the spring. You mention your daughter, and I find myself floored at how quickly she's grown, struggling to remember how long it's been that I've been where I'm at these days. It was lifetimes ago when we'd exchange words face to face over coffees or whiskeys.

And, yet, it was yesterday. Ain't that the way? I always do go on about time being an abstract, and I did fuck off for a place where time is even more of a dubious proposition, where the fantastic is said by some to dance upon earthly feet.

Be that as it may, I've read and re-read your latest postcard, as I am always wont to do. Your wish of spring has illicited a reaction of excitement. We'll get to see one another soon, get to exchange words in the realms of the flesh. Sooner than we think, though perhaps a little later than we hope.