These beautiful texts arrived to me on hand-written paper letters, as well as text messages through the WhatsApp platform. The letters were part of the magic contents of a big, carton box that arrived at my home in La Perla for my birthday in August. It was filled with nuts and chocolates, Toblerone, cashew salted and unsalted, sets of guitar-strings, box of band-aids, liquids for contacts, nail-varnish, shampoo, skin-oinment, albacore-fish paquets and duct-tape.

Many of the love writings below were expressed by Mona Lisa as text messages through the WhatsApp platform, from the USA to Venezuela. After an intense relationship thirty years ago, we have not seen each other live for twenty years now. The existence of emotions of love, within many other feelings, attributed to a life solely in the domain of the imagination is a key to the reality of existence and consciousness.

(Letter inside the Box, on a paper with a slight brownish color, and another similarly colored page with a drawing of two distant trees on different parts of the world, joined by their roots deep under the ground)

Emilio,
    Is it strange that I labored over the color choice of the paper for this note? Should I go with BLUE, in memory of the children’s story you once told me where “Mar y Cielo” were repeated in the rhythm of the tale? LAVENDER? The shade of the many mornings that I woke to wonder if our secret meeting the night prior was but a delicious dream for only me to savor? RED, for the chilis that captured our spirits so many moons ago?  ORANGE for my half orange? Ultimately I chose this, the color of roots that reached below the surface, reached under us as we have shifted and changed with the wind and sun and rain. Roots that have stretched for miles, connecting and carrying vibrations to other roots that stretch under and through valleys and rivers and oceans, connecting us again.

May the contents of this box bring you joy and nourish your body and spirit. May they stretch a smile on your face and release the rays of wisdom from the corners of your eyes.
    Sent with love!
    Annette

25-07-2022
Emilio, my moon,
My soul is nestled in earth,
I’ll wait for his call.

26-07-2022
Your tattered edges

Give me your tattered edges so that I might inspect them

Let me touch the ripples of your scars that shaped surface and below

Let me see the wildness of your hair when the sweat and humidity has their way

Far too much beauty is assigned to the new, the young, to those unfettered by the weight of this life.

Give me your tattered edges. The “Fuck!” exclaimed when you think the connection pops

Should I have watched when you thought that I was no longer there?  Watched your abrupt departure off screen before returning with your guitar…?

A voyeur as I witness you twist from frustration to creation, …there the beauty lies.

The man, the moon.

09-08-2022
Your absence is
HEAVY
I have been carrying it for decades
Sometimes it settles in my elbows, rendering them motionless
Other times I balance it on and in my head, calculating each movement of my hips and swing of arms as to not upset the balance
yes, the balance
for if it is balanced,
the weight of it just pushes me down,
spares me the indignity of flailing this way and that,
In grotesque desperation to catch myself before slamming to the earth.
Most times it settles on my heart,
this absence
It squeezes with each beat
A little too hard
Vacating every last drop from each chamber
Reminding me of how close
How close we were
How close
How close we were to having
Having, having it all
Leaving
Leaving only the weight
The weight of absence.
————
My messages unopened 
Once you told me to stop,
Stop drawing,
stop adorning,
stop spreading my affection on the outside of the envelopes, the packages sent to you in Europe.
The Germans were growing suspicious,
Suspicious of the flagrant gestures from the woman in New York. 
The American.
The Exaggerant.
The woman around whom you should give berth,
for she may draw you in,
suck you down there, suck you down and you don’t even realize until you’ve gone,
Gone too far to remember
before,
before her.
Loud love
Unbridled love
Unruly love
Untethered
Unlike any other
she was too much
Yes, too much
Best to watch her from afar, or
Just let the lids slip, slip over iris
into slumber,
let her extinguish 
like the setting sun.
————
A breeze flows in through a window forgotten to be shut,
Cool but for the sweet scent of honey, dark and rich. 
Have the clouds conspired to bring your scent to me?  Have they stolen the influences of the moon and her pull on the waters, the sun in its brilliance to push with its heat, to carry your essence?
To enter me as essential as my breath?
To stir my longing,
Awaken my desire,
Fill the depths that I had forgotten exists?

I dreamed of you last night. The low purr that your voice brings to my name, brings it to the surface, lifts me.
————
So good to hear your voice!

I am going to the Birdsfoot Farm reunion- the place that ignited my passion for you.

August
I will make the pilgrimage to the origin of us.
I danced in the sunlight to the cadence of your drum
By firelight our eyes were a tango of glances, competing with the flames
As all the world fell away in the absence of our light

You my half orange
You my healer
My catalyst
My blood

Did you know it then?  Can our hearts defy the shackles of linear time?  Did the fire and the wine and the magic of the night air allow our spirits a portal in time, a glimpse of our destiny of passion?

Did Cadence summon us to create her or did our fierce desire to revive ourselves summon her?

Wish you were going with me!
————
Mango Sweet
The knife drawn across flesh
Reveals the sticky promise of a golden dance on the tongue

A ritual of peeling and tasting, unwitnessed by me until now

We had so few moments of everyday life together though I have imagined them.  I extrapolate from our stolen moments…how you took pleasure in the smallest of moments.  The feel of a fabric on your skin, the smell of a meal, the sound of rain.  Were you to ask me to imagine you eating a mango, I would have imagined something like what you sent.

Were all my other imaginings just as accurate?  Were they imaginings or did I peek at another trajectory where other versions of us lived a  life together?

Would we be tired of one another, arguing over who should take out the trash? Would we have lost our jobs because we stayed home making love all day?

10-08-2022
When time looked lovingly at us, we twisted together in intricate patterns and wild tangles of heated breath and angles of arms and legs and hips.

The ropes of dreams and exploration drawing in and constructing and hardening in place…
Constricting and binding
Converting and bending
Cementing and bleaching

Faded and bound my movements are imperceptible

Picking at the edges
Lifting a loop
Loosening another, all the while the length of me is still…
Still and waiting for the pick, pick, pick to reach their threads, waiting for the moment when the whole damn thing rips apart, leaving nothing save the dents in our flesh from where we shackled ourselves

29-09-2022
Cool air rolls through a cracked window, cascading to the floor, curls around ankle, then calf, over the soft bend in knee. Climbing, reminding, of our dance in the burning, crackling fall of falling into each other’s arms. So brief we were, just a few seasons, snuffed out by practicality, other commitments, the absurdity of us… the abandon of all things proper, cloaked in the purity of skin on skin

20-10-2022
(Letters written on three paper pages, inside the Magic Box)
Emilio,
    I have touched each item, imagined you using it, touching it, eating some, finding solutions, answering questions, providing safety, relief. I thought about you creating, smiling, strengthening.
    I hope you feel the love and joy I packed into the air between the items, the spaces where the love spills out onto the table, cascading to the floor sliding under your feet so that this gift might carry you, swirl around you and wrap you, as for now my arms cannot reach you,
     (heart drawing) Annette
—————————
(Light purple-colored page with a big, glued paper cut-out of a full moon)
    Your light falls like rain,
    Cupped hands capture precious drops,
    Rapture soaks my Soul
—————————
(Light blue-colored paper with text written in meanders swirling around the page in all directions)
    Isn’t it beautiful how time loops back on itself transporting us back to a version of us that was younger, wilder, and naked, unfettered by the layers of social pressures, ”adult” responsibilities, jobs and our feeble attempts to be something respectable, worthy, and full of honor. All the while our wildness is smothered, all but extinguished until our oxygen arrives in a ring of a phone, a velvet voice, the sound of a chuckle, a choppy connection that liberates your soul, awakens your senses as though you never left that version of you eating fruits on the floor by candlelight, licking fingers with joy.   

Message interchange
EM:
Impressed by the pleasure of taste, practical solutions to life.
Future solutions
To life running’s
But in this feast of flavour, sabor, your poems and letter are the sweetness of life itself, I love your writing, Annette, it is eternal.
Thank you.

Annette:
I’m so happy you finally got it!
To see you holding them
Carried the distance of miles
The distance of years
And yet we are.

EM:
Your texts are so fluent and smooth that your phrases move and touch the senses in walls of memory. I’ll send you the doc with your love poems, for you to check.

Annette:
And yet we are

EM:
Thanks Annette, an intense moment
Just like hearing Sade again

Annette:
She is our guardian
Our witness
The poetry that wrapped us like silk
Sheer and soft
Natural and strong
Sweet dreams
Right back to that little room at Jo’s house.
Candles, Sade, fruits and lovemaking
How many dirty nights between those walls.

27-10-2022
Almost 30 years ago you gave me pearl earrings.
I wore them today.

Pearls

Bonded in grief
Each a different loss at the core

layers of iridescence smooth the surface

Rolling on our tongues

Gathering mass

Each moment, a glistening complexity submits to the sheen

It’s form defies the origins, the tumbling transformation, graceful perfection, the unburdened love that is without expectation

My pearl, my moon

03-11-2022
(e-mail)
How strange it is to feel this strong connection after so many years. I have carried your heart in mine. The essence, the distilled and purest measure of us, captured and preserved…is it even real? I have wondered over and under decades.  This curiosity, as though captured and preserved, yet somehow moving, growing, imperceptibly, three decades pass before it blooms again. Or maybe we are like cicadas, evolving in the earth of the earth, waiting to emerge with purpose.  

Do  you remember the first night we spoke? You made me a drink in someone’s kitchen.  We spoke of children who only lived but a few hours.  Consequential lives that shook us, screamed with tiny lungs, to live, to dare us to exist with purpose and to love with  abandon.

We both knew that night that ours was not a chance meeting. We had destiny to fulfill, scalding love to touch, to burn with.

Have we cooled enough to appreciate this purity?

(Reply by EM)
Cicada purity, I am amazed and startled by your written conveying of our complex but pure sentiments. Should I write a love song with them, or a chorale, or even an opera or film script, or perhaps guitar music with contemporary dance on video? I am barely and simply transcribing them onto a page which I will hang on to my "poems segment" of my web page, while I await a creative surge to respond in matching profoundness. Even all the art forms, including my own grasped abilities to create music, fall short of expressing your texts. This deception of the arts renders me defenseless, Annette, I remain numb, but privileged that I am in it, I am part of it, a selfish hedonist of pure love.
Yours, truly,
Emilio

13-11-2022
Our Daughter

28 years of breath and art, laughter and sadness-
Woven into a woman profound

What measures a life? The years that pass?
The works created? The lovers lost and those we hold close?

What is a life? Is it measured in hearts connected,
however brief?  

This is how I measure- Who did I let in? 
How many can my heart hold?  Who did I let tear at my insides, leaving me breathless?

The ones I return to, after the pain, carrying my scarred body, holding my wounds.

These are the ones. I deem “worth it.”  The ones who have loved me fiercely, branded my soul,
screamed at me to savor a moment, even those that push me to my knees.

These are my people.  My wild reminders that love is what makes us

30-11-2022
Emilio
Touchstone of my essence
Are you my purest sense of me?
As I shift and change, do you hold what is eternal,
Core to my being,
Everlasting?

Perhaps you represent my shifting ground,
My eternal changing sense of self

You are with me always, your apparition, there to measure a moment,
provide a consult, opinion, declare it beautiful or send it to an abyss of the inconsequential.

Are you my life un-lived?  The detour I never took?

It is this that haunts me

This Emilio. This love. This love so brief, it doesn’t know it’s name
————
Will I ever see you again?
Feel the heat of your face against mine?
Breathe the scent of honey from flowers of distant lands?
Will I ever hear the purr of your voice speak my name as your breath curls around my neck?
Will I ever know your body again, as it trembles in the ecstasy we create?
Will I hear the questions you pose in the middle of love-making, meant to challenge our connections to a greater depth? The playful laughter as we conspired against all who would rather burn us to the ground than admit that we existed so boldly in each other’s embrace?

These are the fire against which all others are but a flicker of flame

03-01-2023
Whispering -
Sending love and warmth in the vespers of the new year.
Emilio, a name said with more breath than any other,
The thought of you releases me,
A slow exhale that hopes of breathing you in,
Holding you at the core of my being,
A dark morsel of chocolate resting in my breast
————
When you see a message from me, how do you respond?  Do you wait to open it last?
After all of the mundane is finished to relish before closing the day? 
Am I the tempestuous American with unpredictable messages- prompting you to brace yourself before reading??. 
Wondering if I will respond with cool indifference or choppy sex poetry that tries to capture what was us? 
What is this dance? Does it need a name? 
Shall we always exist outside of structure and normalcy?


13-01-2023
The cadence of your voice stirs an ancient part of me,
Twitching strands of DNA awaken,
Sending out threads, looking for yours, to twist with and wrap and wind- making a new life, a one where the rest falls away fading into earth with the setting sun.
Ours is the darkness.
The place we existed.
The place we reside now- riffing on digital whispers, blurred edges of memories, building on slipping sands, but doing it anyway.
The heart defies logic because the dreamers dream