dear rachel

I am writing this to you from the couch, from the barely-morning hours, from the place where overzealous Spanish television is cheering you on, urging you forward. I am writing to you Rachel, from a place outside yourself.

I am writing to you because you should know that you have become a glutton, a lush. Baudelaire told you that you needed to be drunk, and so you are. He said that Time must be avoided, that in order that you might not be crushed you must drink deeply and "be drunk without ceasing." He commanded that the poison be of your choosing and you listened. He offered virtue, wine, poetry arrayed in an intoxicating buffet and demanded that if you were to hide from the gallows of time you must take the heavy drought of ordinary conviviality and drown in it.

And because for all my attempted objectivity I am you, with your weaknesses and impulses, I did. I stole from e.e. cummings to describe rainy days. I made cups of tea events and imagined the liquid warming away all weariness, and because I imagined it, my pretense won. I spent an hour and a half (stonecoldandschoolmarmsober) peeling the skin from a grapefruit, separating the sections, laying them side by side, like so many swaddled babies in a nursery, tenderly peeling the bitter white sub-skin from the sections, and teaching my tongue to separate and love every single miracle bubble of juice. I ate the most expensive sushi roll on the menu, slowly; alone. I showed cleavage. I refused to tan or brush my hair. I loved the hell out of the man most dangerous to my heart. I accepted an apology. I kissed asses that needed kissing. I sympathized with a woman who hated me, I ached for her when she hurt.

And above all, the part that makes me life's addict, it's endless gorging glutton is this: I softened it all with the grany lens of the poetic mind. I drizzled it all with the honey of a heart released from pain and I watched it baptize the world's horrors.

I frivolously made every single day of my life more than it ever was. I celebrated and drank mediocrity by lending a charming blessedness to the simple difference between my smell before and after a shower. I allowed this. I toasted and blessed this continual drunkenness on the simple breaths of mortality as a means to survive crushing defeat. But we have survived. And now I am asking for a change.

We have made a glass half-full (a life half-empty) into a cup overflowing, by pouring the entirety of my, your, (our?) purpose into the smallest glass to be found. While this is a charming quality for the dowdiest of starving artists, this is not enough.

There is more. You have more within you.

So, I'm not asking. I'm telling. Get a bigger cup, child. Fill it up. Expand your drink with the effervescence of purpose and thrive at the challenge. Let the quest be your new drug.

Then, when we've filled the oceans, the swimming pools, the rivers, and the water towers, we'll toast Baudelaire, and get drunk on our own vitality. Then, my dear, time cannot touch you.


salud,
the prodigal child.