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Date Posted: 22:40:06 11/27/07 Tue
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Tracy my darling girl- I am, indeed, up to my arse in the snowy fields of Russia, but never fear, I'm a resourceful boy even in the most strenuous of situations. I've heard Canada can be mighty chilly as well, so have sent you a little bit of something of myself as a youth. Seen through another's eyes, mind you...but I hope you'll enjoy it all the same. Just the thought of your precious giggle will keep me warm.....From Russia with love, James.>>>>
In reply to: Tracy 's message, "For James Kirkpatrick :)" on 18:55:51 11/27/07 Tue

copyright 2007 Cindy Brandner

Memory was often served best, Jonathan Wexler had found, at three am of a morning. He had at one time hated these hours, not night, not day, but something dead in between, where terror and failure keep their homes. He’d learned how to live with it over the years however, occasionally with sherry and a good book. Occasionally with alcoholic oblivion and young bodies that seemed faceless in the morning. And, more often than was wise or good for his soul with thoughts of the man who lay now, deeply and one hoped dreamlessly, sleeping the opium-laced sleep for which when he awoke, they would both pay dearly. They had come down this particular road three times now and if the long evening and night he’d just spent were any indication, the boy was getting worse, not better.

The boy. It made him smile to think of him so, though he bore little resemblance to the beautiful dreamer he’d met a long time ago. He could still take the memory out as if it were five minutes ago and feel it as only very special memories can be felt. A September morning, so tender as to feel like spring and he in a mood to match the soft, untarnished guise of it.

Thirteen years of teaching English to children had deluded him of most of his ideals, the second coming of Byron had not occured and he had ceased to hope for one. He’d a bit of talent of his own, not enough, as he had the honesty to admit, a small appearance in an anthology occasionally, a slender volume of verse published when he was twenty-eight and since then, nothing.

And then that tender September day, lightning struck, so strongly that he had for a dizzying moment, thought that lightning had, literally, struck. Fifty expectant faces turned towards him, the usual opening speech about that most beguiling of bitches, the English language. Nothing out of the ordinary in that, but there had been a frisson of something, a fizzing expectation flowing like an electric current below the surface of the skin. He had been almost afraid to look up.

He had not seen him at first, had indeed fumbled once or twice in a speech he knew flawlessly from memory. And then a face had emerged, not so different in that it was young and filled with fire, so were half of the faces seated before him. This face came forth in fragments it seemed, fine-featured though not enough to appear feminine. Each bone, each shadow, each curve of flesh made expressly for the grace of the next and the eyes, oh dear dark gods, the eyes of a green so pure and merciless that he felt he’d been knocked hard in the chest and had for one mad moment thought that perhaps he was having a heart attack. His senses however returned to a state in which he could function, though he was hardly aware what the rest of his speech consisted of and it must be said there were several students who expressed confusion over the fact that English Literature the Wexler way now contained elements of Oriental philosophy and one or two of the bolder ones asked if he would always be conducting a third of his lessons in Latin.

He called roll in class the next time, a practice he had never held with before. When he came to the halfway point in the roll and called out in his dry, disciplined tones ‘Kirkpatrick, James,’ a distinctly Irish voice answered, ‘aye’ with just a trace of mischievous malice.

He lived in fear after that that the boy would turn out to be heartrenderingly stupid, even at Oxford it wasn’t impossible. So he assigned an essay right then at the end of their second class. The title and content of which was to be ‘Keats- Great Poet or Underage Martyr.’ The looks of shock had been uniform across forty-nine faces and merely amused on the fiftieth. Well if he wasn’t going completely mad, at least he was living up to his reputation of being so. The class was not disappointed. And as it turned out, one week later neither was he. The first forty-nine essays ranged from elegant bullshit to outright bewilderment. The fiftieth which he had saved with bated breath and a bit of dread was brilliant. The boy had sliced and diced, playing both sides of the chessboard with equal ease, never giving an exact opinion, dissecting in a way that connotated a brilliant ordered mind of the classical mode and then running off with prose so lyric and maddeningly beautiful that it seemed he might be Romanticism incarnate. And maddening he would continue to be.

Oh yes, maddening and elusive, stubborn to a degree that Jonathan vowed on several occasions had heretofore been unrivalled in the human experience. A mind too flame-ridden for its own good and a mind that burned that intensely, with beauty, wit and cunning must needs also find within the delicacy of its fine construction a crack, that inevitably would overflow with despair, joints that leaked confusion, long sheaves of gossamer membrane devoted solely to flinging great waves of panic and ugliness through the soul of the bearer. The darkness, John knew having sipped somewhat of the cup himself, was fathomless, bottomless and in the moment, eternity itself.
He had however, and knew it without drama or excess, found his soulmate. Such was the hell he himself had long ago been damned to that the boy did not recognize the same in him. Though he saw in him a bent towards saturnalian tastes, he knew the sheer orgiastic splendour of that was sharply reined and when released (ah, the mindbending vision of that had given him more than one hectic hour) was intended for the pleasure of women and the soulsap of the pen. Women and words, he’d reason to curse both. Had upon occasion done so.

But when Jamie was bent and broken, as he was tonight and would be for the week to come, it was Jonathan he ran to, it was Jonathan he allowed into the very darkest nights of his soul and John knew this was a privilege accorded to none other in Jamie’s life. Most days, most nights it was enough for him to know that, to hold it as sacred. Tonight though, tonight he could hold the head of the beloved in his lap, stroke the tremors from the body, murmur the nightmares out into the ether. He knew five languages and yet there were never enough words and always too many to speak of love. To say to the beloved ‘this, this one word is all you are to me.’ So tonight he could ramble endlessly, pouring forth the contents of his heart for a man who would not remember a word come morning or he could keep his silence and merely watch the light and dark play their pretty games over the restless visage of his love. And he could listen to words mumbled, words shouted, words cried to a God that neither of them seemed to be able to keep sight of. And he could gather carefully in the fragile hours another piece or two of a puzzle that he only hoped he lived long enough to see become a complete picture.

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