holding on

prints in the snow

breath frozen on a pane

of glass was as close as we

got all winter

i loved you even more i

clung like an icicle

to the photograph. your

words like a child drawn

on the back

#katyamills

letter to true love (1996)

Here I reprint a letter I wrote (1996) and never sent
to my first true love. We parted ways that same year.
(from my black cover diary)...

A-- ,

Do you still love me? Because I love you and I'm not fucking around when I say so. And to be perfectly clear, to make certain you understand me completely and unquestionably, I want to tell you again I love you, and I have never stopped loving you from the day I met you, through the ups and downs, the varied moods, the emotional depths and altitudes; from the joy we carried, to the coffin of pain we buried. And if you ever want back in my life, my love, there's a home for you in Tampa, FL. I will never be too proud to confess my love for you, I promise, for love is too strong to be fooled by shallow pride.

chalk it off as existential slowburn -iv

i don't wanna do it. i don't wanna tell you what i think will happen here because i always had hope, always in life i had hope. i wouldn't want to describe a terrible thing to you. i wouldn't want you to misunderstand. it kills me how we fail to come across sometimes. love doesn't need convincing. i doubt you believe in us anymore, actually. can i say that? whereas my sense is you have tried hard and i have tried hard it's just our ways of living here have shifted drastically from how we were raised and it's an ever moving picture whereby we are ever trying to adjust. so, you see, i can and forever love you. i am that way for life, i know i am, and you say you are, too, but i don't know. i don't know why this fucking thing happened and please don't ever tell me again that i'm some broken record, okay, i don't even carry a philosophy to support that kind of talk - about waste and wastelands. i am humbler than when i met you. you gave me this. i am more quiet, it's true, but not necessarily withholding or despising you for talking to me, as you presume. alot of it is just me internally looking at my situation and wondering how i could ever have imagined my life being any less than tragic, in the end... i love you. we've been through a lot and i won't forget you, all i can do now is just live through it with you until maybe i need to live through it without you? i don't know. it's different looking one day to the next. the light. it's just blinding. i gotta close my eyes sometimes.   -fin (from an old letter never was sent)

chalk it off as existential slowburn -iii

... i was foolish. i tried to convince you i loved you. maybe it was all i was capable of - a desperate time - we hardly spoke anymore, one of us bound to be triggered or hypersensitive or so very much in disagreement we would rather be silent and avoid the pain, stuff flared up anyway when we couldn't keep it in any longer - yet love doesn't need convincing - i've never felt like such a colossal failure, it's really fucked, the enduring pain of being alive and becoming more aware of whats really going on with everybody, so few people really making it and us, sad and repeating, start out so well like we do, overcoming adversities and falling in love, making a family where there was none, then stricken by some or other corruption, watch sanity slip away in the residuals, wicks away, sad reminders of love affairs we dusted, wondering how they could be so indifferent to us now, realizing in hindsight how i could be so insensitive sometimes, life gets stressful and the bond between two people begins to fray if it cannot hold. love shouldn't need convincing but we go there anyway. chalk it off to existential slow burn.

chalk it off as existential slowburn -ii

... i dont know how to write this. i want to think before i write, but i cannot. i want to treat this
with the attention it requires. the gravity it inspires. the sensitivity it needs. i am even now
holding back from trying to rush to disagree with you on some of your points you made,
because i do feel differently, yes, and thats okay, yes. however, i cannot disagree with your
overall vision. because this is also what i see. atleast i think our visions of us are pretty
much alike. it doesnt matter if they are or they aren't, though. i truly believe that.

god i feel like im in church all of a sudden. because my spirit is aching. i feel my spirit through
my body in that powerful way like i did on the best sundays in the earliest 1980s, when my family
was a young family, the 4 of us were tight, we had a big old queene anne victorian to tear around
in, a big old lawn wrapping around her, and a little peke-a-poo dog named buttons. its fur was like
the worst case of jerry curls when she was just a pup. my moms radiant joyfulness at having
all of us together singing hymns on sunday, well, it just filled us up, also. but my dad wasnt
really into it. so the kids werent either. so looking back its an aching kind of spirit i felt ...