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DEAR MARCI
xxxxxxxxxxxx – Jack Skelley

April 17, 2021

So what use is emotion? What use is anything? Oh, Oh, I’m not understanding anything anymore, even as perceptions stream in at all angles all hours all pores all doors to the soul in mortal anguish, while nobody is understanding anything. The only question is when to kill oneself.

Not only is there NO ESCAPE FROM PERCEIVING but the only way to deal with pain is to kill oneself. AND NOW YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT SUICIDE, about your sadness that isn’t self-pitying, but simply suicidal. I fell in love with your undaunted pessimism. You never wanted any sympathy. Just to be left alone. And your face had this scorched, depleted, devastated, mauled, ragged beauty, which I’ll never be able to forget.

Your jagged features are etched in my mind. So are your words: when you said you can’t sleep at night because of nightmares of dead fathers and brothers, waving their bloody limbs, and when you said in the morning that you were sick and couldn’t get up, and when you talked about your mother. You were a gorgeous manic-depressive and I was just a boy scout, an innocent bystander that wanted to help a soul in trouble when I saw your tear-tracks in the morning, saw this beautiful creature lost in wild bummers and I had to help. I was so struck by this.

Ouch!

I can still see you and hear you and start getting crazy myself and have to divert myself to stop thinking of your gorgeous sad face and how you made me get sick and cry.

As society becomes increasingly depersonalized, and as there are less and less baseball players with nicknames, my chance diminishes for real personal rapport.

Still, I have my desires and my inner life. If no one can ever share these, neither can they take them away.

Meanwhile, you’re waking up hungover and suddenly realizing all the failures of last night and your deep depression and there’s no escape from the troubles of you and your family and once there were a few victories every now and then in your life, but now it’s defeat after defeat and you’re only getting older and mostly you’re lonely, you’re so terribly lonely and just want to die alone.

You walk around, you’re not understanding anything. All your day like all your life you’re walking around dejected, the school’s ugly duckling, then you have an accident and wake up under the plastic surgeon’s knife as the most beautiful coed on campus. But when you wake up, you are making out with Ed Asner, and millions of Americans are watching you on TV. I am one of those Americans. I hear your dark voice and watch you cock your head. On TV, perceptions stream in like this, no way to deal with the pain. My consciousness is seeping out without my ever having understood what came in. Emotions and baseball games. I’m crying as I watch the commercials.

PUSH YOUR TIITIES TOGETHER. PINCH THE TIPS OF YOUR TITTIES. I WALK IN THE DOOR.

I AM YOUR TEACHER.

TAKE OFF YOUR SKIRT.

SUCK ME.

RUB YOUR CLIT.

TURN OVER AND SHOW ME YOUR ASSHOLE AND PUSSY UNDERNEATH. 

PLAY WITH YOUR CLIT.

MY HANDS ARE RUBBING YOUR TITS.

MY LIPS ARE TOUCHING YOUR LIPS. MY LIPS ARE YOUR LIPS.

WE ARE CRAWLING IN AND OUT OF EACH OTHER THROUGH OUR LIPS.

YOU MASTURBATE AND COME HARD.

YOU ARE LETTING LOOSE EVERY KIND OF EMOTION… LOVE IS AN EMOTION.

(And Kathy Acker walks through London rain in scruffy black cowboy boots.)

Then, the UFO.

Even as you know all this is preposterous, it has the cold pinch of reality. It’s all happening all over again, just like you’re walking down your own street. But when you walk down your street and look up at the cold windy sky that’s about to start raining again, you see something new. You see the lights, the beautiful architectonic design of lights on the large flying interconnecting diamonds, dancing harlequin diamonds of light in the sky coming down and silently resting on the street next door to the Champion Auto Parts store. Now a crowd is gathered around, your neighbors and all the shopkeepers and people off the bus. And a hush falls over the crowd as a cool blue throbbing panel slides down invitingly. You long to enter there, and you start to move forward, but you feel the fear and censure of the crowd. All your family and friends. Once you go inside and that thing flies off again, you’ll be gone forever. I’ll never see you again.

I break into tears right there and they splatter on the sidewalk. The buildings close in around me. I wander home to bed.

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