Words by Leendert Vooijce.
To who you maybe
Did my previous letter not arrive? Perhaps it disappeared. Or it’s in someone else’s hands right now.
If that’s the case, I hope it transcends the feelings that were left by that one afternoon we spent together.
But maybe there’s a garden for unreceived love, for things that never were and never will be – a continuous impasse, with artificial flowers in a soil of plastic.
I am somewhere far after midnight. A stack of papers with me on my bed. Eating a banana. A bit frustrated since I started formulating my feelings for you a couple of times by now. Trying to find your memory with my recollection of that one afternoon rebuilt within these words. It leaves me uncertain, as if I’ve been dropped in a crowded city and must find you with just one clue; that afternoon we spent together. So, I hold on to that, while I wander through these words. The streets as a vacuum of understanding. I hear people laughing and fighting. When the door of a random bar opens, because of someone leaving or entering, snippets of pop songs escape the isolated realms filled those who got lost.
Every night, even in the middle of the summer, when it’s thirty degrees outside and the city is dressed in the sticky and sluggish marmalade left by the tangerine sun, even then, I hear at least once; All I want for Christmas is you.
It was around twenty days before Christmas when you texted me, ’’I think I’m basically here’’, ’’Oh, yes. I’m outside’’. You visited Amsterdam and came by my studio that afternoon. We had never met. The firmament and everything that is disguised beyond that was more concrete to me than the thought of ever meeting you. But ’’Hey’’ there you were, Lindengracht 93, from Dundee, Scotland.
The feeling of your soft skin is still within my hands. I can draw the tenderness of your body in a shy sketch with charcoal. From your toes, to your legs and the back of your knees. Your bum, your back to the top of your head.
Your body moved like slow clouds in a spring sky. I couldn’t grasp so I kept you drifting.
This moment.
All in one stroke as my hands are drawing you in disbelieve. Is this really happening?
Two body’s that slowly want to meet. Need to meet. Have to meet. My hands, wandering around cautiously, touch to see how far this could go. Reality catches up with poetry. Is this really happening?
Two body’s that end up naked on a concrete floor. A fallen dream.
An ocean arose in your armpit, and I drank it.
I sucked the poppies out of your neck, one by one, exploding. This field of dark red flourishing on a white skin.
Our goodbye was just a hug. A temporarily statue.
You may wonder how I’m doing, perhaps you don’t. Life is going well, and I am in a happy place. I have been acquiring more and more words to articulate dreams, ideas and ideals, an alternative, in order to create a space where I can invite people to and share it with.
Maybe I should use a random address. Just to see if I can get in touch with you. What will it do with my feelings, if I reach you? If I get in touch with you? If I get to know you? Who are you?
You are the poem, that touched me with such a pristine beauty, I can’t ignore. But is it what has been written or is it what I read, that finds this enduring longing for things that never were or never will be?
Is the one who questions too afraid to believe?
This letter is a sculpture.
I saw you dance from a distance.
Then and there or maybe another time,
is where I would love to meet you.
XX
