An open letter to no one.

Because this prose is for no one and I don't know you, I'll turn it into an advert: a letter of recommendation from the stars. I'm glowing. I have hands and feet that I mistrust and a heart that could even make the doctor's blush. I'll write my promises onto the sun and even after they've been burnt away, I'll keep them. I want to know you. I've jumped to the front of the queue and I will do anything to keep your eyes fixed on mine. I work with impossibility. I will take you to the top of the Ferris wheel to serenade you with poor attempts at concealing fear, I'll tell you horror stories of people stubbing their toes on low-lying objects. I'll teach bruises what colour means. Your irises are stunning. You could teach the sky what passion feels like and it would still take it a million years to reach that shade. I will grind my bones as I pause the planets in line: gather 'round, this is how it feels when time stands still. I broke my watch in the harbour the night I first dreamt of you, swimming through the sea on a half-eaten body board. You made even the sharks blush.

I'm sure I've met you before. You were the boy reading my favourite book at the back of the bus that I wanted to sit next to. The conversation I never started. The missed connection, standing atop the harbour bridge with the birds soaring around you. You are the blue mosquito lights, buzzing each time I reach out to you. Yours were the first footsteps, walking through a sea of glass bottles, each surface reflecting the sun. I fell in love with your hands.

I am the woman on the moon. You are the letter I sent to myself and put extra stamps on it so I knew it would find me wherever I was. You are the notes I leave myself next to the best passages, the crack in my tardis mug, the second just before I stepped on the picture hook, burying it in my heel. You were the exit sign that fell on my head in 2006. The stranger that caught me looking too long at you. Your ankles are splendid.

If by chance you read this, meet me underneath the sprawling tree. I'll bring fireworks. You bring the music. I'll pick your name from a hat and call it magic. I am the master magician and I'd cut me in half to stand before you again. You're what summer feels like. At forty one degrees, my mouth stayed shut, and you- still a stranger, taught me what it's like to regret.

I'll fold time in half, back to that afternoon and I'll steal those tomatoes. You bit into one and the seeds came spilling out. I've never met such beautiful teeth before. I’ll eat the whole of Italy to meet them again.

In order to win you over, I'll break the seasons apart and pull out only the perfect days for you: the thunderstorms; the ones where every possible thing goes so wrong that it becomes funny; the late nights in funny costumes and back alleys; the days that fall in by chance. The sort of chance that feels lucky for every single second and makes you wonder if it's really real. You're not real. I'll bet your bones are stunning.

If you read this, I will have not existed. I am a madwoman with grand ideas and I would teach you how to fly if you didn't already seem like the sort of person that knows how. The birds got their lessons from you, and I put them to flight. I am terrible at self-promotion. Come meet me by the unplanned location. I'll be sure not to forget you.

The moon is waxing gibbous

You’ll be brave this time. Your name will seep through your skin and you’ll feel it. Poaching eggs with faces like the moon. Running through the city like there’s two minutes until the end of the world and the lights are down. Riding your bike and pretending like it’s the largest place on earth, and you can carry everyone. Get in. You have dirty hands. Keep them. These words run off everything you touch and you’re no longer a one-liner, you’re Moby Dick in a kingdom by the sea, where the angels come to steal lessons. Your skin burns. You are the bold seagull, hopping on one leg to get my attention. You have learned what it is like to fly and you’re begging me to be Fenchurch: lose your socks over London. This time you’ll be the one to steal the tomatoes. You are the mirrored hall in Versailles. You are the glass lake before the Doctor gets shot and all time folds back on itself. You are time. Feel it. Remember what it was like, back when you and everything else was still nothing. Remember that burst of joy, when you finally became something. You’ll be the Mediterranean, burning white with the sun, eight minutes late and five billion years early. You’ll be the phone number written on the palm, the sweat that rises to meet it, the eyes like Ferris wheels in front of a 1920’s sunset. You’ll be the colour green. You’ll be bold this time, to take my hand and pull me along in the rain like nothing else matters, nothing but that the lights are out and you are turning into the moon.

The silences

What if the commandment “do not take the lord’s name in vain” is not about the crying out of a name, the swearing and the pain that comes with it? What if the blasphemy comes not from crying “Jesus!” when one stubs a toe, but from the ignoring of the silences?

“Yahweh”, the Hebrew name for the god of the Christians and the Jews, is an unpronounceable phrase, a word for one who will take claim to none. Yahweh. The word meant not to be spoken, but to be felt and to be known. Felt, as one feels the closeness of a lover.

What then, is god’s name but a breath on the neck of the person you love; the silences that conversation need not fill; the spaces between fingers? What if, all this time, this god of the jews was just warning us not to forget the little things, to not blaspheme the silences? To remind us broken, brittle beings of the lives that surround us, and the silences that go with them.