Original English

It keeps happening to me again and again, and you wonder what “it” is and I can only offer synonyms: heart or spleen, kidney or rough trade. And we are assembling each other word by word…each time you open your mouth, I try to classify our relationship, or cast it in terms of Victorian lovers—are you Jane Eyre or Catherine Earnshaw? Are you a Linton yet. I could be Rochester, blind as a bat and abusive to crazy women, I could be burned in a fire, I could be as hateful as Heathcliff and be burning for you. Which is what happens when you live with a cartoon cat. The whole world falls apart, the sky tries to hold you, tries to contain what you called “lust-with-heart” which might simply mean you adore me but don’t want to sleep with me. And friend-cum-lass I feel the same way, but only more so, but only I want to paint you naked, and I want us to cry over dead friends and attend the same weddings not ours…and this is the tragedy of pronouns. Our can mean mine and mine only, or ours collectively but not us together. And we smolder, and the yellow paper flickers. If we are fireflies, we are archaic and monogamous we have a smile of each. And have I told you how shocked I was to see you in a photograph, or rather many photographs? Have you found the frame? No…good, I’ll tell you. Your teeth were many and your nose larger than I recall and your wiry frame more wiry and you were still pretty but I didn’t feel lust. I felt sadness and shame and I went to the church and I kneeled at the fountain and I washed my face again and again.