Dear Bas Jan,
A commission is a strange impetus to pen a love letter, but I assure you, what I am about to say comes from the heart, I love you and I’m sorry. I know this letter comes too late. You were too sad to tell the world. I can’t speak for you, I only knew you for one night, but I hope you can forgive me for telling our story.
It was a typical London November night, rain—perfect weather to spend watching experimental films in some draughty ex-industrial building in the East End. The first film is loaded. You ride your bike into the canal. Darkness. A few laughs. Some knocking around at the back of the room as the next roll of 16mm is loaded. Silence, but for the whirl of the projector. A handwritten title card—I’m too sad to tell you. Your face illuminates the room. You seem to be drowning in the silence, gasping for air. Your hand enters the frame and rises to your hair and then back down across your face, almost covering your grimace. You are crying. You try to hold back the tears but the momentum of the projector seems to be driving them from you. Stuttering tears, stuttering sobs, pushed forth. I turn from your beautiful tortured face and there, two rows back, you sit, illuminated by your tears in black and white. Monochrome—you stay that way for the whole of our encounter. It is only later, in my dreams, that I see you in full spectrum.
Your hair is a little longer now and I notice you’ve had your ears pierced, both of them. I want to slide my hand beneath your shirt. I want to run my nails across your back. To pinch, to bite. To shake you. You can tell me. You can tell me. Tell me. I know—I was once that scared lost sad reluctant boy.
The films finish. The crowd gathers around a makeshift bar. I bump into a vague acquaintance. He talks at me as I watch you over his shoulder. You take a swig of your beer and for a moment we catch one another’s eye. I move, merely to shift the room, to shuffle the pack, in the hope of landing next to you. I head outside to smoke, you follow. There is little shelter from the rain. I stand on the stoop as I hear the door open and close behind me. You are stood next to me. We stare out on to the sodden street. I turn to you. Your gaze fixed forward, a smile breaks across your face. I have one of the five most beautiful belly buttons in the world, you say, as you gently lift your shirt. Shall we leave? I ask.
Later at mine, on the sofa, after we kiss, you ask me my name. Alice, I reply. And before? I raise my eyebrows—you don’t ask that, I tell you. I invite you to bed before you say something else stupid but somehow you still find time—I don’t know if I want you or if I want to be you. Well come find out, I reply.
You are all ribs and hips and elbows. Hairless torso, cold hands. A boy with sad eyes that give away your years. Your areola are so perfectly round against your skinny flat chest, like two two-pence-pieces. Four pence. I sweep it from the table and pocket it. Spare change. Your belly button is beautiful. Your crotch smells like pencil sharpenings and sudocrem.
You make love to me in the only way you know how. After, in the silence and the dark and the waiting, I hear you whisper, how do lesbians make love? I don’t reply, I don’t know who you are asking. Then, another whisper follows in its wake, I’m so scared of failing. I roll to face you. You have tears in your eyes. But what about your films? I ask. Exactly, you reply. We lie in the silence. I’m so scared of falling, I whisper. You kiss me and whisper into my hair, sometimes it feels as though there is a force stronger than gravity pulling at me. Pulling you where? I ask. Silence. I feel like I’ve been running away my whole life.
In the morning you are gone. Your disappearing act. Back across the Atlantic, back to suburbia. The next time you cross is your last. The final disappearance. It’s only years later that I read about it. That’s when you start to visit me in my dreams, reincarnated in full colour.
Yours,
Alice
