Be My Knife Read Free Page B

of life, tell me.
    Tell me.
    I shouldn’t have told you about that, should I? What have you got to do with the married life of a person you haven’t even seen? I already feel the coldness of that mistake. Here I am, again, a clown—this is probably what it looks like to you, some man throwing everything he owns up into the air, and of course everything is scattered around him on the ground. Never mind, people love clowns—that is what my couple of great educators taught me (but consider, on the borders of your mind, think of me, let’s say, like a man with a huge burn on his face deciding to enter a room full of people). Perhaps your way of thinking dictates that I should have waited until we knew each other a little better before telling you such a story, yes? I think along the same lines, but with you I’m not doing things according to my reflection but according to my distortion. And, at the same time, I don’t want to wait, because our time together is different, spherical, every point on it is at the exact same distance to the center. And I won’t apologize if I’m embarrassing you; this is not salon chatter. It is murder to erase one word to you—and everything I said here—I didn’t plan any of it—and I will not erase a word!
     
     
    April 16-17
    Can’t sleep. I wish I could already know how the letter I wrote this morning makes you feel. And whether you’ll continue to write to me after you read it. I am almost certain you won’t. You’ll consider it rude of
me to expose such aspects of my life. Well, I am quite pleased with myself for sending it anyway. Even with the full day of self-torture that went with it. And you were right that I’m looking for a partner to join me on an imaginary journey, but you were completely wrong when you said that I might not need a real partner. Exactly the opposite: I need a real partner for an imaginary journey. As I’m writing these words, my heart thumps in a physically very real way, and in general, my heart beats true only when I imagine—now—again—thumping. Did you know there is such a bird, a thumper-bird, a parpur?
    If you touch its chest—once—gently—its heart stops beating and it dies. One mustn’t make a single wrong move with this bird, because any tiny mistake sends a delicate impact to its heart and it just stops beating. If I could only buy such a parpur, two actually—no: I would buy a flock and let them fly here, above what I’m writing you, so they could be living lie detectors, like the canaries that used to be sent into mines to discover gas leaks. Imagine, if you will: one false or inexact word, or one that is rude, or just indifferent—and a dead bird falls on the page. Then you’ll see how I write to you.
    By the way, I forgot to tell you that you offended me when you thought I might have mistaken you for someone else I saw that night. And I was even more offended by your difficulty in deciding which you would prefer—that I was mistaken or that I was right.
    But you know what really broke my heart? When you described yourself to me to make sure. Because of how you somehow diminished yourself into one single sentence, in parentheses on top of that (“Quite tall, long curly messy hair, glasses …”). If you really feel yourself to be in parentheses—at least let me squeeze into them as well and let the whole world remain outside. Let the world only be the element outside the parentheses that will multiply us on the inside.
    Y.
     
     
    P.S. Anyway—even though this journey isn’t exactly smooth right now, rough going and twisting and turning from the beginning, I have to tell you something. Do you have any idea that my pupils dilate when I see a word of yours in another place, even when I stumble upon it in a newspaper or in a TV commercial … because certain words are so obviously yours, your soul prints, and coming from any other human being they
sound like speaking equipment, fragments of language, no more than that.