Pipe and Slippers

A letter to Serafina

Darling Serafina,

Today I realised that, were I offered one wish, one brief spark of hope, to cast out onto this darkling plain that we call life, it would be to drink your bath water.

Please - and see how I know you so well my love, even though we are apart - please do not wrinkle your darling nose, the nose that you dislike and turn sideways in shop windows to scornfully appraise; please wrinkle this nose no more for soon I will sing but one song and that song will be 'Serafina, I love your nose'.

Until then, if we are to be kept apart - as circumstances seem determined to precipitate - then I desire nothing more than to perch at the bath's lip when you have left it and sup from the stew of your body's leavings.

Is that really so bad my love? In this mixed up world in which we live, where perverts and pederasts reign, I desire nothing more than to drink the fragrant soup of you.

If it were summer and if you were to assent, I would gladly make ice cubes from your sweat so that every drink was fringed with the taste of you.

I would use novelty ice cube holders so that they were in the shape of hearts and stars and Christmas Trees. And in the centre of each one, like the nucleus at the heart of all things I would set the crescent moons of your toenail clippings.

And now my love I must tell you - for you may have guessed, clever as you are - darling Serafina, two days ago I went through your rubbish bins - there I have said it! I am not ashamed. I opened the black plastic sacks on my kitchen floor and it was like a butterfly unfurling because there you were.

There was the juice carton that your lips brushed still moist with morning perspiration, there the eggshells split with the tender violence of your own fingers. I smelt the coffee grounds and in their muddy odour I found you.

I took the blue sheets covered in wax and hair that you had used to keep your legs so smooth. I am not ashamed to say I found every last one of them and took them to my breast. I unpicked every fragment of hair and laid it on a sheet of white cotton.

I burnt them to see what they smelled like - sweet as heaven itself! - and wiped the ash across a piece of paper and pushed my fingerprints into it so that my fingerprints were printed in you. Now I keep this paper in the inside pocket of my coat at all times as identity papers to be shown to the heart's own police.

Do you see?

Away from you I feel like one of those frogs that freezes in the winter and thaws with spring's first footsteps; except there is no spring, nor is there likely to be one and I am awake, able to think about all that is happening to me while I am cruelly kept from your side. And I am not a frog but a man hewn of manly flesh and bone. And I miss you.

Or,

I am like a tiny dog left outside a shop whose owners forget they brought it with them and walk home without stopping so that every tiny atom of the dog yearns to be taken with its owner but it is left, chained to a child's ride in the shape of a space rocket.

Don't you see? I don't want to be tied to a child's ride in the shape of a space rocket my sweet, I want to be walking beside a beautiful river with you. In the springtime when the hawthorns flower.

I sometimes wish that I could be made tiny so that I could skip, laughing over the bumps set at your ankles and wrists. I would trek for days through the perfumed gorse of the golden hairs at the back of your neck. I would set up camp in the hollow of your navel and sleep in the hammock of you inner ear.

I think of the smell of you in my mind's nose - for we have a mind's eye, why not a nose - and it is the smell of loneliness as sharp as burnt toast. I am not shamed to say I have gained succour, suckled from your used plastic tampon applicator tubes.

I have charted the journeys we will make together around the coasts of the yellow maps you leave on your panty liners. I have kept wads of your tissues safe at the back of my tongue.

Darling Serafina I am the world's first and only anthropologist of you.

Do you miss me like I miss you my love? What I feel is like a hard little worm, wriggling in my guts so that I can hardly think about anything else but your belly and your breasts and the gentle outward curve of your very inner thigh.

I walked into work this morning. The sky was lit up like tissue paper stretched across glass; the clouds were like paintings of clouds and I thought how the best thing about the world is that now I can begin to show you it. Remember when we were out that night, a while ago, and we were pretending to not know each other because your father had said you couldn't see me anymore.

But I was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood and as we walked past each other I leant out and touched your hand and it was as if all the drops of rain along the edges of the bushes and in everyone's hair lit up like tiny suns and for a moment the dark was made light.

And I felt that our hearts began to beat at the same rhythm. And even now I know that our hearts are beating together. It makes me feel good to know that wherever we are, however different what you are doing is to what I'm doing. I can push my hand over my ears and hear the deep echo of my pulse and it will be the same as yours.

And it is as if the spiders in the corners of my room are writing your name in their webs. When I bathe, the fronds of my pubic hair weave together to spell your name. All the twisted winter twigs come together in their wind-brushed calligraphy to write 'Serafina'. I cannot believe that people cannot see the stamp of your love upon me, like some holy mark. I feel it burning brightly whenever I begin to think of you.

You must know I love everything about you.

I love the way you leave the bathroom window open when you run a bath, even though your flat is on the ground floor - so foolhardy, so confident, so you - so that the room does not become too full of steam. Are you buffed pink by the steam my piglet?

I do not think I can hold off any longer, the desert that is inside of me is parched of water and dead and I am thirsty. I am so thirsty my darling Serafina. The window is open and the steam furs the glass and I am so thirsty. The stars look down upon us like fresh powdered snow cast into the night and I am so thirsty my darling Serafina.

I fear that I must drink.

Love Jeff