February 13, 2025
The Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco.
Love Is An Ambivalence That Knows No Bounds
I wrote one poem about you four years ago and confused subject and object throughout. It’s hard to give you anything that didn’t in some way come from you. It’s nice and you said you liked it but now I see it appears I was complimenting myself. There is a pointlessness because I cannot write anything that would make you love me more. In writing about love there are conventions of sentiment and physics and minutiae and I don’t recognize in them what we have which is an incredibly lucky break. We laugh about the impossibility of metaphor after so long but the truth is that I have never been very direct and you have always been the form. I think it’s the same for you inasmuch as I am the mirror who you can see through. We could stop loving each other and nothing would change because love is nothing at all and permanent. Love is doled out unevenly like everything else and it’s not fair. You told me that you always walk on the side of the street that’s closer to where you think I am. I would follow you around like a dog if I were allowed. We both value our dignity but you are better at it. I’m better at making shit up. There is absolutely no way that our feelings are identical. I find it hilarious that we used to be unknown to each other. I am reminded by the sound of fake insects in the Conservatory of Flowers that we met in a time of abundance at a place of abundance. We didn’t know each other then because I was a girl who did not yet try to know anyone and you were a boy among the other boys. At least that’s how I remember it from the pictures I lost. This was the first moment of a five-year period during which fate bounced us off each other several times. We are the readout of a broken oscilloscope. We are crickets at night. Neither a tension nor a rest. A series of negotiations that are mostly silent. At that time I was still discrete. If I had to do this by myself I wouldn’t.
Elisabeth Nicula is an artist and writer from Norfolk, Virginia. She is the editor of San Francisco Review of Whatever, a new magazine for critical writing on any subject by (mostly) Bay Area writers, and also runs Smooth Friend, an ad hoc short fiction and poetry press.