Gary Hardaway

Letter to a Distant Friend *

It’s hard to find the time to write.  Small duties proliferate. A sloth breeds among this crowd of phones requiring answers, meetings needing attendants, knots demanding to be tied or loosened – Now. I wonder often if the life I live is worth the life I lead supporting both. The two seem not my own but messes left by someone else for me to tidy up.

My life is life in shape alone. The substance leaks away like blood removed by the embalmer’s art. My wife is wife in name alone. The moist affection dries. A residue alone still clings like glitter to her skin. The loneliness amid a hum of voices kills a little more each cluttered day and kissless night.

A small despair suffuses me. I wish for vast and sudden grief, huge and quick enough to justify the sharp voracity of sorrow eating me away. A shell confronts the news from Bosnia, Belfast, and the Mississippi Valley. Implacable water rises to the mouth. My own is amplified by grief impersonal and endless. How can we survive so much indifference?

Complaints are crowding out the small and daily wonders I once used to justify my breathing. Pattern, habit, inertia, and obedience are all that keep me vertical. Without them, I would sleep. I wash another glass. I do it well and this allows another step.

I know that beauty flourishes, that misery like mine is private, individual and small. Such knowledge, though, remains inert, pinned by all the tiny darts that paralyze. Enough belief remains at least to push the pen, to let it say I hope this finds you well and happy, busy in the work you love. I hope it’s such abundance widening the gaps between your letters into chasms. Worry comes of quiet. Reading what you write is reassurance always welcome. Just a note, however brief, would comfort as a smile.

I send a few new pieces, knowing you will read them; knowing, too, you seldom seem to like them much and that it’s hard to find the time to write.

CP

Gary Hardaway lives in Texas. His writing has appeared in Connotation Press, Blue Fifth Review, Olentangy Review, Divine Dirt Quarterly, The Arlington Review, and many other fine places.

* Letter to a Distant Friend is a 2014 Editor's Favorite