52 things I loved about you (and love about you still)

Clubs

• A: Your love of words and stories and where imagination can take a writer and a reader. Where it took us.
• 2: How you would search for or happen upon the right myth with which to tell your stories; particularly, of course, our story.
• 3: Your ideas. Some I took, and ran with, but it wasn’t theft, not really, because you were my muse, and I was yours, and it all got mixed up, so that you were in my ideas and words and I was in yours. You were a starter, but by your own admission, rarely a finisher, and sometimes I would finish what you started, for the love of it; for the love in it.
• 4: The way you could steamroller me with words when there was something on your mind, so that I could hardly get one in edgeways. Not that I minded, and not that I wished to. In full flow, you were magnificent.
• 5: That you were searingly honest with me about the fluxing state of your feelings. It was not in you to pretend, and so I always got the unadulterated you.
• 6: The precise combination of fearless and fearful that was you.
• 7: Your taste, in all things, from cacti to books. Everything you handled and warmed to either physically or mentally was, I think, an expression of the youness of you, and by extension, a part of the you I loved.
• 8: Your frankness, that unwillingness to call a spade anything other than a spade, no matter that I might think it a fork or a shovel.
• 9: Your black moods, when nothing could rescue you from the hole or paralysis you were in, not even love. Because although we both might have wished them never to descend, they were a part of you, and they only made me love you all the more.
• 10: How you were (are still) knitted into the various communities of which you were (are still) formally or informally (but mostly the latter) a member – quietly proud of them, but never blind to their deficiencies. You were (are still) wedded to a place in a way that I am not, and yet you knew (know still) the value of a contrast.
• J: Your love of animals.
• Q: In particular, what became our shared love of birds. Oh, and the comically highfalutin names you gave your poultry.
• K: So catholic in your taste, so unwittingly Catholic in the way that guilt plagued you. Again, I loved you all the more for it, for never allowing us to believe that it could be an easy ride.

Diamonds

• A: Your flaws, and that I could see how you had stuck yourself back together after you had broken. How it was a tanka of yours about those fractures that ultimately led me to this place. You never hid them from me; quite the contrary, you drew attention to them, mending the cracks with the golden lacquer of your words, the golden joinery of them.
• 2: Your eyes, ‘a blue million miles’.
• 3: The way you used those eyes for your work, and what you chose in that quick computation which took place between them and the aesthetic and commercial parts of your judgment.
• 4: How our conversations would range across hours, days, months even, always picking up where we left off, until we were connected by a myriad of threads, any of which could even now be picked up at a moment’s notice.
• 5: That you could be the life and soul of a party and yet simultaneously the detached observer, noticing everything, at least until your head was spun out of its observances by the drink.
• 6: How you led me (or we led each other) into other cultures – Russian, Japanese, Greek, Central American. We infused our own blood with shots of theirs, and magpie-like, took anything we wanted from their mythologies and added it to our own.
• 7: Your wish to do the right thing, at no matter what personal cost.
• 8: The intoxicating rush that was your hedonistic streak. That you loved to drink, and how wild you were when you did. That moderation was always difficult for you, though perhaps you have achieved it now, at a time when life has finally suggested it of you.
• 9: Your impatience. The heady rush of that, too. And when you were feeling both impatient and hedonistic, well, nothing could stand in your way, and certainly not me.
• 10: The way you have sought to heal your body from those excesses, with the kind of determination which is I think more second nature than you know or believe.
• J: I was never quite sure how much I had to do with it, but that you became a runner, more or less from scratch; and if you did take any inspiration from me and my running, then for taking inspiration from me, too.
• Q: Your insistence on living in the moment. Being determined to make the best of what you had (have), rather than pine or yearn. A lesson I am still trying to learn from you.
• K: Your love of the natural world about you, and the way you could describe it with a raw sensitivity that would be the envy of any writer.

Hearts

• A: Like any mother, but no less admirable for that, the unconditional nature of your love for your children. That undoubtedly they each have something of you, which will live on in them, and in the children they go on to have.
• 2: That really beautiful poem you wrote about your own mother.
• 3: All of your poems, written with all the most vital organs of your body. To find myself captured – or rather, held for a moment in time – in so many of them was among the greatest of the many gifts you gave me.
• 4: Your prose, what were to me spellbinding insights from right inside of a woman, drawing on everything around her. To read you was to be you, to feel and see it all.
• 5: Your tipsy typos. Sometimes, your stone-cold sober ones. And how you would always welcome the attentions of a certain member of the typo police. Especially in relation to crimes involving the apostrophe.
• 6: The colour of your hair. The way it curled about your face, the way it felt in my hands, the way it grazed my navel.
• 7: Your being ever so slightly lop-sided and asymmetrical. Your figure less than Greek, but all the more beautiful to me for that.
• 8: The hard-won flexibility and pliancy of that asymmetrical body of yours.
• 9: Those traits in you which might be called spiritual or even hippy-dippy, but which acted as a foil to the underlying existential bent of your mind.
• 10: How you loved to tease me, to try and get a rise out of me; oh, and the trouble into which it got you.
• J: Your rootedness, despite what that meant for me, for us.
• Q: Your ability to assert yourself.
• K: The many, many times when you made me feel that I was all that mattered. And I know that in those moments, I was, as you were to me, too. We were all that mattered.

Spades

• A: That you were, like me, a wanker, and proud of it. How you used to suggest that there are only two kinds of people; those who were wankers, and those who were not.
• 2: That you were experienced. Oh, the tales you could tell.
• 3: Both your inability to escape omphaloskepsis, and your urge to do so. Not to mention your willingness to use words like omphaloskepsis. I still contend that you are more of a bluestocking than you think you are.
• 4: That you were both a creature of the night and a lover of the light, an ethereal, moonlit woman of mystery and seduction, and a rare meadow wildflower, longing for and turning your head to the sun.
• 5: The look of your mouth, and the way you would bite your lip. Even the way you bit your nails.
• 6: The taste of your mouth, and our kisses, from the softest to the greediest.
• 7: The way your body felt against mine, whether clothed or naked.
• 8: The endlessness of our love-making. How it could never quite finish, how it almost immediately rose phoenix-like from the ashes of each petite mort.
• 9: The look in your eyes when we sat a little apart, touching ourselves – proud almost to the point of defiance, not unaware of the power of your sexuality, and yet at the same time, as vulnerable and needy as a novitiate pleasing a man for the first time. How could something be both an unselfconscious performance and at the same time, a self-conscious truth? And yet it was so.
• 10: The way you loved to be treated sexually, and where and how and why you loved to be so treated, not to mention with what.
• J: The way you sucked my cock as much with your eyes as your mouth.
• Q: Your cunt, and its particular taste, indescribably intoxicating, though I tried once to describe it, in a poem.
• K: Your dirtily beautiful and beautifully dirty mind.