robin writes to us

Robin goes out and has adventures all the time. She was on top of Mount Olympus with an acoustic guitar, she wrote me letters in Arizona. She said, on a phone rooted in the sand around wood, the ocean is orange, and she said that in California. Then she was in Spain, her bracelets moving in the wind of a window of a blue car on a road stretching North from Madrid. Robin goes to Tokyo where she is the most beautiful person in a crowd of a million people.

She’s saving up her money to go to space on a spaceship. I know this, because she stopped to be with me in Philadelphia (she was passing through). I was busy staring at her thighs, because I don’t get to see them often. But she was looking around the yard we were in, noticing that everything was concrete, but there was grass upsticking, and we had a view of the skyscrapers beyond, and the small stream and fountain built in the yard was pretty for her too. We both had our beers, and occasionally we looked up into the sky to wait for the next star to appear through the light-dark clearing. Then while we are talking about her adventures — she learns in to me, her thighs against my knees, I’ve got a mouth of beer to swallow, the Allman Brothers are doing Lord I Was Born A ‘Ramblin Man, the best song to listen to while you’re hurling down an afternoon highway on vacation or just trying to get the hell out of your hole and see what heaven can be like, and it’s a guitar right now, and it has a little funk to it — she tells me when I go into space, I’ll be a lot older. So when it’s time to go back, I’m taking over a pod and ejecting it and I’ll get to fly out there. I don’t believe her, of course. I say Robin, no body like us is going into space, besides you’re not going to do that if you did… I’m cupping the beer and the conversation changes. I notice the stream too, and as we talk and we become drunk, I notice more things, like how everything IS just made out of concrete and grass and plastic. And it does not bother me, because Robin has told me: it doesn’t matter what you make the planet out of, just so long as we can live here and be happy with each other. And she didn’t mean it (in a bad way), but she said it and it makes me feel happy. We go to bed and Robin sleeps with me. in the morning she is gone

To Omaha, to the Mississippi River (Just like Huckleberry Finn! she writes (with love)), to Alaska, to Russia, she keeps going, up. Then she turns and goes back down.

She writes to us, all the old friends. She keeps up with the world, with the neighborhood gossip. She writes to us her adventures. Her life is in the context of adventure. But otherwise she says It is just like everyone else’s life.

Except that we are often sad.

I do not know what it is like to be what Robin is. I imagine things are so strikingly beautiful that it has become much like music already is to me. She tells me, it is scary at first.

But the end of her letters have so many exclamation marks. So now whenever I listen to good music — I used to only laugh — but now when I laugh I think about what it is like for Robin to listen to it too and laugh. And I always have this idea that we are on a train. And the train has shot through a tunnel and is now shooting towards the sun. racing it, the music is beautiful and the window is rare and we can’t even smile because our faces are doing something better, and she’s so beautiful, and so is this life,