Strawberry Letter 27

Hello my love,

I thought about you this weekend on a sky like mushroom soup. I reminded a pair I know that umbrellas work better for two if you link arms. It's the only way that you can keep pace in the rain. I wondered where such a golden nugget of knowledge had come from. I finally settled on the paper pink notion that you had given me that tip long ago as a way of keeping your smile in my thoughts on rainy days. It's like how I keep your favorite drink around for a nip and your brand of smokes hidden in my cupboard. It seems silly but I just want you to know that a vanilla sight comes to mind every time I open a drawer looking for a hammer and see those cigarettes with the cellophane keeping them fresh until you come over, wet like a cat in the drink with no umbrella, and find that in your panic to outrun the heavens you dropped your last two sticks in a quickly racing mini stream. Though we both know you should quit, you really needed one especially after all that is bursting from your head to tell me. And I'll listen with a sweet ear while I turn the heat up just a notch to dry out your shoes by the vent. I'm clueless as to how many cigarettes are in a pack but I look forward to stretching out their lifetime across those days that may seem insignificant as they go by but are expensive to cash in later when they're gone.
I sat through a late show of the film AMELIE wishing that I could turn to you at all the right moments and appreciate that I had found you like the heroine finds her nerdy hero after years of not knowing he was always there. I wish that the theater had invested in those fancy seats where the arms come up so that I could lay in the nook of your arm as our faces flickered romantic reflections like a a slide show spun forward to catastrophic speeds. Your heart sounds like a projector sprocket running and it lulls me to calm. I imagine the film being shown from your gigantic eyes. In Cinemascope, of course.
I continue to look for you in the faces I see everyday and wish that you would hurry up and figure things out already so that I could wind these clocks again. Their blue faces would light up like a lightning bolt caught in gooey molasses and quietly tick away our time together again. Until that day I just continue to tell time by the warm sun and fall asleep in the night when the waiting for you turns me to a million drops of water cascading down to clean the slate and start over anew.

Until the next drop,
Keith