Tonight I cannot sleep, my love. I am kept awake by sadness and by grief so violent that I feel blessed. Two vivid images entice my tears over and over again, in great waves: the way you were watching me undress you—like an infant—two nights ago, and the way you were following me with your eyes—your head slightly bowed in trust—as I was leaving you this afternoon, the door silently closing behind me…

Our love is still so innocent, my love. We have not yet hurt each other in any way. But I seem to be grieving because of the mere possibility that I will some day cause you even the slightest of pains. As I weep—still a guiltless sinner—I keep moaning rhythmically: “I don’t want to hurt you, my love, I don’t want to hurt you…” In blind anticipation, I cannot stop weeping disconsolately.

I am mystified by the vehemence of my love for you, and by its color—so very blue. It is suffused with sorrow of someone who has lived long enough to know or to fear that love is a miracle and that miracles are for the feebleminded. And that knowledge, that fear, is indeed my first sin against you, my love. Please forgive me. Please forgive me, my love, my saddest love…

Addendum I (March 27, 1994)

There are no miracles. If there is a miracle, it is that we believe in miracles. More to the point, the most miraculous aspect of our existence is that we fall for miracles from time to time. When we fall in love, we are especially exposed to this ailment of the human mind. When the smoke clears and the dust settles, when all the pretensions and lies are added up and accounted for, nothing much remains but the aftertaste of yet another misconceived project, yet another exercise in self-deception. For deception is inconceivable without self-deception.

When I met Lauren she was living with both Tom and Allan. This had been going on for more than a year, and perhaps even more than two years. It is the most amazing thing, the most miraculous miracle, that I was entirely incapable of drawing any conclusions from this simple fact about Lauren’s existence. And the key conclusion should have been that Lauren was not only living in a world of divided loyalty, habitual lies, distorting mirrors, double vision, and waking dreams, but that she had become entirely used to such a world, and that she was in all likelihood unable to leave it for a more wholesome one.

In the culture in which I grew up it was the poets who spoke the truth; Lauren grew up in a culture in which the monopoly to the truth was in the hands of psychoanalysts and lawyers. There, words that are not medically compelling or legally binding are at best entertaining. Everything goes, every lie is just as good as any other, the world is totally open to interpretation and reinterpretation on the psychoanalyst’s couch or in the lawyer’s office. My promises to Lauren never meant much to her; the next day she wanted more promises, because all the others were already lost, spent, used up in the heat of the moment. Her promises to me meant as little as my promises to her. They were good for a day, if that long.

Having learned only a day or two ago about the nature of Lauren’s feelings toward Janina, her girlfriend from MIT, I am not sure any longer what to believe and what not to believe in connection with her relationships with Tom and Allan. Did she indeed leave both of them after we made love for the first time, as I had done with Bonny? Did she tell both of them what she told me she told them about our great love? If yes, why did both of them, and especially Allan, linger around Lauren for such a long time? Were Tom and Allan simply deluded into following her a while longer, or were they egged on into believing that everything would soon turn the other way, and that one of them—or perhaps both, again—would be victorious over me?

Indeed, there are no miracles. If there is a miracle, it is that I had fallen in love again, against all odds, and that I have maintained it for such a long time in complete darkness about the object of that love. That is a miracle—and a fucking miraculous miracle at that. But the funniest thing about all this is that I now feel that Lauren has incapacitated me for another long period of time from loving a woman! Well, I should congratulate her and give her a friendly smack on her jolly ass. With some luck, she may have cured me for good from my romantic delusions about love and chastity.

Addendum II (January 31, 2000)

“Please forgive me,” I sobbed in her arms in the middle of the street, “for all the pain I am yet to cause you.” Not surprisingly, these words took me back to our first days together, but this time the pain was much more real. And so were my sins against my beloved.

Addendum III (January 30, 2013)

Someone has been patiently searching my Residua for several years now by using the same phrase over and over again: “Never loved Lauren.” The pain I have first felt in February 1989 invariably comes back whenever I discover this phrase on Google Analytics. For I used to love Lauren. And how. But today I found another but related phrase on Google Analytics: “I did love Lauren.” Yes. Yes, I did. I surely did. With all my heart and soul. I can only hope that this addendum will come to the attention of that someone who has been searching my site for years. And the tears are back…