#8 of Fleur's 10 Best

#8 needs no introduction. It's one of my favorites, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Dear Fleur,
I'm wondering whether an exuberant vow made in the first rush of now-kaput love-ishness, must nevertheless be honored? i.e. do I really have to boycott Ireland?
~Silky

Dearest Silky,
What was good about wanting to go there anyway, if not your handsome muse in a cliched sweater, with a five o'clock shadow, and you tasting his mouth to taste yet another beer when you do not generally even enjoy beer?! Love-ishness -when new, on the ninth floor, when Christmas tree lights and muted afternoon sun play over your eyelids, and hands feel like secrets you forgot were once whispered to you backstage in the dusty shadows before you sang your song for the full breathless auditorium...Love-ishness is so quiet then, approximating the sound of feathers being touched with an impulse to migrate, or the silence of the blue glaze brushed into slender willows on a single antique plate propped in a curio case behind a bone from the arroyo. Love-ishness sends up kites to flutter at the sky you so often don't even look at. Love-ishness you had all to yourself when you could have sworn you were accompanied, drew a map, a red line over blue expanse to green you imagined existed and you also imagined the ankles of horses. Do you have to honor that imaginary journey now that your entire experience, the circumference of the coffee table on our backs, sides, each other, with skin worn away, ruddy and surrendered to hours that have no clocks, has been left all alone in the envelope of that afternoon? Ireland, I don't know what Ireland is because I have never been there. I haven't smelled it, or leaned against you in a crowded bus, or touched my hands to an ancient brick wall as if there was a braille I could read there, or had alcoholic coffee with you in the morning, or taken a picture of you laughing. Love-ishness now-kaput, was the first green looking through dark March dirt, the tip of an onion held in the bulb and then alive. I _will_ have the translucent thing anyway.