Dear Dorothy

I remember that you scorn all things handwritten—you type everything, I remember, even though your handwriting is lovely and straight, like white picket fences, birthday candles, and pushpins on the corkboard above your bed—but perhaps you will find some empathy within you to read this. I can imagine you now, wherever you are, reading this, perhaps at your desk, or perhaps at a café at your lunch break. Perhaps you have a cup of coffee—it looks black because it fits your personality, but I know you put three teaspoons of sugar inside it, I know that about you—and perhaps you are pulling a cigarette out of the slim silver case, inherited from your father, from your handbag. I see you exhaling the smoke in a long, lazy cloud. You used to blow it into my face, and you would toss your head back, laughing, when my eyes began tearing up. I coughed, you didn’t. I remember that about you.

I remember many things about you. Your name was Dorota officially, on your letterheads, followed by your degree, your department, and the name of our university. Dorota was serious and grim, who, standing at six feet could look professors down with her fierce black eyes lined like a cat’s, and you were Dolly to fools who thought they could control a wild beast like you, and because I knew better, you were Dorothy. You were Dorothy to everyone, and I am no exception. You, Dorothy with the formidable surname, a jumble of eastern European syllables impossible to say, intimidating in typeface, of wild beauty when dragged out in ink by your hand.

I remember you in fits and bursts, Dorothy, glimpses of you in the throngs on the plaza, dark colors, coifed hair, lips marked with a poisonous red. I still look for you in the crowds, and sometimes I see you thrown to pieces and scattered amongst strangers, your smart black shoes, your swift and purposeful walk, your haughty bark of laughter. I remember the smell of your perfume—you puffed it onto me once to see if I could be grown-up and mature like you, it didn’t work—but nobody wears it like you do, Dorothy.

I remember the first time I saw you. It was September and it was warm, and you were lounging on the glade, shoes flung aside, book in your lap, cigarette between your fingers. I sketched you in red colored pencil. You didn’t know this at the time, didn’t see me because I was an insignificant speck of an individual, and when I told you I was shaking with anxiety, which you laughed at, of course.

I had amassed an embarrassing amount of sketches of you, Dorothy, by the time we met. Do you remember that windy April morning? The wind carried my sketches your way, and you collected them, handed them back to me, and teased me because I was one of your many admirers. Somehow, I dared to ask if I could paint you, and perhaps because you indulged every opportunity to be worshipped, you took me to your lair.

                Dorothy, you swallowed me whole. You picked me up by your fingertips, nails short but painted prim pink, and dropped me down your gullet. I was lost the moment I crossed the threshold, into your house, the sacred box, a too-small cave for a dragon queen, draped with deep reds and hung with neat photographs of enchanting places familiar to you, arcane to me. This is the chamber of Dorothy, but you laughed and dug your elbow into the pillow and peered at me with your venom eyes.

I recall it during a hot spell in the spring, and the window was cracked open, and only for you. You didn’t offer me a drink or anything, and you, you could fan yourself with my sketches if you liked, and slip out of your costume to reveal armor and naked skin, scales of a terrible, beautiful beast that I could not hope to comprehend. I felt silly even taking off my scarf, and so I suffered there in your room, breathing in the heady, nauseatingly powerful odors of flowers plucked from the side of the mechanical engineering building smudged along every surface. Dead flowers, wilted and  browned, still belching their odors and oils—and I was growing faint, and you laughed as you put your clothes back on.

When I close my eyes I perceive you—a tall, dark woman with a quick, straight gait, loping across campus with books under one arm, a cigarette wedged between oxblood lips. I can paint you with a few quick strokes of India ink and have it recognizable, Dorothy, but it isn’t you. I’ve tried. I’ve created you in ink and paint and charcoal, worked your dark lipstick into the paper and canvas, sometimes smudged along with my ring finger, other times straight from the bullet, dangerous and bold like you were. I picked the flowers, redolent and pressed them against your image—smutty, slutty fragrance, lacking in elegance, inadequate to describe you.

Dear Dorothy, these are for you. Sketches, all, but fitting of the brevity of our acquaintance—and you don’t think much of art, anyways. I was too frightened—and still, I am frightened—to say you were my muse, but you were, you who scorned art and love and beauty, frivolities and pointless indulgences. I remember this about you. You, who had an engine in place of a soul, as you told me one time when I tried to read you poetry—I remember this about you.

And when I told you that I loved you, you laughed in my face—how dare I, scarcely past girlhood, an artist (you said this derisively, you were derisive of art in general) of feeble talent and creativity, no use to a civilization that marches towards the future, court you? You told me you had no need for desperate warrior artists, and would not care to read whatever lovelorn drivel I sent your way, if it was anything like how I behaved. I remember this about you.

And because I remember this about you, I can feel safe that you will never read these words or look at these sketches. The envelope may smell like the flowers—gardenias, I looked them up—but you are Dorothy, Dorota ascended to meet the new America, the new woman resplendent and powerful, and you will have forgotten me. You will not read this, and this realization comes with relief and not despair, dear Dorothy, I know this about me, because you have taught me to be this way, I know this. You will have forgotten me, but I remember you, Dorothy, and I wish you well

Love,

An admirer

                

**

Heavily inspired by the poem "Bien loin d'ici" by Charles Baudelaire, trans. Edna St. Vincent Millay, as depicted in the description of the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume oil blend of the same name.