Blue Valentines

I had a hunch that Christmas card from Minneapolis was just the beginning. She never did know when to leave well enough alone.

Received a second note the day her parole came through. Valentine’s Day. Never could be any other way.

The envelope was bigger this time, like she was trying to fit in an apology along with some version of the truth. Her usual fantastical, phantasmagorical version thereof.

The name was not mine, not any more, but someone that I used to be.

The envelope was thick, too — too thick. A sign that someone’s been trying to keep something buried under layers of paper and a stack of lies. I should have left it on the kitchen table, next to the bottle and the butts.

I didn’t, of course. She knew me better than that.

Unfolded it slowly. There was something about seeing my old name on the envelope that made every word feel like a hand reaching out of a grave, cold fingers digging into my chest.

The paper was fresh and crisp. Heavy with the scent of perfume (Kayali vanilla candy rock sugar, if I had to guess) and recklessness. The handwriting still looked like a wrecking ball — just a little outside — but the paper felt heavier. More serious. Like she thought I might actually read it. Or need to.

I stared until it pulsed like a warrant.

Objects in your rear-view mirror may be closer than they appear. When it comes to lovers from your past, that’s a stone-cold guarantee.

The valentine was blank and blue, with an implicit message — a single line — that hit me in the gut before I even had time to breathe.

I know you think I’m poison, Charlie, but at least I’m alive.

Alive.

She had something on me there.

I had changed my name, then changed it again. I took rooms in towns that barely exist. I learned to sleep under bridges because the silence in a series of suites was too accusatory. But the valentines kept arriving. Always blue. Always blank. As if silence were a language only she and I could speak on the anniversary of the person I had exiled from my life. His life. Poor deluded bastard.

This time, I was holed up in a third-rate apartment above a butcher shop on the south side of Point No Point, the kind of place that smells like raw meat and old penitents, dragging their dirges behind them. The radiator hissed with bravado and gasconade, and the shadows on the walls had more personality than the cold anchorites across the hall. That’s where her latest letter found me — a pale blue envelope with no return address, postmarked from Philadelphia.

I know you think I’m poison, Charlie, but at least I’m alive.

Another Blue Valentine. Another half-forgotten dream.

It hung in the air like the smoke off that Yule log on the free cable channel at Christmas. Every once in a while, a disembodied hand would reach in with a poker to stoke the fire.

I read it again.

I know you think I’m poison, Charlie, but at least I’m alive.

She was right. About the first part, anyway. I did think she was poison. I was skeptical about her claim to be alive in any meaningful sense. But I was in no position to judge relative claims to vivacity.

Always blue. Always blank. As if silence were a language only she and I could speak. Or maybe the only language we could speak. A thistle in a kiss.

Every blonde in a raincoat becomes her silhouette. Every woman’s laugh that cuts through the night belongs to her. You don’t ever really leave someone like that. You just try to outpace the shards.

These blue valentines.

Blue valentines.

Blue valentines.

Why do I save all this madness here in the nightstand drawer? It takes a whole a lot of whiskey to make these nightmares go away.

Every year, she reminds me of the promise I made through my greasy hair and my burgundy shirt and this blind and broken heart that sleeps behind the lapel on the white marble steps of the Catholic church across from the Mexican whorehouse where I spent all my money the night we broke up.

That I’d write to her.

Maybe I just did.

Muriel, I still hit all the same old haunts.

And you follow me wherever I go.

Sincerely,

Billie Joe McAllister