I was attempting to describe you to a friend of mine a couple days ago, because you don't look like any woman I’ve ever seen before.
For some reason, I couldn’t say, “well she looks a lot like Sally Field in her prime, except that she’s shaped like heaven's sacred hourglass and her eyes are like little breathing mirrors of moonlight, and of course she’s not a famous movie star, but she is a lot prettier than Sally ever was."
I couldn’t say that, because you don’t look like her at all. You look just like you, and that your majesty, is an absolutely beautiful thing.
So I finally ended up describing you as a sort of unforgettable milestone in regards to the infrastructure of modern society that happened almost exactly a hundred years ago.
The only way I could think to describe you was like the tittilization of rural America way back in the roaring 1920's.
I was living in a past life, the one just before the last one I lived during the Beat Generation. I was a word farmer lost in the middle of a page out in Nowhere, Nevada just outside of bum fuck Egypt, enjoying a simpleton lifestyle, while farming for meaningful words in the dark.
I had to use oil wick lanterns just to be able to see barely anything in the darkness of my surroundings. I also had an antiquated internal lantern that I used for lighting up my mind, which somewhat helped my vision to see things more clearly, but didn't always light up, due to reasons unbeknownst to me. There were no easy ways to communicate out this far yet. There were no telephones, no typewriters, no radios, no walkie talkies, no record players, no televisions, or iPhones, or social media for that matter.
Then out of absolutely nowhere, they just up and started to build a great big dam well south of here. They named it after an industrious beaver that was always chewing on the specs for it. I think its name was Hoover.
Shortly thereafter they started planting lacquer pole trees and stringing thick black wires that hummed with a buzzing timbre through every amber wave of grain across the god blessed country. The sweet land of liberty called the US of A.
There was an incredibly heroic composition in the literary details that came with the perfect placing of rather large looking pencils in the ground, just so the electric currents could move swift and free from one home to the next, all the while illuminating one town with the other all the damn way back to New York City. It all looked wonderfully ancient and revolutionarily modern just the same, much like you do.
And then the day had come that they were to flip a gigantic switch and turn all the electricity on. But there was a cosmic malfunction they never even saw coming. The load of all that wildly unharnessed power was to much for any manmade industrial system to bear.
But then, not a minute too late, and from out of nowhere, as if an angel had fallen from the wild blue yonder above, you just strode on into town one lazy day on a celestial horse and carriage with a harness made of stardust, like the Grecian Goddess of divine light, little Miss Theia.
Yes ma'am, that pretty little soul of yours lit up the darkness of the countryside with ease. You were like some ether of bright blue skies and blinding sunshine.
All of the sudden, almost religiously, with just the mere flipping of a switch there were lights for everything. There was now a light that allowed me to milk the literary dairy cows for the perfect words on damp and dreary mornings. But more important than anything, it was your light that helped me to write with much more clarity in the dark.
The next day, I moseyed my way on back to town to try and find you again, but much to no avail were you around, as I would have to guess that you moved on to the next sleepy town to do your thing and light up their little world.
So instead, and in lieu of not searching too hard for you. I bought myself a new fancy AM radio, a buzzing contraption called an electric heater, and a modernized lamp with something called a light bulb. I put the heater by my heart, and the lamp next to the coffee table just beside my soul, so I could write imaginative tales and heartfelt poetry all about you. The radio was for listening to the fireside chats, a new kind of music called the blues, and heavenly hymns all about love and new age fairytales.
It was all pretty bizarre for me to feel so much electricity that it made every hair on my being stand up straight and rather militant.
I heard along the way back to town the next day to buy more lamps and light bulbs, that the light you brought to the humble abode of my soul had already made its way from sea to shining sea.
It is unfortunate though, that soon after I heard such uplifting news about the way you moved so swiftly through me, and the country, they sent me off to fight in the first of what would be only two World wars. I was shot and killed on accident by a newfound friend a few weeks in. I can't blame him, he was scared and couldn't see anything because it was way too damn dark overseas.
Either way, it’s a uniquely funny little tragedy of a story with a happy ending, because that’s what you looked like to me way back then, and even more so now that I can feel the light of you coursing through my veins once again. You are—and have always been—pure, clean and clear, and wildly unfettered, universal electricity.
Yours truly & cordially,
Ryan Love
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