Broken Telephones Serial Fiction Game - Chapter 2

Dear Dexter,

Here is a list of things I’m thinking I’d like to tell you in no particular order and with no expectation of ever seeing or hearing from you again, except maybe in one of those travel coincidences where you meet at the side of the Ganges or something, surrounded by millions of strangers and make wide-eyed laughing chat about ‘oh how amazing’ but then there’s nothing else to say to a person you loved for a few days a long time ago so you slip back into the crowd and that’s your farewell. Interesting, but it doesn’t change anything.

Here’s the list:

1. I hated you when I met you at first, and that’s never happened to me before, that stereotype about finding yourself suddenly massively moved and attracted to someone you were loathing and battling a minute ago. You ooozed arrogant American, you dripped it on the pretty hostel worker’s shoes and boobs, at least that’s what I assumed from what I could overhear, and made me resent my North Americanism. Later I found you undercut your own arrogance with jokes that showed you knew exactly what you were doing, you play all your possible characters including the one that knows and can talk about it and be quiet and smile and hold a moment with your wild eyes and make the world spin with possibilities. Are you an actor in real life? I don’t think I asked, but you’d be good at it.

2. This train goes so fast I feel like the intangible part of my mind that floats around above my head is still stuck back at the station, wondering where I am, disorientated. If you see it, will you tuck it in your pocket please, or take it out for a beer?

3. Which reminds me, I should tell you: Sam, the burlier Aussie we had those pints with, is gay. This should be obvious, but I don’t think you caught it. He and I had some interesting conversations. You should let him down gently and carefully, he’s a big guy with a big heart and you with your dark eyes and floppy poet hair are bound to break it.

4. I’m not sure I’m going to Montreal yet, so if you are writing me there I’ll be missing your letters for a while. I can’t go home, I thought I could, but this lost feeling is a hard habit to shake, and home gets harder to face. I like to imagine you are writing me already, and that letters are piling up and the giggly Japanese medical students subletting my place are gathering love letters from you daily, and thinking I am a wild romantic. Exchanging only mailing addresses with you did seem romantic at the time, but now you’re lost in the wash of Europe speeding behind us on this train and I’m wishing.. but anyway.

5. I am sharing the seat with an elderly Polish man on his way to see relatives and he is sharing briny pickled things with me. I am telling you this so you don’t think those are tears or that my tears smell like eggs. My tears smell fine.

6. I am in the airport now. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you had more jumps left on my ticket, I don’t know why I bolted, I don’t know why you spook me. I know I got tired of Paris, it’s so old and packed and jangly, and the beauty is sharp and cosmopolitan and too modern and post-modern and glass-and-metal for me, and it’s all covered in your speedy, jokey, emotional complexity now, and in my own rapid heart, hands shaking, too much feeling. I think I need some sun.

If by some chance you get this before the heat in your quick heart has cooled entirely, you could come meet me in Havana, I’ve decided that’s where I’m going next. For the sun and because they say you have to see it before Castro dies and it’s overrun with Americans.

I’ll be there for a while. If you can manage to come I’ll be staying in a casa particular near the ice cream place in Vedado, old Havana.

Trace

[here are the rules for Broken Telephones. You should play!]