The Plays
True Love [sample]
by Charles L. Mee
RICHARD
You thought I thought of you
as a bimbo outside of anything
"real" or "important" or "significant" to me?
Everything I've done and felt and known and lived for these past five years
was about you
was filled with your spirit
and your tastes and your hatreds and your loves
and your humor and your idiosyncracies
and your whims
your sudden turns and your steadiness
your confidence in me
the depth of your feelings
and the ferocity of them
everything I did was about you
and now without you my life is over.
You thought I thought of you as the great fuck
in the hot little dresses
You never were a great fuck
You were the worst fuck I ever had
I loved to make love with you
because I loved you
and I loved who you were
and I cared for you
and I always wanted to be close to you
as close as I could be
You were inhibited and frightened and closed off to adventure
repulsed and I don't know what else
and I always thought it was because you had been sexually abused
as a child
by a grownup
or by the other kids in the woods
that you always used to joke about
and say how tough you were and you didn't care what they did
but I've never known a woman
so averse to just opening up and having a good time sexually
and experimenting and trying things
and seeing where it might take you
No
only because I loved you so much
did I live with what I always thought was
a frustrating and unsatisfying sex life
for you as well as me, I'm sure,
that I only thought maybe, maybe one day
if you ever came to love me and trust me enough
you might overcome whatever trauma of the past
had made you this way
and if you never did
I loved you so much
that a great fuck was way way down the list of important things
to me about you
the biggest thing was always that I loved you completely and forever
I loved your brains and your sensibility
we were soulmates
we felt and thought the same things in the same ways
all the little subtle things in life felt the same to us
the same things were funny and stupid and heartbreaking
the same things were pretty
the same things were good to eat
we liked the same light in the sky in Provence
we liked the same roads
we liked the sounds of the cicadas
we liked the same room in the hotel
we felt the same about Nostradamus's house
and about the people who ran it
and about the little stone pool back away from the house
we liked the same things when you decorated the living room
we liked the same scenes in the same plays
ten thousand million little things held us together
like no one I've ever known
I wanted to be inside you
inside your love
inside your feelings
inside your thoughts and how you felt the world
I wanted to feel things as you felt them
I wanted to be in your heart
and so often I felt I was
I felt we were together in that way
and in that way
you were the greatest fuck I ever had
but not the great fuck in the hot little dress
the great fuck because of who you were in your heart
and how I loved you more than life itself
I remember
when we went to see the Greek play
The Danaids
in the abandoned marble quarry
and I thought:
we are connected to this human life
and to one another
for all eternity.
[They sit looking at one another
while we hear the Handel Sarabande from Suite No. 11 for Harpsichord.]
Then Richard shoots Polly.
