Dear Lolita,
It is the name I have given to you, a beautiful stranger. But I don’t think I see you the same as Nabokov sees pretty young women. I’ve watched you for sometime. You start off most evenings with a cup of coffee which you bring into the bookstore and run off to the second floor, to a corner with a high table, rummaging through a collection of Vonnegut’s novels. It’s a nice spot that overlooks rows of books and rows of people. You don’t read much. Your eyes always stray off from the pages to the people, the people reading, the people looking, the people doing people things. Except talking. They rarely talk. There exists a peace in the silence that blankets the store, a peace that might become unsettling. You go mad if you haven’t been disturbed by a human voice in a long time, believe me. Looking at these people, I wonder if you speak for them, inventing conversations for people talking to themselves or to other people. I do the same. It would be nice if the two of us could create scripts for all of them, conjuring made-up dialogues for strangers.
You started Vonnegut’s collection at the beginning of February. It’s the end of April, the beginning of May. There is never a wrong time to read Vonnegut, which I love. He speaks to readers as if he knows what they’re feeling, he sympathizes, and carries on with a story that neither nurtures nor worsens your emotions. I would go over there to speak with you about all his books, but I’m afraid something more might happen. Something always does. I might use words I don’t mean and pull you into bed. We’d enjoy a one-night stand and we would never see each other again. It’s happened countless times before. I’m guilty and shamed. But with you, for you, and for myself, I’ve tamed and kept a distance, only my mind and eyes in the works of kissing you, caressing you, entering you, pressing my naked body to yours. To hear you moan and feel you curl through warm hazel eyes, through the scent of your dirty-blonde hair.
I’m not a pedophile. I’m not a rapist. I’m merely a lonely man in a world I see as peopled. Everyone with everyone, everything with everything, a harmony I am not a piece off, perhaps because I’m an extra or that I don’t fit anywhere of this earthly puzzle. I cannot settle. It scares me. To be ball and chained to a woman for the rest of my life, unable to love anybody else, terrifies me. I cannot love one woman and one woman only. I need a plethora, a feast. I have an appetite that is always hungry and growing.
It’s my terrible nature not to stop imagining such sexual wonders. I am man. I am animal. And I can’t help it. Of all women, I admit this to you. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was time I talk to somebody about my problem. And what better way than to cast it to you, a stranger, to bite the line and be lured into a hellhole of mine. I’m not so sure as to how you’d help me, but admitting all of this to anybody would be a first good step.
Lolita, beautiful stranger, this is the closest thing I will ever get to meeting you besides the fantasies and the spying. I hope you will forgive me. I hope you will not see me as a monster so much as other women have. Do not be like other women, Lolita. You aren’t like the others for I have not felt the smooth of your lips like a poet’s pencil and paper, eternally romantic. So, I ask of you one thing, the last thing, to hear of my criminal mind and to forgive me. Physically, mentally, and spiritually forgive me. Otherwise, I will have to pretend you have forgiven me, a white lie that comforts too little. And with that, I should be able to get by and by, through and through, until I am cremated, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
With love and squalor,
Joshua “Josh” Summerford
(this was written a while back. i wrote it after i finished Lolita)