It’s a love letter babydoll.

Dearest girlfriend,

I want to start by saying that this is a love letter and that I love you. You have been a steadfast and passionate companion when I have been, as is evident to everybody, as insane as ever. I know that it is sometimes hard to know what I am thinking or to predict my desires, you have told me that the fluidity of my motivations and activations is difficult to access and more difficult to follow. Nevertheless you astound me with your ability to disregard the fluid and concentrate on the solid. In order to convey to you, with such exactitude as is possible, how I feel about you, I want to guide you through a visualisation, an image of a lovely day we’ve not yet spent together: You’re walking through Hyde Park. You walk down the hill from the Norfolk street side, this is where you parked your car, and it is where you have habitually parked your car ever since you met your sister at that side for a picnic and enjoyed a lazy day training her new-born blue-heeler puppy. You pass the water fountains over the mosaics, which had been used as a toilet for both kinds of excretion by the young dog, and approach the edge of the lake. You begin to walk around the lake, clockwise, intending to meet me on the other side, where I have a barbecue lunch waiting for you. You think how awfully nice it will be to finally spend some time together uninterrupted. As you round the lake you pass a family of ducks, a mother and 4 ducklings. They follow her dutifully. They remain in perfect formation for some 30 yards as they paddle towards you, parallel to the banks. You wonder how the mother has engendered in her charges such discipline when you yourself, with superior intelligence and strength would have been verily unlikely to achieve the same. Her aptitude, which exceeds yours despite her clear disadvantage in all other modes of behaviour bar flight, comforts you, reminds you that the rest of the world exists beyond your ability to put it on your calendar. You do so love planning things on your calendar. As you watch them pass, a turtle suddenly breaches and gulps in air with a snap. He scares the ducklings. Their mother hastily swims circles around them, gathering them back into line and continues onwards, inasmuch as there is anything like an ‘onwards’ in a circular lake full of well-fed ducks. You continue around the lake, passing the public ablutions, renowned for their attendant homosexual community and the children’s play set, proximal to the park’s cottage.  You’re thinking how wonderfully cosy the entire world is, on a summer’s day, in the golden filtered-light beneath the wide leaves of a Morton Bay fig. You’re hung-over but the warmth of the day is not so much that it exacerbates your dehydration and is just enough to accentuate the pleasant feelings of uselessness that dominate your mood. The feeling that, though you are capable of much, today you need rest from productive behaviour and nurse your body as it goes about it’s intense hepatic metabolism. In the distance you can see me, I am standing at a picnic table, lifting food from a cooler, obviously having just arrived myself. You call out and wave. Though I don’t hear your call, I see your wave and return it, but it is not with delightful surprise that I greet you. I’ve known for quite some time that you were approaching. You raise your pace, now anxious to say hello. Your canter brings you within eye-shot of my face in seconds. You can see my mouth, flattened into a moderate smile. It’s a smile you’ve seen before. It’s an artificial smile, the straightening by force of will of what would otherwise be a severely twisted smirk. Now you wonder; “Why is he suppressing a knowing smirk? Have I something on my face? Has he bought me a present? Does he intend to propose?” The very proposition for which you have long pined now dominates your thinking. A wave of wonderful anxiety rushes over you, and you wish you had not been goaded into those vodka shooters last night. You wish you had put more effort into your appearance. You wish you had deciphered this invitation to picnic at noon, which although reasonable enough in the ever-changing pattern of my behaviour was anyhow out of the ordinary. You are overcome by relief as you realise all of your life-plans may finally be realised. You are 20 metres from me when 400 exact copies of me rush from the bushes to your left and gang-rape you.