My darling sweet, my darling sweet, we have known each other for many years, have we not, but when we first met, in that tiny playground of the school, we were so young and now almost forgotten as the people we once were. The photos that were taken are what we have to go on, thank goodness, filling in the gaps; even snapshots in black and white can carry the souls of the beings we once were, two tiny kids. To celebrate our long time together, my darling sweet, I am about to supply those sweets we once enjoyed so very much, sweets that you can’t buy these days, and although tiny sweet shops with weighing machines and jars and triangular paper bags still exist, they are rare, and even if they do exist their sweets are different. Sweets that do not have the smell of the 1950s about them. The feel of those old times surely no longer exists as sweets, you think. Stickiness that got stuck somewhere in the past, leaving us with flat and unsharp and smooth and unsticky ones today. But I have found the original sweets still edible but with the smell and stickiness of the 1950s still clinging to them in dreams. Can you believe it? You know how you have been able to trust me over so many years of happy togetherness. But first you need to find these sweets in the same dreams as mine. This is a game like the ones we used to play. A laughter of tricks and clues. And co-vivid dreaming. Ah, you have found them too easily, my darling sweet. You are so clever, always have been. No change there. But I meant you to search all night, but you are as ever too clever for me. Your smile is as sweet as it ever was, my now seeing you gaze in disbelief at the sweets you’ve found for yourself in our dreams, without my help, but sweets not as sweet as your smile, I hasten to add. A teardrop at the corner shop of your eye, a sign of joy, not sadness, of course. I try to return your smile with my own, but it cannot compare with yours, I’m sure. Ah, you do not need to open your powder compact for its mirror. I believe you, as you believe me. And I am fain to say more, now the game of laughter has tripped your smile into further ricochets of hiccuping. Always the same hiccuping hilarity, and I know you are as happy as Chloe. Yes, do open the triangular paper bags, to see the sweets more clearly. To feel their stickiness on the tips of your fingers. Sorry, they are not in proper 1950s paper, stiff, and crimped. Pinked by pinking scissors. And drizzled with sugar grains. But being in sleep’s cellophane, you can see the sweets without first getting yourself too sticky. Fruit drops, penny chews, humbugs, bull’s eyes, pineapple chunks, pear drops, lemon sherbets, and rhubarb-and-custard pieces just for you tasting like school dinner puddings, and yes, I know, not all those were quite the same or even available at all in the old days, but a pick-a-mix today is as good as a choice of beautiful pastel or even primary colours in sweet jars all those years ago. We used to get our faces covered in stickiness, I remember, thus allowing our kisses to seem to last almost forever. Or are these kisses merely in our dreams today, kisses that never happened at all? I watch you touch the sweets gingerly. Testing out the bags for further openings that have inadvertently been ripped into them during your first excited rush in getting at them, after long calm moments of pent-up anticipation. Try first the rhubarb and custard ones, my darling sweet. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at their surge of gentle flavour. Even longer moments of nostalgic hindsight as you allow them to seep into you with their essential sweetness of distant past time’s premonition of our loving life together… Go on, suck hard, do not chew. You have to watch your teeth. Ah, I am so pleased. Sweets for my sweet. And your sweet smile itself can now hopefully last in eternity for me, even beyond the peaceful end of your laughter. Close your compact, my darling sweet. Keep your powder dry.
I feign to say more, as the future unfolds into age, but in truth I actually do, viz. there seem be at least ghostly sweets visible in it, but whether that means it’s a task of depths that is dead easy to plumb or it’s an impermeable complex of folds in cellophane that sits on my desk in our mansion, but I am not sure which, easy or complex. Except it’s clear; it is clear, too that there is no container on my desk at all, because there is no container at all upon my desk as I sit here looking at the desk’s wood-grained expanse with nothing at all upon it, not even a piece of paper or a pen. Just an empty ink-well sunk in one corner, an aperture for when writers used to scratch out handwriting with a nib that they dipped into it. Ah, it’s an empty cellophane container I sense to exist, I suppose, of sorts, even though it is not on the desk but in it. But usually when you say that something is in a desk, it usually means it is something in one of its drawers. The inkwell as container is part of the desk itself, carved into the wood of its surface, and roughly finished to allow an inner non-wooden container to be inserted that would itself hold the ink. But being an empty part of my desk, it was neither on or in it, but an intrinsic aperture like the slots into which the drawers are inserted and such drawers usually represent a miracle of workmanship whereby nothing gets stuck like sticky sweets get stuck, but moving as if on smooth or well-oiled runners, even though it is wood moving upon or within other wood, without any lubrication between. Not loose, but fitting exactly, and no perceptible gaps, yet avoiding any groans or grindings when pushed in and out, a prime example of the carpenter’s art. Even dampness fails to make it work less efficiently. And my study is beset with a decided dampness, ever since you died. Why that should be, I have not had long enough since your death to discover. On a sudden impulse, I put my finger into the empty inkwell hole in the corner of the desk, a runnel running off from the side as a method to hold pens and pencils within its groove to stop them rolling down the desk, or, suddenly, I thought, to allow excess ink or any other fluid to be irrigated along as an escape route… But where would it have gone? Only down the slope of the desk-lid toward whoever is sitting at the desk. Ah, that’s the first indication I have received that this desk does not have a flat writing surface but a gradient of a desklid that is openable upon a whole cornucopia of contents beneath it. There are after all no smooth running drawers in this desk, as I originally indicated. My thinking has become confused ever since I lost you. This desk is an old schoolroom version, with one sloping desklid and metal joints below to cage my bare legs. I look around and see whole rows of such desks around me, each with a bent head above it. I quickly look away as this does not seem to be my study at home at all. And I finally extract my finger from the inkwell and find it dripping blue-back Stephens ink. Yes, Stephens, not Quink. The firm of Stephens once made sweets as well as ink, few seem to know. How can I be so sure? Well, I have touched the tip of my tongue with it and I certainly know the taste of Stephens when compared to that of Quink. “Boy!” shouted a voice from the front of the room, “what on earth are you doing?” I must have looked confused, and my underpants felt suddenly damp, and while the voice was otherwise abruptly engaged with another child’s emergency in the classroom elsewhere, I lifted the desklid slope to hide my blushes. There is seemingly nothing inside, I thought, wondering for a moment where all my school books must have gone. My head smoothly running inside with no gaps between, silently I had shrunk to a single cell within a cell pushed shut from behind me by the teacher towards a final darkness inside, without even a single groan of bone on grinding bone in the procedure of entry. You, my sweet, never liked drawers left open, but was never strong enough to push them shut. Would I find our leftover rhubarb and custard lozenge lodged stuck into one of the desk’s dark corners. In any such spectral form of fane, a shrine to my Platonic sweet surely should be found.
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