Thrust: A Novel

My Dawn,

The sun is setting and the water is blue and orange-yellow, with little caps of white diamonds.

The hole you have left in my life is an unsuturable wound.

Inside this last bottle, I will let go of my letter of goodbye, Aurora.

I am leaving this strange and beautiful place called a country. My Big Daughter is done. The colossus is erected. She seems to grow from the very water itself, in certain light. I have a cough I cannot master either, and thus I return by ship tomorrow.

I hope against hope that my daughter, my brainchild, inspires this young nation to think of freedom as alive. Freedom is a living organism, the statue a symbol to carry the life forward. Perhaps presidents will speak at her feet and inspire the people. Perhaps the masses will gather courage from her. Perhaps she may be a beacon for those caught inside tempests.

But I also hope that this country respects and honors that the whole project of constructing and erecting this statue has been one of enormous generosity and self-sacrifice. Time, work, and money have been sacrificed. At risk of immodesty, I believe the colossus to be the most important statue in the world — and I am her father, her existence born of the toil of my imagination and the countless hands of laborers. Are you laughing yet?

I can hear you. “Ah, the male genius. Always spraying itself about.”

I remember well the raps you so devotedly gave my cock in an effort to reroute both my blood and my imagination.

I meant to make you laugh — or to inspire one of your barbed retorts. Now I just feel ridiculous.

I miss you.

Aurora, if you ever meet Liberty, if you are out there somewhere and you have occasion to visit her, to enter her, please know: I have tried to infuse her form with a kind of power — that is, your power, your erotic power, recognized by Plato as the fundamental creative impulse, with its sensual element. Or, to put it differently — for you would never put it the way Plato did, would you; no, you’d call him someone who sublimated sensation so that he might ejaculate intellect — I have tried to invest Liberty with that profound power and unrelenting bliss you carry inside yourself. Your joy. Your command of pure sensation. Your ever-devouring and ever-generating body. The pure rush of you. If only a woman could be that: ungendered into her power. This is why I have rendered Liberty’s masculine and feminine face and body as one. It is my understanding of you, beloved. No other woman like you exists, except in the form of Liberty. No virgin, no mother, no sister, daughter, wife, or whore. Only Liberty.

I can see your face in youth, bleeding and laughing, sutures ripped open, a bloody apple on the floor.

How we picked the apple back up and ate it with zeal. How you birthed desire and imagination in a boy forever.

My loss is eternal.

My love is likely lost with you — my deepest love — although, you are right, in the end you are always right, we need another word for it.