Dear Mr. You

To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.

If she has given you children remind yourself every day of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth words in this sentence. If you hurt her in ways that are irreparable I will send out people to hurt you back, sorry, but it has to be like that. Yes, you may have had a difficult childhood, but please allow me to introduce myself: Hello, I am the woman who doesn’t give a shit. Make her something warm to drink in the mornings and give her time to begin speaking; only rush at her with an embrace or a gemstone. Wildflowers. A love note. Yeats.

Thank you for giving me your arm and those four hours that I now understand you did not have an endless supply of. It was short but I loved our little trip. We fell in love, but the way you love a view that comes along once or twice in life.

be careful of thinking about people as “kinds of people”?

I wrote about us while you were away in a notebook that eventually saw the end of us, but the last I wrote about that time was in ink; it was a hurried, angry scrawl reading: Time, that cold bastard, with its nearlys and untils. I think, what a shame. Time should weep for having spent me without you.

I said I don't know how to say no, I only know how to yell it.

Faith to you was more clay than mortar, and if you could interpret the gospel, so could I. So should anyone. If God wasn’t mad at you for drinking wine and chain-smoking and being a homosexual, he might forgive me for stealing a kitten and trying to hide it under a blanket in the back of our station wagon. Certainly that God was preferable to others who wouldn’t let you in Heaven if you said bad words or drank Mountain Dew.

I'll tell you now before you can speak: strength is a myth. It's not what it is, when it looks like what it is. It's usually what it is when it looks like something else. It takes bravery to admit that you're petrified and keep soldiering on despite it. Oh,and, "easy"? Also a hoax! If it existed it would be sold for the same as you got it for- nothing! Ha!

I love that sensation, when you think, this is too good, I'll catch up with everyone else later. You just have to take in the truth of that expanse a few more seconds before it changes and becomes something else entirely, or before you do.

Everyone is a mass of contradictions. There are no "types" of people,

Thank you for being open to another more workable draft of me. It affected me profoundly.

There was no one for you to impress and no one for you to offend. You were right there and I was afraid of how real you were, which made me question my own level of authenticity. I'd take off my clothes on the beach or spill my guts to a girl I'd never met on the bus, thinking I was uncensored and open, but I wasn't always real if I wanted someone to like me. I gravitated to those who withheld or told me who they thought I was.

We know there exists a planet with four thousand different versions of songbirds. Because that is possible and because on that same planet can exist sentient beings made up almost entirely of stardust, and because bonafide poetry erupts mightily from some of those beings, and there is music, sex, and babies that laugh in their sleep; because we are roaming a universe that may be a hologram, with another dimension consecutively projecting itself outside this construct of reality and gravity; because of all that, there is no reason why my prayers shouldn't be able to reach your mother whose name I don't even know.

Time, that cold bastard, with its nearlys and untils. I think, what a shame. Time should weep for having spent me without you.

I don’t believe in endings, happy or sad, so my relationships with you continue to this day. They are the kind of relationships you have with a pair of skis you know you’ll never have to strap to yourself again. Maybe you never really liked skiing, but enjoyed being a person who could say, “Looks like I’ll be hitting the slopes this weekend!” So you kept on even though it cost too much to get down a hill. Gave you windburn. I see nothing weird about keeping those skis in the basement. They offer a little nostalgia for crappier times. More importantly, they serve as a reminder that I no longer have to ski. Wake

It’s because of you that I can go to any church and take whatever the service has to offer, all of it up for interpretation except kindness.

Enraged is the wrong word, but I felt like I wanted to kick you in the shins and then make you banana bread. I wanted to key your car and take you out for dim sum. It was admiration, passion and that voice of yours all mushing together and disarming me, making me want smash something and kiss someone.

Letting someone you don’t really like surprise you is evolved,

I hear people say, “It happened for a reason,” or “It’s part of God’s plan,” and I wish that made sense to me but it doesn’t.

I go far out, maybe in a field somewhere quiet. I think of things I have done in my life that people tell me are good. I remember that I have done good

I said I don’t know how to say no, I only know how to yell it.

I don’t know if you feel conflict when you hear the phrase “new reality,” or if it makes you want to throw in the towel. When you realize that the only thing to be counted on is the shifting and reestablishing of proximity, do you ever feel like, why did I bother searching in the first place? We have to rewrite ourselves again and draw all new maps. What

You weren’t looking at me as you continued to eat my food and I couldn’t move from rage.

You are what makes me indomitable and how I know to keep walking when I feel crippled in every conceivable way.

I can’t take credit for more than remembering to point to you when I do something right and for continuing to put one foot in front of the other when I lose heart. We

Thanks to you I don't have to watch either of those scenarios play out while perched on a cloud fighting with God to let me intercede,or spend eternity aching to at least become the quivering sunbeam that lands on them one morning when they rol out of bed at age twenty-five.

You were a living reminder of what I always professed to believe, that you never know what happened to someone that day, so try to cut some slack, but being bound by my own ropes I was unable to give you that.