All of Last Summer...

Dear John,

I can hardly stand how oddly sad I've felt tonight.
Just a slight pang in my gut.
Every time I hear a certain melody or pitch in someone's voice....
At the restaurant, for the entire duration of my 3 hour swing shift, I kept suddenly feeling you. And it made my stomach hurt. And it made my chest clench tightly.
I tried pushing you away, focus on getting more beef jus or prosecco.
Then I'd hear the music again...
Then I'd smell the cigarettes from the back porch...
All of last summer...

Because we're both always too poor for our palettes: one entree with a bottle of wine in the warm summer evening air.
You and me, smoking cigarettes throughout the entire meal -- stretching out the meal like the fleeting time we had left 'together' -- one or the other, always on the verge of burning out.

How it hurts that you haven't called me back. Or written me an e-mail. Or sent me a text. Or gotten on instant messenger. It makes me so angry with you, to think of you ignoring me.

You are so lovely.
And you will always be lonely.

Secret Admirer

Dear John,

I'm trying to play it cool, but what I really want to say- edit: shout from the rooftops- is that I think about you constantly. Seriously, all of the time! Not in a creepy way. Like when I see couples holding hands walking down the street. Or when 'Pale Blue Eyes' plays on my ipod. Or when I look out the window and watch two birds fluttering by each other. When I get dressed in the morning. When I get ready for bed. At dinner with my friends. On the bus. In the record shop. Right now. 

Age 31

Dear Joan,

Will you be my girlfriend? Yes, No, or Maybe?

Patience is a Risky Virtue

Dear John,

This is going to be good. This is going to be really good, I can feel it. Maybe not right now, but someday. Someday, this will be great. A great big intense kind of love. Bigger than all the galaxies. Deeper than the tiniest particles of the earth. Completely intangible and immeasurable. And it's only just beginning. It's going to take the one most significant thing in life that I am no good at... patience. And I will work every day for it!

BitterSweet

Dear Joan,

..You have enriched my life and shown me such new and beautiful things. I cherish the times that we have had and the memories warm my heart often. I don't want to loose your friendship when I have been so foolish to loose your heart. As I write this through the tears I search for a quick fix to make it all better, however there is not one. Great things take work someday there will be a reward. And drifting hearts will find their equal match. Than you for it all.

Unpleasant Surprise

Dear John,

I know that you know the difference between my vagina and my butthole, so DON'T even think about it.

Half Truth

Dear John,

I want to sleep with other people. I am sexy and young, and I don't need you.

(This is only partially true.)

Love and Resistance

Antarctica

Dear Joan,

I spent a year trying to write this.  It's not that I didn't know what to say --  I seem to always know what to say, it's that I don't know how to be understood.  I don't know how to tell you a concrete truth and have it stay, and stay, and stay.  It will.  Everything I've ever told you has come from truth.  It's up to you if you can let it stay.  You hear it or read it and file it away and pull it back out and now the words have somehow mutated and become entirely different.  Consequently, I've bounced this through synapses, off fingertips, the wall, and back onto the page, and it's still a stuttering mess.  At times it started with this introduction:

Not to say that this was any part of the problem, but I've always loved too much. The beginning of things, the middle, or the end: too much.  It's made me awkward because I have to play it cool.  So I wake up and feel like I survived a head injury.  I feel like I boarded the wrong train and I'm halfway to Poughkeepsie and it's raining.  It's not a deep terror or despair of evenings past, though... it's a subtle confusion.  It's something in my ribs when I wake up from surgery that rubs against my sternum and reminds me, 'you're safe.  you're alive.  you're fine.  but what the fuck just happened?'"

And then I get stuck.  I mean, I don't get stuck because I know exactly what it was that I was saying.  I get stuck because it's not good enough to say or feel these things.  I sense misinterpretation and you becoming preoccupied with my employment of 8th grade grammar.  I can feel it specifically NOT staying.  It's just this: I was going to tell you about about a moment when I felt that OK-convergence, and how it was a little like being in love.  Not the type of love that you're thinking of.... not romantic love.  Not platonic love... certainly not fucking....

It's that love that you feel when you go to check your hair and the bathroom doesn't have a mirror and you decide not to care because you're with friends and there's a great band playing and you have a drink and it just doesn't matter.   It's the love you feel when you wake up in the morning and you have nothing to do all day and that's OK.  No panic, no stress, no checklist of tasks.  Just a mellow convergence of the OK.  I want to describe that to you -- but I'm not good enough with words to become unstuck. 

And then there's also Antarctica.  I know that it's there, but it's an island I'll never go to that is white and beautiful and cold.  It's lovely.  It's locked and I'll never go there.  But the people that do go there... those people get to RISK it!  That's you, the person who makes all risks worth it.  And I don't mean just my risks. Everyone who meets you wants to risk something for you. They want to try and lick honey from a razor blade.  Is that the truest thing I can say about you? I doubt it.  The truest thing I can say to you is: it was all worth it, every bit, every fucking second, every breakneck decision, baby step and fall-behind.

You remain, despite your ability to destroy everything you come in contact with, one of the most interesting people I've ever met. There it is, the truth. My favorite truth to give. It doesn't sound like much, but it's the best one I have. And I want to give you my best. We all do.  It's not a secret because I don't need to have secrets.

Yet, here's one.  Inked and tucked neatly in an envelope: you make me write corny shit like this.  You've been doing it for a year. Thank you.

Boy weren't you wrong.

Dear John,

You are beyond a peach.

You are a whole orchard of peaches.

Today was a great day with you.

You have a love for love, life and all things that shine in a unique way.

That vitality is one of the most attractive qualities you possess. 

Don't ever change. 

Deep Dark Seventh-Grade Love

Dearest Disease,

Foresight failed me when i pursued you rigorously. You couldn't be trusted at the front lines of my daily war, a man who can't move mountains is mostly just a perpetuating eyesore. And yet it was your manliness that first intrigued me, a place in maturity you were at and i presumably could not be. I was myself to the extreme: witty, blunt and mean. You cradled this mess in the palm of your hand and fed my ego until my fluttering heart could land. So here I drift, in the desert of your emotions, a land full of fickleness and false fancy notions.

Smothering kisses.

Inspiration

I cannot better explain to you what I felt than by saying that your unknown heart seemed to pass into my bosom- there to dwell forever- while mine, I thought, was translated into your own.

From that hour I loved you. Yes, I now feel that it was then- on that evening of sweet dreams- that the very first dawn love burst upon the icy night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight, half of anxiety... for years your name never past my lips, while my soul drank in, with delirious thirst, all that was uttered in my presence respecting you. 

The merest whisper that concerned you awoke in me a shuddering sixth sense, vaguely compounded of fear, ecstatic happiness, and a wild, inexplicable sentiment that resembled nothing so nearly as the consciousness of guilt.

~Edgar Allen Poe

A Fake!

Dear John,

I faked it....I tried, you sorta tried.

But I faked it.

Taking the one night out of One Night Stands.

Dear John,

Are you seriously trying to give me a back rub right now? We just had horrible sex that yes, was my idea. But shouldn't you be trying to leave right now? This is soo embarrassing.
Please try not to sleep over, please try not to sleep over.

How can we be lovers?

Dear John,

You are a good kisser from what I can remember. And I would like to do it again...The more time that passes the more I like you.

No Texting After Midnight

Dear John,

Here's what I really wanted to say...
Sometimes I just get frustrated, then I have a couple of drinks. I'm probably getting my period too. I feel like I have all these emotions swirling around with no one to listen to them who doesn't think I'm at least half insane. Maybe I am. I probably am. Ok, I am. It's fine. But this still doesn't answer this question:
What the fuck is your problem?
I'm really over the whole '18 year old jock in a 26 year old hipster body' act. You can't fuck everything that walks. People have feelings, you know. It's not going to fill your void.
And did you know that I'm a really good catch? Most of the time, I'm really smart and funny. Except for the times when I'm not, like right now. And probably every time we hang out because you make me nervous. By the way, I have a pretty awesome vagina, and I can talk to you about the subtle nuances of Marx's Das Kapital. What more do you want? I'm not made of magic golden wishes, but pretty close.
But instead, I write you to pretend I never told you how I felt. Just forget it. Forget about me, really. Even though I don't really mean it, wait, why do I say these things? That's the thing isn't it? Only you know me, that's why it's all so frustrating. Then you can't blame me for overreacting from time to time.
Maybe you should just go home with that stripper over there.
Wait, I didn't mean it.

Dear John,

A place for boys and girls to birth the hard things to say. The premature I love yous, the frustration of a new love, the passive break up. This is a place to post the letters you've always wanted to write, text, mail, and the messages you've been dying to send. Whether the morning after or from yesteryear, come one come all!