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.