I miss you a bit lately. It’s funny that the last time I wrote anything was this exact day two years ago. It means something, I’m sure. It all does.

I went to Venice on Saturday with my two friends. I was feeling eh and regretting agreeing to go out (it was hot, I hadn’t slept much, I would have been happy to stay home). But then we decided to go west and immediately I said “Venice.” I shaved my legs. I put in my contacts. I picked my outfit. All for that tiny little chance that I might see you.

I parked in the lot near you (I always do). I wonder if you still live there (I didn’t see your car). I wonder if you moved. I wonder if you took that framed print I got you. I wonder if it feels like a burden. I am never not wondering about you. But I haven’t felt the need for you until recently. Maybe the longest stretch since we met. Mostly I think that you’re not really present anymore. But then you’re in so many songs maybe I don’t even realize.

I’m sure you’re fine. There is a fortitude in you. A scrappiness. You will forge ahead. You will make it work. It’s hard for me to picture you being in love but you love being in love so why wouldn’t you have found someone. How many of the other girls in your past do you compare her to? In a few months (January) we will have known each other for ten years. I guess that feels right. Long ago and still too close. Where were you Saturday night? It was late when we walked by where you like to park. Is that still your spot or have you moved on completely?

I read your email right after you sent it. My heart jumped. I’ve been preoccupied, lately, with this guy (hot and French). I had almost forgotten what an overwhelming crush I had on you. I remember it now. I don’t know how to respond. I want to be honest and open and familiar. Not superficial. Or sarcastic. Or defensive. But the only honest thing is, I’ve had feelings for you probably since we met. I remember that first dinner, at that place by the bridge, there with the group. I don’t know if I was aware of you then, not the way I would become in the weeks/months later. But I do remember how it was, suddenly, out of nowhere, and all at once – being aware of you. We sat next to each other at Brody one night, at the edge of the room. And it was there then, like blinking. I don’t think I would ever get tired of talking to you. I like you. I like the way you see things. The way you smile. The way you treat your friends. The way you treat me. And wherever the line between like and love is, I don’t mind if it’s blurred beyond recognition. I’m happy to love you. I want to know all about you. I want to start a conversation with you that will never end. And maybe this is all too much. How well do we really know each other? Is this even okay to say, let alone feel? I don’t know. Lately I feel a little like I’m having to re learn myself. Which is a gift. Life. Aliveness. Point being: I’m happy to know less than I thought I did, to open to all the magic I thought I had become closed to. So for this, like so many other answers, I don’t know. What I do know: I like you love you miss you. I want to talk to you. I want to lay next to you, ride in the car next to you, hold hands, be silent, be laughing, be kissing. I want to try new things and have new ideas and be able to catch your eye from across the room and know exactly what we are to each other. A whole little world. Magic. Possibility. Love. Good. So whatever you’re doing in this moment that you’re reading this, know that someone out there thinks of you. Wants the best for you. Believes in you. Waits for you to return.

You and I

You

You and I

You

Baby

I had big plans for us

Plans I didn’t even know I had

Until after

Until now

He said

Sit back down where you belong

In the corner of my bar

With your high heels on

Big ideas

You and I

Together

Entwined

Looking

At you

At me

Locked

Sit back down on the couch where we

Made love the first time

And you said to me

I miss you

Most days

Everyday

Today

the root of the root

the bud of the bud

what spring does to the cherry trees

I love you

This whole time

With him

and with him

and even now

when I am alive

glowing

in the possibility

of him

It’s you

Baby you and I

babydoll

You wrote

To me

In pencil

That morning

That last day

Before everything crumbled before me

I remember the mist

The sun coming up

Knowing you were asleep

Inside

Safe

And I was safe too

Tied to you

and safe

Treasured

I wrote

Not loved

But adored

It was almost enough

That night

The alive one before the mist

(and the truth)

Was almost enough

Kissing you

Looking at you

You looking at me

Enough

I loved you

It was so simple

Small and holy

The

loveliest

version

of me

Whole

and wide eyed

and precious

You and I

Baby

You and I

September 10, 2008

I am a Classics major. I like to watch movies, walk, eat and sing, but that only when nobody can hear. I have a father, mother, and brother, all of whom still live in the city where I grew up. I was a ballet dancer for ten years, and after I stopped I didn’t know what I was. I am allergic to nuts, cats, and dust mites, and am a Capricorn like my mom. I have always preferred being by myself, and in coming to college, for the first time I miss my friends. I get bored with things easily and have yet to find my passion. When I was younger my family used to take vacations to Hawaii every year during Presidents Week. We’d go boogey boarding, and one day I decided that I was ready to go out to a cove where the waves were bigger. You were supposed to ride the wave to a point and then stop yourself because the cove was manmade and led not to sand but a concrete wall. But I forgot to stop, caught up in the thrill and my daring, and was sucked down and sent tumbling in the water. That day I lost a fin and maybe my courage with it. In elementary school when I first started having sleepovers at my friends’ houses, I used to wake up in the night sobbing and have to call my parents to come get me. That feeling, like a fist grabbing my insides and twisting, is the same homesickness I feel now. I live mostly in my head, and call upon music rather than people for help. I am a listener and advice-giver, a pleaser, fixer, worrier, and list-maker. I am a sister envious of her brother’s confidence and praying for his happiness; an adult eager to shed fear and become the person long desired; a child who misses her parents and counts the days until she can go home again. If I’d had to write this last month I don’t know exactly what I would have written, but it would have been very different. I hope this means next month I’ll want to change my answer.

You will never age for me. Never wither. Never fade. Never bald, wrinkle, or gray. Never bitter. You will never die.

I’ve had a fever in me my whole life. Buzzing, catching, stinging, even, just beneath the surface, a layer like skin. Soon, I know, it will burst forth, in me, out of me, radiate through my fingertips, my lips, the ends of my hair, igniting every crease, every breath, every part. I will be set ablaze. Unstoppable and humming. Sometimes I’m afraid of what I know I can do.

That you have probably no idea what I’m talking about is okay. But I want you to know this as well as I know how to explain because if in your mind you’re holding onto this barely there glimmer of a thing who could barely meet your eyes but loved you nonetheless, let go. That was a piece, real and beating and full of hope but just a piece, a glance struggling to meet its whole. I am more than that. What you know is a moment, one that had its purpose and passed quietly, as moments do. I don’t know what you imagine my life is like, and what I am like in it. Maybe you don’t imagine at all. But if you do, I think you might be wrong. There are times that I am barely alive and others where I am choking on the beat of my own heart. I’ve made playlists and bought condoms and for a breath not known where I ended and he began. I’ve begged for scars that will never really heal and tried not to lose socks between the dryer. I’ve broken a best friend’s heart through my own even selfishness, and moved on easily, detached, without real regret. I’ve gotten passport stamps and parking tickets and anxiety that turns everything gray. I have a storage unit in LA filled with shit I’m pretty sure I need none of, the rest spread between my aunt’s house in Pasadena, my dad’s in Berkeley, my mom’s in Richmond, and my apartment in Budapest. Home is relative but usually feels like wherever my face wash and moisturizer end up. I thought about falling in love with this guy I met here but decided against it because if I know one thing about myself it’s that once I let someone in they’re there for good and I was just too tired to deal with that on this job. I’ve been too tired to deal with that for awhile. I flew from here to San Francisco for one day last weekend to see Third Eye Blind play at the Masonic, and in June flew from here to Honolulu to hold my grandmother’s hand while she died. I’m emotional but can shutdown so fast it scares me. I broke my ankle a few years ago and have the pins and memories of a hot pink cast and isolation to prove it. I spend too much money on things I don’t need but I’m trying to be better. I’m impulsive/indecisive, giving/cruel, hopeful/terrified, and always feel more than I let on or express, to my own detriment. I started this season in designer boots and uncertainty, ended it in Converse, ripped jeans, and an eye roll. My parents are in California, my best friends in New York and Greece, my brother in Spain, and I am stretched between them, reaching out in all directions because this world is so much smaller than I’d ever imagined before I went out into it. I’ve scraped up my knees on a reef in Israel, given cab fare to a group of “dancers” stranded at the Black Sea in Turkey, and contemplated just jumping off a cliff into the Atlantic on the coast of Morocco to escape this guy whose hands went way too fast and who, when I would look back later, scared me a lot more than I could ever admit in the moment. I’ve procrastinated on my taxes, crashed various cars into trash cans and poles I should have seen coming, and listened to almost every Taylor Swift song on repeat. And through all of it, I don’t want to be your friend. Because that little piece, crippled by her own unworthiness and desperate fear of/desire for life, was very much in love with you and doesn’t know how not to be. That piece, small and scared, asking for permission and reassurance and someone to pull her into the world, is in me, is me, a part of whatever it is that makes me whole, full and alive and feverish with hope, still tied to you and the spark that was activated like thunder a thousand years ago or maybe yesterday. And that’s okay. I’m sure it will fade someday and maybe I’ll be sad it see it go, maybe I won’t notice. But today is the same. So I don’t want to catch up. I don’t want small talk. I don’t want to skim the surface because it will only make me feel hollowed out afterward. And I don’t know why you keep trying, every year or two, seemingly earnest. What’s the point? Maybe because you don’t like to lose people, maybe because you feel some kind of responsibility because you happen to be the first person to stick his penis in me (sorry). Whatever the reason, where you fit in the context of my life is not where I fit in the context of yours. So even though I am curious, it probably doesn’t matter beyond that, and might even be an unfair question to ask.

There is no need to respond to this, not for me anyway. It’s all okay. There is nothing to be broken. I wish you only the best, as always. So if you don’t know what to do with this, just treat it as a piece of writing, know that it’s more for me than it is for you, and feel more than free to let it go.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this (obviously), as much if not more for me than for you so feel free to read or ignore or just take a shit in the shower.

It’s okay if you like him. It’s okay that he’s twenty and you’re not. It’s okay that you were jealous of/bothered by Annie or Alyssa or Katie or anyone else. It’s okay if you want to kiss him and have him fall asleep with you, and it’s okay if you want to fuck his brains out. And more than that, it’s okay if you do. It’s even okay if (that) you’re thinking about a future beyond this season and this show. All of that: okay. That it may require you to relinquish some of your power is up to you.

In high school I decided that my mantra as to why I sabotaged a relationship for the first (but definitely not the last) time was that it was easier to disappoint myself than be disappointed by someone else. That was how I could understand it at the time. But now I know that that’s a lie, just a catchy way of comforting myself with bullshit, and that in truth it was (is) just the terror of caring, wanting, hoping, loving, and then being found out, seen, rejected. Of being the disappointment I knew/feared I was. This pretty much defines every relationship I’ve had or thought about having ever.

So if you like him and you’re filled with fear at whatever kind of exposure that could bring you, emotional, professional, whatever, then that’s one thing, and I would understand. And if that’s true, if that’s true AND you acknowledge that it’s true, it still might not mean that pursing something with him is the right thing for you. The two are not mutually exclusive.

I said no to things my whole life. I turned down every birthday party, every play date, every trip. My parents didn’t like it because they assumed it was because I thought I was too good for other people – my friends, my classmates, whomever it was. This was not a teenaged thing borne out of puberty or pimples or feeling out of place; I remember saying no to a specific birthday party (Natalie, blonde), remember my mom’s annoyance, remember her handing me our big white phone and making me call to tell them I wouldn’t be coming. And I remember knowing the reason why and feeling something, a kind of shame, that there was no way for me to verbalize. I was five. So this is something fundamental in me that has taken (and continues to take) a lot of effort to overcome. So when I finally broke down and committed to therapy to treat my eating disorders first but really all the shit behind them, I started saying yes. To everything. Even if I was uncomfortable, or anxious, or scared, yes. Open. Ready. And everything happened. I made the best friends, I fell in love, I tried new things and felt new things and came alive. And it wasn’t the absence of fear. (Because I’m afraid of everything and fearlessness for me is false.) It was the decision that there was something more important than fear. For me the distinction is important.

Like most things, that was cyclical. I said yes, I let it all in, until I couldn’t say no. I suffered the consequences of things I knew weren’t good for me because I thought that saying yes meant trying not just new things but all things, all people, all experiences. That that was letting go and truly allowing (one of my words/images, to allow). But what I realize and what I know now is that, for me, saying yes means saying yes with understanding. Not just having insight but actually applying it. It means having enough respect for and knowledge of myself to know what to allow, what to open for, what to let in.

And at first all the yes’s I said to people I knew weren’t what I really wanted were learning lessons. Experiences. The chance to make playlists and buy condoms and feel giddy or scared or moody or heartbroken. The messiness that I had been craving. But somehow, at a certain point, maybe last year, it turned hollow. And I saw that the yes’s to these people, these experiences, this messiness had started to cave on itself, and close me off to the possibility of what I knew and know I truly want. Something good, something intimate, something beautiful and positive and whole. Something more. I did the fun and the dramatics and the banter and the world coming to an end and I don’t want that anymore. It isn’t enough. And I think right now, even though it can be boring or frustrating or just plain lonely, I would rather have nothing than have that. Like eating candy when you want a steak.

You know you. Past all the bullshit that keeps you from yourself, you know. So if you like him and you choose to have something with him, okay. If you like him and you decide that that something isn’t right for you, okay. Give yourself a break. Trust yourself. Whatever it is you want, it’s okay. Uphold it.

Anna, Heidi, Oren, Eric, Evan, and Missy travel in a pack. Anna is in heels, a mini skirt, low cut top, eyes alight. She hangs on Oren’s arm, laughing too loud as they all strut together. Her power is new, vibrating off her in waves. Here she is, twenty one and in love. Here she is, belonging, to someone, to him, out there is the world and tied to her right back. Here she is, alive, and at last.

I think I’m too tired for this. I feel wearied and over it and bored with myself because here we go again and why would it, could it, ever be any different than it’s been. And when will I ever learn to just let it go. To let it go and to let it be okay, let it be soft and faded and something as lackluster as I think it probably was but didn’t realize at the time. Let me love you in the abstract, in a way that I remember absently, in passing, in a way that can never ever be painful. And you too. There’s no reason to see me. There’s no reason to ask how I am, to be earnest and hopeful and write every note like it’s the last, like there’s something that can still be broken. There’s barely a reason to care because a part of me doesn’t/can’t/will never believe that you ever really did. So let it all go. I’m forever trying do the same.

I have this terrible impulse to “accidentally” email you. The most chicken shit move of all, I know. I hope I don’t do it. When we do speak again (because we will, of course, and how could I ever doubt that), I don’t want it to start with lie, especially one so lame, so couched in desperation. And transparent. As transparent as when you did the same to me all those years ago, with those texts, so innocuous and yet so sure, the ones that sent me reeling, set me ablaze. Almost four years exactly, which is hard to believe. You feel like yesterday, and you feel like tomorrow, like always. How could you not.

Is this great love? Is this my great love story? I hope not. I hope it gets better. I hope it can be real, inside and out and straight down to the core of me, and of you. I hope it can be so breathtakingly open, still and there and eye to eye and not looking away, that it tilts my world on its axis, changes everything I ever assumed about or expected from love.

But. If this is it, if you are that great love, okay. Against my better judgement I’ll probably hang onto you, that something to fill the empty spaces, to sit on the other side of the song. I miss you, today and tomorrow, miss you and the yesterdays when you were so close that, for a moment, you almost felt like mine. You and the furrow right in the middle of your brow, you and that silver ring on your finger, the tattoos I never asked about, the song you said was ours but I forgot, the shudder that shot through you in your sleep, my thumb soothing its way across your eyebrow, the way you looked at me that night it all fell apart. Today, tomorrow, yesterday. Most days, it all feels the same.