The Next Morning

UNSENT DRAFTS FOLDER (1)

11:59 P.M.    October 18th, 2009

Hey J.,

Thinking of you. Longing to go back to what we had. The universe tends toward entropy, I know, I know, but the thought of you has concentrated mass, a definite pull. For me. What has passed between us is more intense than, well, anyway, I don’t want to lose track of where I was going with this.

I can be different. You said I never told you enough about myself, my feelings. Funny to hear from a surgeon-in-training but maybe feelings matter more once you know what we’re made out of. When you left you said, “I don’t know who you are,” and yeah I just gestured like, Here I am, you know?

That wasn’t enough, was it?  

So, let me try and explain myself. I have to start at the beginning. To get at the heart of why I am who I am. Who I am is not who I wanted to be, OK?  I’m not kidding. I never wanted to wind up here, writing

Look, there’s no obvious way to communicate how alienated I was then, when this all started. You didn’t appear in my life until years later, Baltimore, grad school, that October when we met online, sure, but who you first reminded me of, the way your neck cants forward like your head is a little too heavy, how you spoke of your mother—a lunatic, her obsessions at the supermarket, going through every melon, all that talk of bruises—and then your kinky hair of course, your hair, was and could only be, Paige. Because Paige is