——

      September 27, 2010

A.,¹

Before I get back to writing I had to jot this down to you.² Like, the last six times we’ve spoken it has ended with a series of long silences where I say something, then another thing to modify it, then I sort of apologize, then I sort of unapologize.³ That would be funny as a scene in an indie rom-com,⁴ funny the first few times it happens, but it doesn’t need to happen because I should just be able to get off the phone and say “enjoy your day, A., I’ll talk with you soon.” I’m obviously fishing for stuff and then explaining it away between silences.

I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn’t heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.)⁵ The dynamics of romantic relationships are obviously fascinating to us both, artistically and theoretically.⁶ Ditto sex. But it’s harder to incorporate into your actual working life in a way that’s comfortable.⁷

I obviously like you a lot. Not in a scary oppressive way⁸ and not in an “I just came looking at a picture of you” way (though I did do that)⁹ but in the way that I am going out of my way to make you a part of my life, or just to figure out what it could be. I was so ready to spend four months in Los Angeles really embracing this alien city of bad trees, letting my parents visit me and hiking and maybe dating some douche bag just for the story.¹⁰ A week before I met you I quipped to someone “I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.”¹¹ Jokes aren’t just jokes.¹²

It feels really good to check in with you, and I’m intrigued by the possibility of sharing certain kinds of concerns regularly.¹³ Because I’m here and you’re there it can’t happen totally organically, and because I’m me I have a hard time sitting with that. So that’s why I try to understand if I’ll see you when I come home, or if you think about me when you jerk off,¹⁴ or just how available you are to have your life futzed with a little bit.

The night of the party when we met, when you told me to meet you on the corner, I was really sure that I would go out there and you’d have tricked me and gone someplace else. And then you weren’t exactly where you said you’d be but you were nearby.¹⁵

OK,¹⁶

L¹⁷

p.s. If you don’t have anything to say back to this email it will be some kind of incredible poetic justice.¹⁸ Also, sorry this email is so unfunny.¹⁹

¹ Addressing my beloved by a single initial seemed romantic, like the desperate and secretive correspondence of two married intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. Lest the meddling postmaster discover our identities and reveal our affair to our vindictive spouses, we will communicate using a code. That code shall be: the first letter of our names.

² “Jot” is a pretty casual word for the dissertation on emotional dysfunction that follows. Throughout the course of this relationship, I wrote A. epics that he would answer with either a single word (“cool,” “sure”) or a screed on a totally unrelated matter that was currently nagging him, like the impossibility of finding fashionable winter boots or the lack of modern-day Hemingways. I would comb these emails, searching desperately for a hint that they were truly for and about me, and come away knowing only that they had, in fact, been sent to my address.

³ Me: So…

      [Beat.]

      Me: Are you still there? I’m feeling kind of … I just wonder if perhaps when I say something you could say something because that is called…

      [Beat.]

      Me: A conversation.

⁴ Ironic references to rom-coms are a great way to show that you are NOT the kind of girl/woman who cares about romantic conventions. A. and I often disagreed about what to watch. His interests lay mostly with masculine classics from the 1980s, while I tended (and still tend) to want to watch films with female protagonists. Rather than admit that he didn’t want to waste two hours watching a woman’s interior life unfold, he would tell me these films “lack structure.” Structure was a constant topic. He built shelves, wrote scripts, and dressed for the cold weather with a rigor and discipline that, while initially intriguing, came to feel like living under a Communist regime. Rules, rules, rules: no mixing navy and black, no stacking books horizontally, pour your beverage into a twenty-ounce Mason jar, and make sure something big happens on this page.

⁵ This is a reference to when I told him that, as a child, I was hypnotized by my own beauty. This was the time in life before I learned it wasn’t considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself.

⁶ Although he worked a job that involved heavy lifting and hard labor, his true passion was writing fiction, and after much cajoling on my part he gave me one of his stories to read. It was the twenty-page account of a young man very much like himself trying, and failing, to seduce an Asian girl who worked at J. Crew in Soho. Although the prose was unusual and funny, the story sat with me like a bad meal. It took me about twenty-four hours to realize the issue: that I could feel, in nearly every sentence, an essential disdain for womankind that was neither examined