Dearest _______,
I want to write you a letter but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand. There’s something within me that has a tendency to twist and manipulate words. Another part easily misinterprets action and language. Another part never knows which direction is down yet screams for me to find my way to some arbitrary home. This is important because you need to understand that to understand me, or this letter.
I want to tell you that your energy is infectious— that when you enter a room I am infused with a vitality that’s disorienting. You shake with excitement or pleasure or anger and I want to be that catalyst. Your eyes are magic and I lose myself in them so I jest but rarely look. You seduce me with your influence and honesty, your simultaneous strength and fragility (we both know my history of tragic women), the way you dress and walk and dance. Tonight I have this intense desire to see you dance— to hear your heels click across a hard surface.
I need to tell you these things because I’m tired of letting fear keep me mute. I want your arms wrapped tightly around my neck. I want to fall asleep tonight with my fingers in your hair. I want to see your shape when stretched out on a bed: the perfect angles of arms and legs, the curve of your hips, a length of back in moonlight, the shadows thrown across one wall when you mount me. I’ve seen the cracks in your façade—woken in the early morning as you stir, kissing my hand and hugging it to your chest. I want to seep inside of those fissures, gently prodding everything within reach to understand what it really means to be inside of you.
You frustrate and confuse me, challenge and enrapture me. You’ve haunted me across oceans and train tracks, between drinks and during commercial breaks, before sex and after breakfast. You exist in such a special place within me but I doubt these words make sense in the way I’ve intended them. It’s not that I couldn’t love anyone else, or that I must have you. In this post post-modern world we’re not that intense. It’s simply that for tonight and all the nights I dare look forward to you will exist this way in my thoughts, and I want to exist similarly in yours. I want you to miss me when I’m gone and look forward, as I do, to honesty, comfort, companionship and love— in whatever form we find it, no matter where it takes us.
If I awake in the early morning—some day—at any distance in the future to find my arm hugged tightly to your chest, lips grazing my fingertips, I will have succeeded. Until that day, it’s just another day.
Adam