Love letter to a boy I knew...

There's nothing for me but you.

When our first daughter was born, and we'd spent more time pregnant than we were kids, my mother took you aside at the hospital.

She said to you, Be careful because she gets into moods where she's hopeless. She'll be fine most of the time, but some of the time she's given over to unhappiness and it gets bad.

Things get bad, sometimes. I feel like I haven't seen a human sun, everywhere I look is just light, light, light and my eyes ache and I'm swimming in my panicked blindness.

I've felt the tendril of our love snap. The thing that kept us tethered as the sea widened and roughened and threatened to take us under, together.

Now, we're apart. Now, we live our lives on a clock and the hands sweep me past you in the evening. I grasp for you, choking on air and blood, my fingertips slipping through the golden thickness of your hair.

When will I ever see you again, my pretty boy love?

Our babies are angels and they hold the world in their fat little fists and I curl around their feet as they make their lives, building towers so tall and majestic, they are gods and I am their foundation. I live for the filling of their slippery, perfect lungs. They are everything, and they build their towers on my back.

Our home, once upon a time.


But when will I see you? Were you a boy who visited me on the weekends? We're still there, somewhere, sticking to one another naked, in my living room. The television is flickering in a bare room somewhere, a vigil to where we've been. Somewhere, smoke is curling into the plaster.

I'd like to marry you again. I'd like to meet you at the foot of a mountain with flowers in my hair. I'd like it if you came alone.


I'd like to have pancakes with you in a torn leather booth at eleven on a Sunday.

Out for breakfast, sometime 2006.




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