It's become so difficult for me to write to you. Well, that's not exactly true, because I write you letters in my head on an oh-so-regular basis. It's just become hard to send them. The words come and I override them. In part, out of a desire to respect your boundaries. And mostly because the speaking of them makes me feel so vulnerable these days.

There was a time when my thoughts for you poured off my tongue with no prayer of censorship: my mind was completely incapable of silencing the words my heart wanted so desperately to speak to you, not because you would respond a certain way or because I knew you'd hear the meaning behind crude phrases I strung together: words on a computer screen or onto a page that could be interpreted or misinterpreted depending on the day, but because the urgency resided so completely in the speaking.

I find myself challenging the absolutes my heart knows, spending too much time thinking and too little letting you in on my feelings. I love you absolutely. I trust certain moments with you, times I can wrap, even my mind around, and know they are real. You are, first and foremost, my friend. It's the relationship I've always cared to cultivate the most. Your messages, the tangibles about you, are mixed, at best. You leave my life and walk back in, of your own volition, only to vanish again and for reasons I can only begin to imagine: a painting I sent with pure intentions, a letter or email I sent conveying my joy about the fact of your birth, that you: brilliant, creative, intense and strange, are out there in the world, how the world is better because, simply because, you are in it.

It's Friday, and in another time, I'd be on a plane right now. I'd be anxious about arrival times and wondering whether your baby would know me when I walked throught the door. We'd have two more times together and in my worst nightmares, never in real time, I'd imagine we wouldn't reach the finish line.

Once you told me, I'd have a physical record: emails, mementoes, words scribbled onto paper, to tell me this experience was, in fact, real. Now, I pass magazine stands and hardly know if what I knew of you existed in the real world or in my imagination. Clearly, you exist, as do I. But did we? Do we? Will we? Or will this place of wondering be my runway, the place I let down the wheels and skate to a stop?

I don't want you back. I want you back. I don't know. I know. The door is open. It's closed. I always loved the intangibles in you, the dichotomies you embody. Not these. I wanted to find a home in questions that didn't have answers. And now that answers are finding their way to the surface, I want to send them underground, say, "No," it cannot be. This is not the way the story ends. And indeed, sometimes, the truth proves stranger than fiction. We were the stuff of dreams, our story heralded in all the corners of the world. We surpassed even those dreams we held most closely to our hearts. And what of it? What can it all mean now that we're no more than yesterday's promises?

Here's what I know: our meeting was predestined. You guided me to certain aspects of my spirit, long forgotten or overlooked: I want a partner, just one. I want a family, kids in tow. I want to build a home. I want a foundation I can settle into. I want someone, very much like you, a last call of the day, a home I implicitly trust.

And what does it mean that it will not be you? Only that I've the impetus to move on. Finding the desire is much more challenging than knowing the truth. I thought I was finished. I thought the searching part was over. And now to date, to try, to put myself out there, feels so much more risky than it did before I flung open the doors I unlocked on our meeting. Everything feels like a great big risk and the thing I valued above all others is only a ghost.

June 26, 2001