Dear,

Your neighborhood is changing so quickly. I drive through it every night on my way home from work. It used to be that, when my car rounded your corner, my headlights would be reflected in the pedestrians’ dead, unwavering eyes. Now the light makes them scatter like leaves. What’s become of the place? What’s become of you?

And what’s become of me? You would be dismayed at the new habits I’ve developed. Laughing hard at jokes. Reading your last poem over and over until I make myself sick. Wearing ill-fitting compliments like hand-me-down clothing. Drinking beer with people who need it more than me, who call two drinks drunk, then use that drunkenness as an excuse for sincerity. It took three hours and four beers for him to crack open like an egg, and one more of each before he asked when I would join that glorious mess. I smiled hard; I never meant it. It has been one year, four months and five days since I last wept. I never meant to lie, I just don’t work right. I just don’t function.

He said things he wouldn’t if he knew I knew he was lucid. But then, I pour my secret, sober self into a notebook, sweeping all that waking candor under a rug, so who’s more artless? Who’s committed a bigger crime? It’s often me.

On the way home, as the sun sets, I burn off like alcohol. I become nothing at all. I spend more and more time thinking about that troublingly militant early-twenties assertion of identity. Not the quiet certainty exhibited by my most admirable peers, but the clamorous desperation that footnotes every interaction I have. Each theory I proffer is disproven by its context, every antidote counteracted by the poison that first called it into being.

Meanwhile, everything I write is a letter left half-open, like a door. And every one of those letters is addressed to the same person. Strange to realize that he would be disgusted with me if he hadn’t met me first. Every time he disentangles one of my convoluted sentences, he seems weary, tired of that old ground he’s already trodden. He watches me with the fascinated disgust that some people exhibit on city buses–but see? He knows my name. And here we are again: the theory, the counterpoint; the antidote, the poison. It is cyclical, and so am I, and so are you.

Though my life is not narrowing, its focus is, and I find myself with less and less time to mourn the passing of what lies outside the camera’s frame. So every night, on that same drive home, I roll down the window, force my head past its proscenium, try desperately to see back outside, but it never quite works. It has been one year, four months and five days since I last wept. I never meant to lie, I just don’t work right. I just don’t function.

You know I wish the best for you.

A.

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