A Love Letter to No One

Dearest ________________,

A secret admirer. That’s what they say, isn’t it? I have been secretive, until
now, and I suppose I do admire you, but that’s only when your back is turned.
30 minutes a day—that’s how long I get to admire you, and then it’s back to the
23 ½ hours of wretched, seething love.

Do I love you when you are next to me? A little. But not as much as when we are
separated—by traffic and daily planners and radio waves and the denizens of our
lives—no, not as much as I love you when your only incarnation is in my mind,
your smile demands mental replay and your body’s attitude and altitude insist
on being remeasured and firmly memorized. The trap that catches my dreams…but
there is no permanence to dreams. They leave no evidence, not like you really
would. A strand of long, dark hair on the pillowcase, a fingerprint on the
countertop, even a blown kiss would have more mass than a dream.

But what else can one do when they love someone so much? No, there it is again.
That word, love, used incorrectly. Not appropriate for my situation. It takes
two to love. Two people playing simultaneous roles as Lover & Beloved. Two
people sharing space and air and radiating heat and intentions. Not us,
however. Instead of two, we have one and one. One of us is alone and hateful to
the world for being so crowded, this city for being so wide and having so many
places to hide (I don’t even know where you live! Where are you right now? A
coffee shop wrapped in a scarf and leaning as I’ve seen you do, intently over a
paperback? A friend’s apartment calling to her from the hallway? In your own
home, privately clenching and releasing your own white toes?) And the other is
accompanied everywhere by a vanilla scent, long lashes, and refracted light.

You have your tricks, I’m sure, of hiding this or that blemish or accentuating
your eyes, but I know that if it was all washed away or stripped what would
remain would be exceptionally fine, bright, and smooth. Have I hit upon it? The
one dominant characteristic of yours that causes you to rule my thoughts? I
believe it is: I haven’t touched you, but I know you are smooth like a stone
fold of a Michelangelo statue, smooth like the lightly packed sand of an
Asiatic shore, smooth like the cheek of god. Maybe that’s what really tempted
me: the thought of touching something so finely crafted, so treacherously
inviting, something so close to perfect that it makes me shudder to even be
around you for fear that through some mishap I’ll mar or brand you. But I
won’t. I have faith in that notion. I could never wear down the elemental
beauty of your skin even with my raw lips and sawdust hands, not even with the
thousand caresses I hope to make possible.

Yes, I want to make it happen. No longer content to be secret or only admiring,
I am baring all. But it’s not something I can will into existence or bribe a
god for—I have to just hope that it’s possible that you would want the same
thing I want: an inescapable love. I want to find you in the morning’s rays, I
want to watch your leg emerge from behind the shower curtain, I want you to sit
on my knee at parties so that everyone knows. I don’t want to waste time
with flirting; I want to leap headfirst into a shared mesmerization, an
unflinching fascination between us two. I want to greedily hoard all of your
secrets and wishes, I want to peel the skin off your back after you’ve been
sunburned, I want to touch your body in the places that push against the seams
and stretches fabric, I want to unclasp and untie and loosen everything that you
are until it can breathe and exist freely in my presence. I want to push my
face into your neck and sleep skin to skin.

I want an unstoppable love with you. I want a love that can resist black holes
and nuclear war. I want a love that spans decades and becomes an iconic
phenomenon that is printed on T-shirts and coffee mugs. I want a love so
powerful that glass breaks around us as we walk, a romance so intense that
others can’t even look directly at us without going blind. I want you and I to
feel interminably enraptured, to be so fierce that no one will ever love again,
that love will be outlawed because of its dangerous nature, that writers will
put down their pens and brushes will hit the floor as artists open their
hands—because neither the poets nor the painters, neither the composers nor the
moviemakers are compelled or able to convey what we are. I want loving you to
sustain me instead of bread and water, and I want loving you to kill me, to
collapse my heart when I am older than old and the world has been laid to waste
by the pulsing shockwaves of our kisses.

I want you, _____________.

So write, so call, so contact me in any way. Don’t delay unless delaying will
make you even more passionate about our first encounter. I have not even folded
this paper, and I am already impatient for your response, for your touches and
clenches and exhalations…

Respond to me, and I will respond to you. Until that charged moment, I remain,

Yours,

____________