Still now, I send letters into space hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down and recognize you from the description in my poems, that he will place the stack of them in your hands and tell you, ‘There is a girl who still writes you…she doesn’t know how not to.’

You can see yourself with them in the future you can’t quite see. You build apartments outfitted with all the right kitchen supplies and the perfect bed with two nightstands, each piled with books and magazines. You wait for them patiently while they chase their dreams; they wait for you patiently as you chase yours. You sit in bed eating dinner late at night, drinking tea and wine and whiskey as you tell each other all about the chasing. You create adopted dogs and cats; you have awkward conversations about money; you put up with each other’s crap. You see what they look like standing at the end of a candle-lit aisle in your grassy front yard and wonder if you’ll make it to the other end to meet them or if they’ll just end up in the scrapbook clutched to your chest or flickering on the screen in your brain.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

But never once did you lie about how you felt. You just didn’t know how. You didn’t know how to look someone in the eye and say I Don’t Love You even though you did, you didn’t know how to mask grief or shock or fear. You used to get red in the face with anger and you used to ugly cry for an audience, you used to laugh uncontrollably and you used to throw your arms around someone’s neck and never once feel like apologizing for it and of all the things that used to be, this is what you miss most.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Let us count the stars
and braid our legs together
as we fall asleep.