There is so much we don't talk about, so much I have trouble believing in. Another strange and complicated mess I have created within my screens and walls. I am almost always filled with doubt, and I love you already, almost.

At first I thought it was simply the idea of you, which it still very much may be, but I am drowning here in the concept of you. Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but the silence may also fool us into believing in an ideal that does not exist. The traces of you that I have known this past year have made me adore you to a point where I have searched these pages looking for you, trying to imagine that one of these letters was yours. It's some small strange hope I have based on the way you listen, take things in turn, and pause when confronted with me. I hope to never let you know how fragile I am. I keep going, working my way through conversations, or otherwise working in silence, interpersonal relations that have nothing to do with anything really. All attempts to bring myself back down to a reality I can accept and live out, without complicating your life, my life or this situation we exist in. I may hate myself for never saying anything to you about the way I feel, but I could not survive your rejection or the reality that may exist outside of my imagination.

I am shivering, anxious, and nervous in your presence. Forgive me please. I find that it is a result of words I cannot say. I am editing my reactions and language as I look at you. Emotionally inept, I think I could disappear in you. I am afraid to disappear in you. I am so petrified that you could be everything and anything to me.

Affection is so very simple and yet I have complicated it to the point that I sometimes cry when I think of you. It has been ages since I have believed in anything. In the past I have been a pragmatic and intellectual lover and so very far from human. You have made me abandon my safety and accidentally forced me to feel far too much. I am trying to find some kind of explanation here that will simplify and balance the chemistry that I cannot control when I am near you. How did I ever let myself fall so far into this one-sided love affair?

4:17pm, November 7th, facing west, on an overcast day, I have matched your eyes to the sky and told you everything. I may only hope that one day I tell your flesh.

[submitted 05/18/03]