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THE MAP OF YOU AND I Something you should know about me: I don't know, anymore, my east and north, left or right. The map of you and I, the hardest one to decipher, reads like a cryptograph, where the only key or compass is the dark hole of missing you. It appears that we are far, getting farther even, bound by spatial distance, but it feels, in the part of me that is gauged by wanting, and not logic of any kind, like the two cities we live in are slowly moving closer together. Cities, real vibrant cities, are a monster of their own creation. The buildings are close to each other and somehow to your skin and the bodies in relation to those buildings create the hot cacophonous jazz of city sounds. We must learn to breathe differently. The sun is hot even in winter, where hot means untouchable, the way you are a steady heat to me now and the opposite of how you will be hot to me at our reunion. And you, darling, you are a metropolis I haven‚t yet fully explored. I go down into your subway and can‚t see the surface. I have no way, now, to feel the deep notes of your skin. The wind on the subway platform isn‚t real. It‚s the physical consequences of mass transit. The secret of manmade machinery whispered out loud. Its a daily kind of torture, a hell of our our own making, not being next to you yet in a bodily way. And still, I think all we need is more experience to understand hell as something possibly good. Everything we are is an amalgam of every person we‚ve ever loved. This letter even, is a recipe from the ways that I have failed others and myself and a vague instruction booklet on how not to break my own heart beyond repair. The best instructions are written in a foreign language. The language that I do understand says only this: I love you. I love you and I am so keenly aware of the many things I can't do in relation to you and in relation to our morphing requirements for happiness. Although I try to change some every day, this main thing I cannot seem to change: You have gotten in there. Right where I want you. Years from now, even if we have ceased to be even this thing that defies name and context and logic, especially logic, whether you have ceased your interest in me by the time this letter reaches your hands or whether, two months from now, I meet your eyes on the street and get out finally for that next endless hug hello, you will remain lodged with a piece of myself, and a diagramed sentence of the things that maybe could have been. I can't stop anything. I can't even read a map. But luckily, for us, the places I want to go have not yet even been discovered. Directionless but always yours -------
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