Excerpt

March 18, 2004

You wanna know something…I have this little ritual that I do when I get your letters…I make myself wait as long as possible…just to torture myself…I think the longest I’ve ever been able to wait was three hours…then I’ll open it, privately, already in my own little world that the letters create…and I’ll read some, laughing and smiling and sometimes getting a little upset, but not minding because that’s all part of it…then I’ll leave it alone for awhile, absorbing the first part, and having mental conversations with your sometimes quirky but always unique prose…as a reward for being such a good girl I’ll allow myself to finish the rest, and by this time it’s night, and whether I’m in the car or in my room I spends hours just thinking about what you said and what I want to say…and these times are the most peaceful I ever am. The next few days are spent organizing my random thoughts into cohesive sentences and paragraphs with perfect grammar and perfect spelling and everything else perfectly perfect because it has to be dammit but…those few hours in the darkness, alone with myself…when’s no one watching or demanding anything or telling me how to live my own fucking damn life…that’s when I’m the most me.
And now I’m starting to cry because I didn’t know I was so angry about this until I started writing about it…and I’m telling myself to stop because I can’t, because I can’t let them see me crying and draw their own wrong conclusions because they won’t listen to mine, and then they’ll want to see and I should not have to show them…and so I’ll stop and tuck in the edges and present a flawless cover that no one bothers to see past…but someday…the proverbial bed is going to be stripped and the crumbs hidden underneath are gonna fly and then what happens after that I don’t know…someday, though, I’ll find out. Dear God.
Here I am falling apart when all I meant to do was tell you something. Writing is dangerous…it makes your demons come alive.


Well…that wasn’t what I meant to say. Where do I go from here? Somewhere safe…because bringing all that up hurts.