My Dearest Girl, I have been a walk this morning with a book in my hand, but as usual, I have been occupied with nothing but you: I wish I could say in an agreeable manner. I am tormented day and night. They talk of my going to Italy. Tis certain I shall never recover if I am to be so long separate from you: yet with all this devotion to you I cannot persuade myself into any confidence of you. You are to me an object intensely desirable the air I breathe in a room empty of you in unhealthy. I am not the same to you no you can wait you have a thousand activities you can be happy without me. Any party, anything to fill up the day has been enough. How have you passd this month? Who have you smild with? All this may seem savage in me. You do not feel as I do you do not know what it is to love one day you may your time is not come. I cannot live without you, and not only you but chaste you; virtuous you. The Sun rises and sets, the day passes, and you follow the bent of your inclination to a certain extent you have no conception of the quantity of miserable feeling that passes through me in a day Be serious! Love is not a plaything and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience. I would sooner die for want of you than Yours for ever J. Keats

How come all the important realizations come to us too late? Ones about time and self and all those messy ones about love? I remember making forts when we were four and you always teasing me the least; how you were the only boy to wash his hands and say thank you to whoevers mom opened their cupboards that day. So many days with you have gone missing, so many feelings except the one I had when you told me I was beautiful. No one before or since has said it with such innocence and without expectation of anything in return. Im sorry I never gave you anything in return. We all came to say goodbye to you with the casket closed. I think I stopped breathing that day and I make wishes on every Sweet William flower I see, hoping youre somewhere knowing I wanted to give you so much in return. Then again, I think you realized that a long time ago. Wishing you were here again, if only for a moment.

Hey! I love you. I said it. Remember that time I was looking at you intently? You accused me of judging you. That wasn't it at all. I was feasting on you. Worse? Sounds like cannibalism? It was. I want to call you, but I feel so uncomfortable around you. Have other people said this to you? Is it just me? I'm aching for your conversation tonight, but I'll just hold out until the babies are asleep, and then slip into another awkward dream of melding into you as I sleep next to my beloved husband- whom I will never tell this fantasy. Sometimes I just wish for the freedom to lie next to you and sense whether we have a pull or not, instead of sensing only the necessary limitations.

sometimes you're so beautiful i actually can't stand it. sometimes so bright i'm blinded. tell me your secrets. tell me what's real. i know we've something but i fear it too. and i know it's not mine this time. just know when i said i loved you i meant it. purely, unselfishly, wholeheartedly. i hope you did too.

Remember how close we sat in Piedmont Park under the magnolia trees? We told ghost stories while the strap of your red bra would fall from your shoulder, and I wanted nothing more than to touch you then, to hook my finger under the strap and return it to its proper place. I felt similarly out of place all weekend, like a weed growing out of the pavement, strangers spilling out from every room, all of them unknowable, but you.

Dear _____, Here's the thing: I know I'm not crazy. And I know you're 500 miles away and we don't even know each other. But meeting you made me remember what it's like to feel again. I never even realized that I had forgotten . it must have happened too slowly to notice. And now I'm just a girl wanting to jump. Wanting somebody to jump with. And if you're not him, that's ok. But I had to tell you. Because I only ever seem to regret the things I don't say. So thank you, from my whole heart to yours

Lover, I talk to much and I lie all the time. I don't blame you for not believing me. I don't blame you for anything. My broken heart I can survive, but for your broken heart I will never forgive myself. I still have your t-shirt with the hole in it. I still laugh at your jokes. I wish you were here to proof read this for me. I love you, its not worth much but its true.

Ive decided I really like you. Not love, not yet, but a deep like. This is a different like than any other I have liked. You are goofy. But that is an understatement. When I am with you, I feel like a little kid bursting at the seams with laughter. I love the funny voices, faces, and comments you make. I like that when we sleep our bodies fit together like a tiny little puzzle. I like your kisses on my forehead and waking up and falling asleep to you. Ive decided I really like you. Because you really do know how to make my soul laugh.

Dearest However: What would I like to know? Nothing less than the proportions of flesh between your thoughts. When time equals our beliefs both time and belief will evaporate and space will be measured in terms of your eyes in mine. I have no idea where space finds you tonight. I haven't the time to believe in our wishes but we are one as organs of God and obviously in love with the ephemeral positions of our bodies within bliss. No doubt we will meet again when bliss can no longer be mistaken for a shudder. We must not take the world very seriously since we both seem to enjoy a romance without kisses and can laugh at the poets when they charm us. You make me remember that life is hollow within us and without us yet solid in the space inbetween. I've made of you a picture of caring, that was easy, I would like to step closer to grief and know that you're watching. As it stands, ours is a relationship between fantasy and Truth. Regardless of our wishes, it wills us to be so much more and much less. But where are you tonight? We have entrusted locks and keys to one another and Christmas is looming... our presents are panting, the trees are bending with the weight of our ornaments. I am yours. You have everything. All is peace.

I want you. I love you. You are my closest male friend right now, and one of my best friends ever. Only in this last year have I realized that you are the prototype for the men I date. The men I want. The men I love. But none of them are you, in the end. All of them, just stand-ins. And I don't think you even knew or suspected. I guess I wasn't joking that night we watched movies at your place; that night when I said I'd date you or seduce you, if you didn't have a girlfriend then. To hear you say, "why not both?" in that cadence laced with curiosity and bravado, wrapped in that voice I find intoxicating (there's a reason we only chat and never Skype. Sure you don't think of it) - I think I flew in my dreams that night. And it was enough, then. We make jokes now about getting together, about getting married. You suggested it last year, after we both broke up with our then-significant others, and after hearing about my family's incessant badgering to settle down. Even if in the form of a joke, I can't help but wonder if you mean it. What would it do to you, if I told you how I feel about you? How I have always felt about you, through varying degrees of friendship, lust, and now one-sided, shy love (infatuation, perhaps?) over these last 6 years? I was so looking forward to seeing you this year. I thought it might be my chance to tell you how I felt. And then I got sick, barely a week before your arrival. Everything was cancelled. Damned sickness and ill health. I thought that it must be the Universe letting me know that it was a bad idea. Yes, yes - I am a hippie, you yuppie. And I believe that the Universe plays a role in bringing people together.

I love your phone calls and your text messages. I love the cards, notes and small presents. I love the jelly beans. I love the I love you messages the most. Like the other day at the 406. You kept looking at me and saying, I love you. That is what the best dreams are made of. I loved that you said that over and over, not to make me feel good, or to reassure me, but because you truly do love me. In a way, I felt like you were giving me your love. I love how, no matter where we go, or what we do, we have so much fun together (even the smallest things like trips to the park or sitting in the car, or going to Target). I love the way you laugh and I love the fact that you laugh at my (sometimes) silly jokes. I love the fact that you get me and that you know me, in some ways better than I know myself. I think about you a lot. There is so much that I do when we are apart, and I find myself wishing I could share those things with you. I dont want to admit that I am the jealous type, but I am. Not jealous out of fear of losing you. Jealous that I cant do all the things I want to do with you. I want you to know that you taught me a lot. Your realist perspective is not in conflict with my eternal optimist thinking. You provide me with a much needed balance. I believe we compliment each other in a lot of ways.

If there's a tiny corner of your heart left unused, all I ask is to be in it. It does not matter how little space remains, leaving me constricted, squeezing out everything I have; it does not matter if you don't sew back the patchy holes of my own heart. Someday, those leaky holes will forge a new and better heart. Someday, that corner will occupy the whole of your right atrium, and more. Someday, I'll have you.

Maybe all those broken couples out there harbor invisible attachments still, feeble but tenacious spiderwebs of love. Sometimes I think I want to write him letters, never send them but tell him all about the life I have now. Do you know the lanterns we bought in _____? Ive made use of them. They help complete the NeoColonial Indochine theme of my room. The letters might not be for him but the man of my dreams, my forever lover, the fellow he once was. I wonder when the next time will be that someone looks at me with that man in his eyes. I tell myself I have a teflon heart.

In sudden moments of some days, I stop in the midst of my mundane - the average task of turning off the backyard light triggering a thought that makes me smile: you are mine/I am yours (both need to be said together). It's impossible to return to the task at hand after that, because I know how quietly powerful your love has been. See, I thought once before that I was exactly where I needed to be, but I didn't know then that it was only exactly right for bringing me to you. This overtaking, these moments that surprise me with their force, the bond we've fashioned out of the strongest material: our faith, the way you show me who I can be by being simply who you are . all of this explains why my gratitude is unending. We are the most likely of unlikely souls, making a beautiful life any way we can. The universe has thrown a lot our way in such a short amount of time - we've embraced it all and fashioned a world, a life, a home, a family out of every single speck. Nothing wasted, everything gained. I love you.

You've taught me much about attachment and aversion, and how everything is perfect, things happen for a reason, the universe imposes some beautiful order on our existence. I held all these beliefs before, but you helped me look at them differently, more clearly than I did previously. I've found that to be true of many things in my life: through you I can see how hopelessly and bitterly hatred shaped my world, how love could change everything. How it does change everything. How I can change my everything through love. About a year after I met you, I developed the strangest habit: I couldn't stop smiling at myself. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, bleary-eyed and exhausted, stumbling my way to the bathroom, grasping at the threads of my dream of you, and every time I caught a glimpse of myself, I'd smile. A ridiculous goofy smile, too, nothing elegant or dignified. My love for you spilled over into an unprecedented love for myself. And it's multiplying everyday. The amazing thing about my feelings for you is that even though you don't love me (maybe because you don't love me), I find myself loving the every person I meet more than I did before. I've got an excess of good will toward people in general. My life is all love and gratitude, and I imagine how much better it could be if we were in love together. But I'm grateful, more than ever, for the fact of your existence. Thank you for everything.

I wonder if I can summon you by words alone, my love. To use my words as an incantation and watch as you materialize before my eyes. Its just so hard to be patient. My heart howls in longing, my face turned up to the starry night. A plea to the Universe. Please, let it be soon. Ive been lonely for years.

None has the song to my heart. None has touched my soul. I'm wading in the shallows searching for depth, a depth to match my own. Love rests on the edge of a knife and only a love in balance fears not to be cut. It's a love that dances it's a love in time it's a love born from rhythm souls singing in rhyme. Passion's flames becoming the kiln for our souls, first melting then forging to make us whole.

This is the "love list" my husband of 9 years gave me on my birthday last year. The reasons why he loves me. This is what he said: 1. you rock 2. you are an amazing mother to my children 3. smoking hot 4. you put up with my nonsense 5. free haircuts 6. you make sure my clothes always match before I leave the house 7. you keep me fed 8. you inspire me to be a better person 9. I am jealous of how much you don't care what other people think about you 10. you are very strong in your convictions 11. you insisted we watch the entire Sopranos series together 12. you are one of the most creative people I know 13. you are an amazing makeup artist 14. I think it's cute when I come home and you and our daughter are playing Harry Potter on the xbox or Princesses on the wii 15. our kids are amazing, 100% of that is due to you being their mommy 16. you are way too cool to have such a geeky husband, but you love me anyway 17. you put up with being a 'Magic The Gathering' widow 18. you're always up to try something new 19. you sacrifice so much to be a stay at home mom, and it's awesome to see how good you are at it 20. you made me move to the city 21. adventures 22. Zion National Park was awesome this year, thanks for planning it for us 23. Maui 24. I love that you always have a hot new hairstyle 25. you have embraced all of my friends as your own and treat everyone with kindness 26. you forgive me for a LOT of stuff 27. you are always strong and supportive, even when things are rough 28. I LOVE my life and have an amazing family, and I owe it all to you Happy 28th Babe, I love you

NO BARRIERS WHATSOEVER I want to love you. More than I have wanted anything in a long time, I want to love you. I don't know quite when this started. Not the first time I saw you, no. Nor the second, wait, let me count...it was the fifth time we met. I remember. I asked you to lunch out of the blue, and to your credit you said yes. To your credit, you have been honest, open, generous, caring, and vulnerable with me from the start. Not the first-meeting start, but that time it was really just us, together, talking with what felt like no barriers whatsoever. But there are always barriers. We always put them there. I'm trying not to. I want to love you. I can do whatever I'd like with my own barriers, but there's only so much I can do with yours. Those are up to you.

You deserve the most honest letter that I can give you. Unfortunately, I don't have the courage to write that letter. Human nature is impossible to predict, and I want to make sure that I only communicate to you the things that I know and understand myself, the mysteries and uncertainties I am keeping for myself until I understand them better. The relationship that I have with ______ picked up exactly where it left off. We have had a connection for half of my life. I don't know what ingredients I am made of. I really don't. I don't know where I came from really. So little of my parents or my hometown are in me. All I know is that even when I was 14, I knew that _____ and I had something very profound and deep in common. We are built from so many of the same ingredients. The things in myself that are the most mysterious to me, he also shares. We see and understand and are moved by the same kind of things in the world. We both have an intensity and a fire within us, 110% and 100 mph. When he is on his game, I feel the same as when I first discovered Camus...I understand the spirit of what he says and thinks. It resonates in my soul as true. We collaborate very well and I know that we are soul-mates in a certain sense. Knowing him makes me feel less alone, and more alive, and it helps me understand who I am and what I need from life. He is not to me the friend that you are. He doesn't know how to be. I don't know where we are all going to end up. When _____ and I first met, I was 14 and he was 32 and we built the strongest bond with one another that we were capable of within those constraints. I never thought I would see him again in my life, but I have carried him inside of me. 15 years later, under absurd inventions and circumstances, we found each other again. This time around, I have you, and he is a broken man and cannot be fixed with the time or energy available to him. The first time we met too early, and the second time we met too late. But again we are trying to build the strongest bond we are capable of under these constraints. I don't know who we would be, or what we would become if we had not always had these impossible constraints between us. The problem is that I loved him long before I knew you and it is horrible that a love that strong doesn't fade or die really ever it seems. I am trying to define and live a friendship with ______ that doesn't betray you or my love for you. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. The most complicated and elaborate dance I have ever led.