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Note: The original four 'letters to no one' comprise the story 'Dear Diary,' which you can see here: Plotmeister's Story "Dear Diary"
Note also: More 'letters to no one' are being added as I write them. It's an open-ended project.


Love Letter


Was there ever a moment when you didn't matter? The sun rose and I thought of you. The sun set and I was unmoved. Your absence was a thread of darkness that bound me to a grim march of mediocre days, unasked and subservient. All words were hollow because they lacked you. Each movement was only a ghost, a potential, without your fire, your light, your heat. Come to me.

Can you question my devotion? I lit a candle in the porcelain basin below the mirror and shivered in its cold eternal reflections, tiny dancing pieces of distant light on the walls, scattered memories of the moment your eyes burned into mine. I long to gather them up but breath clouds in the air and I cannot move. I am helpless without you. Come to me.

Is passion so fraudulent you can so wholly disregard this soul, this naked unburdening? I stand before you shaken to the core, no longer attached to this world but by a single thread of hope. Love was impossible before you. Love is impossible now, in this swaying moment of dreadful possibility. Waiting. Come to me.

Come to me, that the clock may not be deprived of its ticking, the dawn of its hour, the shaky hand of penning the final word. Consummating fire burns. Its heat is yours.

There was never a moment when you didn't matter. 



Tragic


I had nothing more tragic on hand than a tattered umbrella, so when you asked what was wrong I invented. Wildly.

Death depression anger divorce. Aliens and day-late shoe coupons.

You didn't buy a word of it. You said, through the phone, you'd write me a song on your techno machine. I called you a liar.

The distant sounds of wailing bagpipes woke me up that night, six stories below in a gritty parking lot under dull street lamps. The sound alone set car alarms off, or maybe it was one of your skeezy buddies trying to get lucky. Klutzy gits.

I climbed down the fire escape in my pajamas and we made it as far as the last gas station out of town before the too-small engine in your scrap bike fried, and it was flip flops and six-year-old nikes all the way back down cracked blacktop and thumbs nearly lopped off by careless passing drivers.

You told me you read To Kill a Mockingbird, and I told you to shut up and kiss me.

And then there was dewy grass and the passing police car with too-bright lights and a guy named Bubba or so you claimed, and an old-fashioned black phone with a cord and my crazy cousin with her billion credit cards and broken orange nails and trying to remember where we lived after she shared her water bottle around because we were dying of thirst and the scared kitten under the drainpipe you tripped over after she'd pointed us in the right direction and how gently you held him and I cried and you promised to marry me at 11:59:59 on new year's eve and

...Remember?




No, no, I don't buy it either


Do you believe in love, sweet love? How long has it been since you sat in the sun, found shapes in the clouds, daydreamed your heart out?

There's only so many tears to cry, only so many twinkling stars in the sky, how long can you howl to the moon? Raise up your mourning shades, it's noon and the grass is green and wants you to come play. It knows your name.

Your secret name. The one you asked your dog to call you and wouldn't tell me til I tickled you hard. Brief fingers on soft pale sides, t shirt twisted up just enough, a laughing, panting pile of arms and legs on the shag carpet floor.

What makes you happy? That mascara-running misery? Too bad. When there is this ice cream sitting here with no one to claim it, a sun-warmed rock next to me by these secret-sharing waves. Your phoenix tattoo shimmering in the sun, plastic anklets scraping against sandstone.

Where have you been? Earth to Lovely. Welcome back. You should never fly alone. If you won't stay here with me, take me with you. The grass is greener, but the inhospitable trees don't give up their secret paths to just anyone.

Love? No, no, I don't buy it either. But there is this moment, your fingers brushing mine, and for all we know this half-second of linked gazes and short breaths is what Jesus meant when he said Forever.




I was going to write you


I was going to write you a haiku, but what I felt wouldn't fit. So small, haikus. Like miniature sculptures you can hold in the palm of your hand. The kind you accidentally crush when someone calls your name and you look away, fingers closing absently on the space where Art attempted to be.

I was going to write you a poem, but I couldn't figure out the spacing and the punctuation. The silences seemed more important than the words, which had all been said before, but no one can hold a silence quite like you and none of our silence had ever quite been had before, in the history of struggling would-be lovers.

I was going to write you a letter, and quote that song about almost-lovers. How did it go? But I couldn't find my favorite pen, the cheap one with the chewed-up cap and the cracked siding I've refilled three times, that you borrowed the day before we stopped speaking, and you stopped answering my emails.

I was going to write you a song, or at least dedicate one to you one the radio, but several caught my eye and as I dialed the station number I knew I couldn't pick just one, and they would insist I be specific, and I would leave it up to them, and whatever they played wouldn't be right and you wouldn't be listening anyway.

I was going to write you a hundred times today, at your office. Just slip a memo to your secretary, who still knows me and gives me sympathetic looks, and be gone. But I wasn't sure if you would understand what it meant. Just words on paper. They have no voice. Black on white, mocking in their simplicity. I was afraid to type it, because it would be too impersonal, and afraid to handwrite it, because you know my signature. The way I form my g's and dot my i's. The way I cross my z's in the middle, after you, because I thought it was neat. I knew you would notice my hand was shaking when I held the pen, the wrong pen, because you still had the other one.

I was going to write you an explanation. An apology. Or maybe I was going to ask for one. I don't know. But then for the first time in a long time I looked up at the calendar, the cheesy one we'd made together with photographs of all our vacations and late night rental movie parties, the one I hadn't had the heart to take down, and realized it had been two weeks.

I was going to write to let you know how well I was managing, but then I realized, since you hadn't heard from me, you already knew.

I was going to write you everything I felt, but I realized it didn't matter how I felt anymore. It hadn't in a while. That must be why you were gone.

I was going to write you and tell you about my insights, but I realized it had never been about what I may or may not have felt. I loved you for your feelings. I always had. And you had accepted my wordless veneration as your due, and your words were enough for both of us.

I was going to write you. I really was. But the silence was far more bitter and eloquent.



Famous and fabulous air guitar


Your famous and fabulous air guitar rocked apologies from the top of my car (couldn't you have used your own?) from two to four last Thursday morning, and I couldn't come out to tell you to stop for fear you'd see my smile.

So the neighbors did it for me, and when the last police car pulled in, sirens disrupting the noise ordinance more than you and your stolen cheerleader megaphone ever did, I couldn't come to the glass and wave you away because I was crying with laughter all over my pink shag rug leftover from the dorm that you hate so much. It was delicious, and I turned up the radio to my favorite station because it was six a.m. by then and time for work anyway.

Only it wasn't over and I should've known you wouldn't let it go that easily, when the DJ's were telling amused stories about their flooded requests inboxes and how some lunatic had stuffed them and all with the same song. And just to humor the guy who put so much public work into his Sorry's they promised to play it every other song for an hour, so I listened to Undeniably Human all morning and was late for work and nearly fired but it didn't matter because I was giddy with sleeplessness and humming Phil Roy tunes under my breath anyway.

And when you phoned during my break and refused to talk to me but only spoke to my manager instead I nearly started giggling all over again because she looked at me with the end of the phone turned away from her mouth, her paper hat knocked sideways and ketchup stains on her uniform, tired and sweaty and her hair a mess, and she mouthed "hot air balloon?" at me in utter disbelief and it was then I knew what you were planning and my manager had never looked more friendly or relaxed.

I forgave you three miles above the browning tree tops and blindingly reflective skyscrapers while the basket driver turned red and tried to ignore us and you played 99 Luftballoons on your famous and fabulous air guitar for twenty minutes after.

We held hands all the way home.



Scream


Let's go screaming together.

I'll bring the Dr Pepper and you bring your corvette, and we'll drive to the bottom of the hill in the park and run up it at midnight trench coats blowing behind us and slowing us down and we'll scream our lungs out.

And when we collapse we'll spread the blanket and drink caffeine til our stomachs are full and we'll light off fireworks and pretend we're having the time of our lives on the Fourth of July in England.

Then later when we're cold and wet from the thunderstorm we saw coming but couldn't say no to and tired of hiding in the bushes from the cops who think "Park Closes at 10" is something to be enforced we'll go driving down Maynstreat with your speakers thudding until it drowns out the twin rhythms of our hearts.

Later on the bridge you'll balance and I'll just watch you, frozen, waiting for the inevitable, pretending it will come slouching embarrassedly up and hand over the punch line sheepishly, with a muttered, "Sorry."

No harm no foul?

No crime we committed could be as big as what didn't happen tonight. Without. Without soda or cars or parks or clouds or bridges. Alone with the dull haunting glow of the internet (world at my fingertips) I think it is a empty universe without you.

Tomorrow I will go lay flowers and then we will be through. I will tell the daydreams I don't want to play anymore and give your old hoodie to Goodwill. Then I will forget, and we will both be happy.

Satisfied?

I thought you might say that, so I'm keeping the CD you burned, and the photograph with the broken frame, and the old note that turned up in my too-small jacket's hidden pocket yesterday.

Yesterday when it smelled like fall and I went outside to play with the dog so I didn't hear the phone ring and I had to hear it from the answering machine three hours later just as it was getting dark and the lightning storm in the southwest started up.

I watched it for a long time from the back deck and thought about running and trench coats and fireworks and tired looking policemen. Holding your hand underneath scratchy brown leaves and trying not to laugh.

When I told the horrible joke you buried your face in your hands and shook like you were coming apart and I knew you were laughing so I just sat there grinning smugly, but that was before we thought about screaming. Before regulations and serious looking men with long strings of capital letters after their names and white sheets and that cafeteria food smell worked its way into everything.

Before you told me to go home before they gave me a room, too. Before the day that ached of gorgeous red and gold leaves and light jackets and crisp winds, and I wanted to take a picture for you because all you could see from your window was the neon word "Memorial" on the end of the sign and the dirty parking lot. But my home snapshots never turn out and anyway you can't smell photographs.

Now I think about screaming, and I think we should have screamed together, and maybe somebody would have taken notice, and maybe I wouldn't be picking out the matching black shoes that are too shiny from lack of use and watching the blacktop flee under the wheels of my unabashedly orange car as I make my way towards the black gathering on the far side of town.

There are clouds in the sky. I pass the park, a cop car, cross the bridge. Some old truck backfires and I swear I hear firecrackers going off and I almost, almost, look up at the sky.

Let's go screaming together.

I'll start.