(We had been seeing each other for three months. I wanted to have sex with him all of the time but he would tell me I could visit him once a week. We lived at opposite ends of the city, and he said he was too tired from work and so I would take the light rail to meet him at the bar he lived in after his shift and watch him drink tumbler after tumbler of Old Crow until he would put his arm around me and see me in a different way. I realized that there is nothing in this world I would spend two hours commuting to at 10 pm other than sex. In the mornings I would wake up and see tears in his eyes. He looked electrocuted. I was lying in a room of paintings he no longer painted and costumes he no longer wore. His lean vermicelli noodle body, his raven-black hair. His studded leather cuffs. His sky-blue eyes. His facility with words, the poetry he no longer wrote. His mind was a country I wanted to be lost in. Lying there I was beyond naked. I would offer him my bones, if I could. I would hold him and feel like I was holding a glass tumbler of something more beautiful than whiskey and wish he could hold me the way he held his glass tumblers of whiskey but I also didn’t want to be a glass tumbler of whiskey because whiskey turns to piss in two hours and glass breaks so easily and one December day I felt like I was in mourning for a love that hadn’t happened yet and wrote him this:)

I am going to tell you a story about my last night. My friend Suzanna was going out carousing, and we ended up at the Yukon, with her getting men to buy us drinks. She kept dancing and acting pathological and fighting with guys and then caressing them because that is her way. I accepted the free drinks and started singing to everything on the jukebox which ended up being a fair amount of Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Orbison, various oldies. Soon everyone at the bar was at our table and at closing time we carried the party over to a guy’s house. There were three of us now: Suzanna, myself, a goonish guy with a Paul Simon air and hapless ambiance. He was well-installed, a member of some corny old-timey band. He had oriental rugs, posters in frames, a clockwork reality. Over the course of the night he had told us he was getting over a breakup and the death of a cat and trying to cope with his dying grandfather. Suzanna called him a wuss and started dancing to hip hop on his cable teevee and raiding his refrigerator.

We had a dance party and when he and Suzanna said let’s go to the bedroom and Suzanna yelled These women need to be pleasured! I said sure. I know that Suzanna is a complete nut jealous of all women unless she feels she can in some way control them or get approval from them so I had no interest in joining her pleasure party other than to enjoy looking at and feeling her attractive but mad body parts while this guy tried to get a vibrator to do the right thing for her. It turned into a comedy and yet was inspiring. Every time he almost got the right place, she would moan and wiggle but when he lost it (by a millimeter; a micron perhaps!) she was saying dude, no, you lost it! And as they writhed and asked me to join them I curled up contentedly letting myself be caressed and have emotions flood my system, the emotions of my entire year, really, emotions of what has been and what is. I am cracked open, it is true. I am in a fragile state but also a profound one. And yes, my love of you has produced some sort of junkie-like pit in me, where I crave love—I mean emotional love, not a bunch of fondling strangers.

I felt so many emotions as my face pressed into this man’s clean slate-gray moderne comforter that tears started coming to my eyes and I realized this was the right way. I cried. I cried carefully, not letting them see it at first. I didn’t want to interrupt their gropings. At moments my head shuddered a bit, and I let leak a puppy-like squeak, barely perceptible...and then the flow came on more and I felt so good to cry, it was my kind of orgasm. I needed to cry so much, and for everything beautiful and ruined and my mind and life, and your pain, and your worry, and this and this and these. I felt in my being that I didn’t care about having sex with these people, I wanted you. I felt my own uniqueness. I can’t meet anyone’s expectations, either! How easy it is to get the things one doesn’t want in this universe at bargain basement prices.

I decided after my cry really got going to embrace them. They were trying to kiss and I shared my face with them and we all embraced. Suzanna panicked for a moment: “Girl, let’s get your clothes and go,” and I said, “No, this is perfect. This is what I need. I need a release. Crying is my release right now. Really, It’s good. I’m staying. We are all here for release. Please keep having pleasure. We are here for this,” and they carried on, and I did something I have never done before in my life.

After my cry they assumed I would want sex so I said I would masturbate as they kissed and caressed me. The thing I’ve never done before was fake an orgasm. I did a great job, I say! It was my way of telling them “You two are OKAY!” and then they could get back to their own business. I laugh when I think of it as a courtesy. The comedy of their efforts took me far away from feeling real arousal! I don’t go around feeling arousal for many people anyway. I need to love the soul and then the desire comes.

There were many more funny moments. One thing vibrators do is overstimulate women to the point they can feel numb, supercharged down there, so you can hardly tell what the parts are doing. At one point before rejecting the guy, Suzanna said to him, “Feel me down there and tell me if I am cumming!” She ended up giving up and going into the other room to smoke, a time during which I was supposed to get my thrills, but she kept yelling at the guy to come into the living room and close the windows. He started feeling exasperated, yelling back, “REALLY???YOU NEED HELP CLOSING WINDOWS???” And I hugged the guy and felt his chest hair and told him “It’s allright, my dear” about everything, the universe, being alive right now, despite all the wretchedness, and he begged me to see him again but I put on clothes and soon Suzanna and I were gone, but not without her giving him a heap of emotional abuse about his lack of meat in the refrigerator, how he was not a gentleman to drive us home five blocks, and how stupid his tee-shirt was. Suzanna is a mad instigator, so I always get adventures with her, but they are always at a price. Ha-ha!

Today I am so hungover I am surprised I am able to type this at all, but I managed to make more money through my creaking state of metabolic blahness anyway. Pardon me if I am cracked open and perhaps more emotionally loving of you than you know what to do with. Pardon me if I say you are the only one for me. I know that words and impulses can be killed like kids with drones. I know all of this but I love you deeply and you are the only one I crave. The beauty you house is visible to me.

PS: My computer is really going nuts. If I can use one of your spare ones, I may need it sooner rather than later.