Dear cute guy from Jackson Hole,

The worst most wonderful thing that could have happened to me, just did.

You called my bluff.

And now, rather than dream about how this could possibly work, I have to figure it out.

Dreaming is seamless, you know. Its transitions are smooth. Like Hitchcock said, it leaves all the boring parts out of regular life…except not regular life, but the substance of things hoped for…and not the boring parts, because there aren’t any boring parts in dreams.

Instead, it’s the terrifying, retch-inducing, white-knuckling, teeth-gritting parts, that make us gasp for air, that dreaming leaves out.

This, I reckon, is why they stay dreams. This is why Jack said, of most folks, “Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken."

You saw me. You know it’s true.

I’ve talked a big game about choice, these last years, and the audacity to make it. But you were…are…a choice that I did nothing to prepare for. no idea how to process. You weren’t a job I could leave in two weeks if things weren’t working out, or something better came along. I can’t do relationships like free market capitalism.

Mind you, I was going to try. Having been treated, and traded, like a commodity in the past, I was determined to do the same thing. For a few months, I’d been sizing men up the way I felt they had done to me: eyeing them with the question "what if something better comes along?”, consoling myself in their absence by bantering with waiters and bellhops, and sidewise glances in bars, and yes, sometimes text messages with people who didn’t matter, as exercise in not letting them matter.

Whoever came along next, I was determined, not to let matter for a good long while.

But it wasn’t whoever. It was you. You, who looked at me and were not afraid to smile, and keep smiling. You who weren’t afraid to say what you felt, way before it was the “right” time. You who weren’t afraid to list 88 reasons that spread and settled in my shuddering anxious insides like a tonic.

I was trying to figure out what it is, that might make a person love a person in the way I’ve always wanted to but never have: three-dimensionally, as a person rather than as a stock character, a symbol, a trophy, or a project.

Thinking of your smile when we first looked at each other, I was going to say real love is born when you see how much someone truly loves you…but even that doesn’t sound right. Surely you have to see, and love, what someone is, outside of their love for you.

Even that doesn’t cut it. I’ve found that there are very few people who, once you see the depth of who they are, aren’t truly lovable, beautiful, heroic, a privilege to serve, eminently worth sinking your life into.

I guess other people have their ways of knowing. Mine is this feeling of heady risk, of trapezing without a safety net.

Because you’re not safe. Far from it. You are not a type. You aren’t living by rules culled from figureheads relegated by the past to two dimensions. You’re not trying to be Hemingway or Baudelaire or John Muir or St. Augustine, or even simply “a man.”

You’re the most dangerous thing a girl can get with: yourself, and that honestly.

I never knew anyone so brave.

Part of me is wondering if it happened at all.

The other part is thinking that it doesn’t matter–it’s bound to be like every other time: an instructive memory. Only this, and nothing more.

Between these two parts, in the dark, unexplored corner, a very small, shy hope is unfurling its cramped, long-buried bracts.

It’s reaching for the radiance of the rare book room at Powell’s, where we danced to “The Way You Look Tonight” on the green linoleum floor.

It’s drinking the warmth of that night on Burnside Bridge, where I had to walk away from you for a moment because standing beside you, with your eyes on me, was accelerating particles at a velocity that threatened to destroy the world.

I love you.

I love you.

And maybe it’s getting easier to say because this is the kind of love I’m used to…the desperate kind, the inconvenient kind, the kind that knows it doesn’t have a hope unless something breaks in to save it.

But we’ve seen that happen, both you and I. We saw it together.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to go on chasing those moments of eleventh-hour redemption together.

If you want to.

I do.

9 October 2014
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