Dear —,

I wish I could give you this love letter.  I wish, even more, that I could give you my love.

Instead, these words are all I have, here with you in my thoughts while on Pandora radio plays Quartet For Guitar & Strings No. 11 In B Major, MS 38, by Paganini, Niccolo.

I have held you in my arms in front of crowds, seen your stage smile, wanting it just for myself, wanting you all to myself, to sit quietly on a cold night, you and I on the sofa, warming by the fireplace.

Wants and wishes do not put food on the table.

I have not explored your body like a lover but I have held the body of a confident dancer, a complementary/complimentary follower who back leads, who, for fleeting moments, gave me confidence.

For you, I lost thirty pounds.

For you, I jogged and ran, my feet and ankles aching, so I could be a lighter, stronger dance partner.

I do not know what you see in me, what in your thoughts you think of me.

Do I want to know?  I don’t know.

Before I met you, I was unwilling to hunt and kill animals for food, thinking that the relationship with my wife was never strong enough to justify exchanging one life for the sake of another.

After I met you, I grew into the idea of a man who was willing to say that yes, I am a man who has the right to judge the value of a set of states of energy not part of our species, trapping or killing animals that had invaded the home “nest.”

What that means to you, I cannot say.

And while writing this, my wife interrupted me to say she couldn’t work on the computer in the living room because the cats wanted to sit on her lap; I took them to bed with me for a few minutes, letting them fall asleep on my chest before gently sliding them off and covering them with a fleece blanket so I could return to writing this love letter to you.

Yes, life is like that.

Now, Soundgarden’s “Pretty Noose” plays on Pandora radio.  Whoa!  Puts me in the wrong mood.  Type to change “stations.”

Where were we?

Better yet, where are we?

You do not know I love you.  Is that love?

You and I both know how to love the world but does that mean the world knows or cares or loves us in return?

Can I continue to hold your hands, to look you in the eyes, my thoughts tortured by idea of life after my first marriage?

Did I not get married in the sight of God in front of friends and family, “for richer or poorer… in sickness or health… till death do us part”?

Just because my wife doesn’t make me feel like a man doesn’t mean our marriage is wrong, does it?  Is the lack of physical desire for my wife sufficient grounds for divorce?  Does the omnipresent effervescent entity of a universe we call God recognise any human-based sets of states of energy we call thoughts, let alone reasoning for phrases like “irreconcilable differences”?

Marriage is not just about physical desire.

I’ve never been much of a touchy-feely person.

You helped change that.  I’m not as afraid to let another person inside the shell of my personal space as I was before I met you.

But it gets more complicated because I am not only in love with you but I am in love with [one of] your best friend[s], repeating a cycle that has told me (and which you already know in yourself to be true) I have always loved more than one person at a time.  Again, does that person know I love her?

Is this all I get in a relationship — a few hours a week with the women I love?

If the love is not reciprocated, then what is going on inside me and why do I torture myself so much that I would rather die today than face another tomorrow?

I don’t know if I can look in your eyes again or hold your warm hands in mine one more time.

I want to be more than your dance partner.

What do I do?

Do you see why I cannot give this love letter to you?

Instead, it exists here as a theoretical proposition written as an imaginary blog entry.

I don’t know much but I know I can post blog entries and live to see another day, the safety of my old life unchanged, as steadily unhappy as ever, comfortably numb.

The past is not indicative of the future but it’s a pretty decent fortuneteller, all things considered.

When I was ten, my ten-year old girlfriend died.  When I was eleven, my eleven-year old girlfriend moved away.  When I opened my heart again at sixteen, my fifteen-year old girlfriend broke my heart and my twenty-three year old married homeroom teacher, whose husband had abused her, invited me to her house by myself to comfort me in my loss, shaking the very foundation of my understanding of the role of authority and age in the thoughts and actions of love.

Perhaps I take love too seriously?  Or is it too traditional?  Perhaps my fear is too great to give another woman my love outside of marriage?

Perhaps I’m crazy.

There’s no one I can trust with these words so what better hiding place than the Internet to put them?

Yeah, I’m crazy like that.

I’ve talked about you too much to my wife.  She finally said to me, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” hinting that I’ve spoken too much of you to her lately.

The fact that I raced 90+ miles an hour on the freeway last night to get one glimpse of you before your costume party finished was also the wrong message to my wife, also, even though I told my wife that it was for her to see how you looked in your outfit.  Hey, I barely talked to you.  I danced with no one.

Well, I’ve said most everything in my thoughts I wanted to put down here so that, if nothing else, I’ve got a record of words to give a fictional character.

If I never hold you again, if I never look in your eyes, the loss is mine.

I have lived in quiet for so many years now, pursuing the peace and solace of a hermit’s life I sought when my ten-year old girlfriend died that I never expected to meet someone like you who would light a fire inside me to overcome mediocrity for something exhilarating, the exhibitionist’s life on the dance floor perfecting his moves to entertain crowds the way he used to love to make people laugh, smile and clap, gladly overcoming fear, trepidation and personal space issues for the thrill of extemporaneous stage performances.

I don’t know if I can keep on living with the only excuse I can make to see you is when you teach me how to dance with my wife.

I appreciate you giving me the space to walk through these thoughts in public knowing, as we both do, that you still love your last boyfriend and always will.

Do I want to be your dance partner?  Yes.  But I feel I cannot.  I let my guard down to let you in my personal space so we could show good chemistry on the dance floor and, in doing so, I fell in love with you.  I don’t blame you.  It just happened.

In my thoughts, I lead a swinger’s life.  But I didn’t marry a swinger, I married a monogamist.

To become a fully-devoted swinger, I would have to divorce my wife.  To divorce my wife, I would have to renounce my subcultural teachings of a life devoted to a monotheistic religion.

It’s not impossible to mate my thoughts with my actions so that I’m no longer a mental hypocrite.

But to do so would mean there’s a permanent divide between myself and my family, between myself and the ancestors who fought for the idea of a subculture that formed the governing body we call the United States of America which depended, in part, on the brothers of the Masonic Lodge who do not allow atheists as members.

So, regardless of how you feel about me, I have the future of my thoughts to consider.

Am I merely a set of states of energy that happens to exist concurrently with sets of states of energy that use the artificial constructs of memes to justify aligning the conditions of their existence for the sake of governments and religions…

OR am I a set of states of energy that belongs to the solar system and wants to overcome the past in order to make a future in his likeness which includes breaking away from old subcultural traditions to establish colonies on the Moon, Mars and beyond?

You see, it’s not just my love for you at stake.

But because of you, I’m willing to consider the option, to consider the possibilities that the only reason our species exists is to send a living blob out of our solar system to land on one or more habitable celestial bodies in our galaxy, thanks to my knowing and loving you.

You see, the very survival of life as we know it depends on what you and I think of us.

I don’t just want to be your dance partner.

Because of you, I want the whole universe.

If that’s not love, I don’t know what love is.

That’s why these words belong to the whole Internet, not just between us.

Yours truly,
Rick