You don’t know that I’m writing you because you don’t yet exist. Or is it I don’t exist in you, which is why I feel the need to make myself known? I’m sure I saw you walking in the Gardens alone, not even a dog at your side. I was a shadow in the distance, a ghost, too far to name the tune you’d been whistling, still fresh from the café, having just read the letter, this letter. Do you know what it is you’re holding, this map to where the bones lie buried? Is the slant of the writing a sure sign that it was sent by none other than he who follows by always staying three steps ahead even as you fall behind, you looking back with that look like you know you’re being cruised when in fact it’s all over between us? Without this map lying face down in on the dirt path ahead, without your carelessness, what else would I have to say?

*

Did you get the money? Don’t say you’ll pay me back when I know you won’t. It was nothing really, take all the time you need to do what you should’ve done, I won’t believe it, even if the money should come round again as things that circulate tend to do—all that blood rushing through our hearts that we can’t control. So don’t. I’m lying here in bed, not wanting to get dressed, to get all gussied-up—for whom pray tell? And you, gorgeous in your nakedness, what could poverty do to you that hasn’t been done already? Your flesh that answers, my mind that questions, your body like cash exchanging hands, only none of the hands are mine. I bailed you out before, remember?, a curtain of mist rising from the gulch where the waterfalls tumbled down, a double rainbow embroidered to those veils. I’d given you three bills instead of two, knowing how you ask for less than what you need, and I said just take it, you don’t owe me a thing. You said you’d pay me back. I offered you a gift, and this you took but couldn’t really take, emptied out of change, paying in prose what it cost in verse as if you knew the difference. In every letter since, you say you’ll pay me back with the very next check, the day already spent and night with empty pockets stumbling zigzag in the streets where bodies reek of purloined cash.

*

Can’t tell if writing this makes me miss you less or more. Why does the thought of addressing you complete something inside myself I couldn’t otherwise do alone? You walk into a room—just the thought of that room, any room, whether I am in it or not—and I’m struck dumb. You call my name and I come running, good dog, bad dog, with a loyalty that can only embitter the heart. What a good sport sincerity is, corrosive and adhesive, the words holding as much distance as closeness will allow. Babbling ruin. I send this note in the hopes that you won’t receive it, or that you’ll choose not to read it, setting it on your mantel, sealed. Were you to write me, I would do the same, what you wrote already written in my own hand left unread, the selfsame hand I use to touch the parts of me you can’t touch, this hand that won’t abuse the seal. You leave the room just as I open my mouth to speak, as is your practice. Keep the money you owe me, I say, I don’t want this bond, unless you choose not to open what I send, in which case, you’ll still owe me, and whatever it is that’s been going on between us will continue to go on.

*

Not hearing from you makes me feel adrift, farther from the shore than where we started, where we remain, always the same age. Seems time would not leave us alone until we parted. These letters that go undated, unsent—not that either of us are keeping track. It’s all the same letter anyway unless you choose to respond. Even then, I know it’s only you talking to yourself, giving me or someone else the chance to overhear. Some say God has no power to change the past, but you and I know better, how words can creep in, how if you said, no, I wasn’t charmed sitting next to you that first night beside the river, the street lamps all aglitter on the waterfront, I only wanted to get away from you, you’d know I wouldn’t want to listen, but having heard, would try to forget. Just kidding, you’d say, retracting your words but not the doubt. Or if you had been charmed and didn’t want to say, then what a violation my own needs might impose on yours, the neurotic in me wanting to nail the meanings down—crude displays hung next to my diplomas. Best that we not read what the other has written. Keep the past pristine, you said. But don’t you see even the act of having written denies the past’s certainty, a shared past no longer shared, a secession? The letters I don’t send so unlike the ones that don’t get returned, those very words I long to see rewritten in your own hand. Without a past that both of us can agree upon, what hope do we have for any kind of future?

*

I must confess: there’s someone new, someone in this city whom I dare not write. That the letters I send to you aren’t returned somehow heartens me. Don’t think I don’t know, delivery confirmation an extravagance worth the extra penny. Response is so overrated! Better to walk past a stranger’s windows after dark to see if they are lit, the wordless prayers I leave behind but footprints in the mud left beneath his sill. It starts with a glance, and then what choice did I have but to follow him home? Important to know when a smile is more than a smile. Not a come-on but a recognition, not having met before and being sure of that. Well beyond the “you remind me” or “haven’t we met.” We pass thousands on the streets without giving or receiving the simultaneous glance, and then one day, we’re bussing our cafeteria trays, and it’s almost nothing, that look, one look among a thousand looks as we move on down the rest of our to-do lists, only now these items which seemed so concrete, so arranged according to their urgencies, give way to that look, and off we go, onto the next thing, only stunned, dazed, can’t quite go on as before. But we do. Even if we don’t believe in “love at first sight,” only first sights worth remembering. This is how the future arrives: unaware of its own arrival, apprehended after the fact. Out of sight, the glance becomes all seeing, the mind able to replay the scene as if it were happening again and again but unrehearsed, a second time, a third, each a stand-in for the gone-before. Desire has such eddies, such snags. Only a future event can offer release from one pool into the next, the nameless one now assuming a name, the one without an address suddenly located among the addresses that were listed all along if only I knew where to look, a building I’ve walked past every day of my life, never knowing the future was simply waiting behind a door. It may have never happened, the future I was waiting for, waiting in, for out of the many possible futures, why not another? And why not many possible pasts if time indeed flows in both directions as some have said? The mind doesn’t work that way, I tell myself. The future, once it actually arrives, is the only past I’ll get to call my own. Waiting for the arrival of each word, but patiently, like Moses following the finger of God burning his irrevocable will into tablets of stone equal to a past he always already has read, that virginal reading relived again only in forgetting. As I have tried to forget your face, your hair, your name, and the place where our future was about to become, a future about to happen again and again, ever more sweetly, lest we forget.