A Letter To My Long-Distance Crush

Let’s drink whiskey ginger ales all night. Let’s not even worry about what’s going on tomorrow, let’s not remember how old we are and let’s just get drunk on each other, get wide-eyed and get heart-shocked like we’re confiding our dreams in someone who gets it for the first time ever. Let’s be into each other like we’ve never been into anyone, let’s go extra fast like our nervous systems just did mega rails and let’s get more and more enamored of each other; let’s stay up all night talking ecstatically like everything’s new.

Let’s be honest, honest like we’ve never been. Let’s tell each other the truth about things, why not? The blunt horrible fat-legged truth is what really gets someone to like you, not those drippy approximations; no one falls in love with you until you show them some grit. Let’s lay down the secrets trapped under our skins, confessions and insecurities like we’ve never had the courage to describe. Let’s get into our first times having sex, let’s be honest it was terrible and yet we spent so much time trying to convince everyone it was magical, what the hell? No, life is ugly sometimes. Let’s accept that and feel lightened by it.

Let’s not compare. Let’s leave off our pasts, our sad relationships, leave the skeletons to crumble in the closet among the dusty wine bottles and moldy papers and let ourselves be each other’s ritual cleanse. Let’s not place each other next to the demons and superstars of our former selves and instead draw our outlines on separate canvases. Let’s stop carrying the past around desperately like the last sip of water in a desert, no one needs that; we hang onto it because we think we’re holding onto ourselves that way but really it’s just the lead weight of dead things we’re afraid to throw off.

I appreciate you; I want you to know that. I appreciate you for your eyesight: you don’t see only what things look like but what they represent; you see beauty in things, see them for what they really are not just what you project. You have this crazy ability to pin down the exact coincidental fragility of things that is just so. And you have this ability to see beauty in ugliness, or rather, to see ugliness — ugliness is just another type of beauty when your eyes aren’t all blurry, why doesn’t everyone know that? I have so much to learn from you.

I want you to hold my hand in the dark, shoulders touching. I want you to kiss me in the most intimate place you can kiss someone; kiss me on my palms or the insides of my wrists, where you let someone kiss you when you trust them. Let me hear your mellow heartbeat, let me take your glasses off your face when you fall asleep on top of Bret Easton Ellis. I want you to smooth my hair away from my face when my hands are covered in hot sauce and I can’t do it. You won’t need me to explain anything.

But these things won’t happen. I’ll never meet you, you’re too far away for these things to be real; I think I’m talking to myself again.

I’ll never have you, but maybe that’s better because I’ve idealized you in Shakespearean proportions: the thoughts, the words, the poetry; everything’s there but it isn’t. The bleary-eyed reality of it: the deep sad reality of miles and schedules and all the impossible money and what is there to do, really? There’s an organic mass in my heart soaked through with blood but it’s just radio waves. It’s enough to make you tired, realizing the unreachable vastness of your purest emotions you get crushed get complacent and give it up in favor of something you can hold.

At least this way we won’t wonder what would have happened if we met and it didn’t work out.