Dear X,

I have been having trouble sleeping.

I am lying on a new mattress on the floor that still has the plastic on it in an otherwise empty room in this city. There is the shifting sound of plastic against carpet and body underneath me. This is my first time visiting. It is 10pm. It is early for a Friday night. I cannot sleep, so I start messaging with this older guy on Grindr. He's an older white daddy type whose profile picture looks like he took it in the expansive mirror of a decent public bathroom. He’s wearing a lavender polo shirt and the green glow from the bathroom fluorescents makes his face look sallow. This all figures into a distant and benign loneliness across my screen that is almost frightening. After about ten minutes of the usual sexual banter, I turn over on the plastic-covered mattress and I fall asleep, leaving him hanging.

We never meet. A week later he messages me, I miss you.

I am thinking how can you miss someone you’ve never met? He must be missing the idea of me.

Yours,

Y

Dear Y, I am also up late tonight. I can’t seem to get any decent rest lately. I am falling for someone new, someone who I almost certainly cannot have. I am hanging onto almost. I am leaving wiggle room for possibility and the vibrations from this possibility are lingering in my thoughts. They start and stop some of my movements throughout the day. They add fuel to waking dreams of expanded definitions of queer love and desire that are no doubt influenced by the hormones circling through my body, pushing up against its outer banks.

Y, I’m afraid my lower half has become a teenage boy’s racetrack.

One day I casually asked this person, do you want to go away with me this summer? Have you ever seen the West?

I shifted my racetrack hips that direction to indicate where and what I meant. Can we board a long distance train together?

What I am asking is, will you run away with me?

Yours,

Z

This becomes how I know that I love someone.

By suggesting that We remove Ourselves from the present situation and constantly re-frame Our journey.

I begin to wonder whether this impulse to escape is born out of the experience of a grievous spectrum of violence against you and I, against Us.

I am retracing my Body’s history and becoming almost sure of it.

I am retracing my Country's history and becoming sure of it.

I am retracing my Body in my Country's history and becoming surer of it.

I am retracing your Body’s history in Our Country and becoming certain of it.

I have questions.

Then is my love for you about my hurt?

Then is my love for you about Our hurt?

You have questions too.

Dear Z, You asked if collective rage wasn’t just activism while we crossed the street in an icy storm, too cold for April and I imagined that big rage gathered up into something we can see, something we can position our bodies around, something we can imagine has form, something that we can hurl, and that right now, we could be dancing the rage out of happiness, or the happiness out of rage, because these days, it never leaves us alone so let’s dance with it, so that it is becoming an equal partner in the room with us instead of only alluded to and sometimes even forgotten.

Z, I am going to write this twice because I know how you distracted you are with your new love interest:

You asked if collective rage wasn’t just activism while we crossed the street in an icy storm, too cold for April and I imagined that big rage gathered up into something we can see, something we can position our bodies around, something we can imagine has form, something that we can hurl, and that right now, we could be dancing the rage out of happiness, or the happiness out of rage, because these days, it never leaves us alone so let’s dance with it, so that it is becoming an equal partner in the room with us instead of only alluded to and sometimes even forgotten.

Yours,

X

Dear X,

Yes, it is that too. Yes. I have questions too.

Yours,

Y

As we orbit nearer to each other I am beginning to wonder how on earth can we ever imagine staying put?

How can we exert the energy of a powerful presence without it exhausting us beyond recovery?

Together we scream into the same wide-mouthed jar.

Then is my love for you partially about my hurt?

Then is my love for you partially about Our hurt?

I have questions. You have questions too.

Yes, you think so. You think so too.

You have questions. I have questions too.

Together we scream into the same wide-mouthed jar.

This is one form of an answer that we have come up with.

Dear Y, I kept the video of your performance from last fall on my phone. It shows everyone screaming into the same small space cupped in between your hands.

Even though it is taking up too much memory, I delete everything around it. I delete everything around it. I delete everything around it. I delete everything around it.

What did you plan on doing with all that rage once you captured it for us? What do I plan on doing with it since I am hanging on so tightly to it?

I think that it might be a talisman.

Yours,

Z

Dear Z,

It is like a talisman.

Yes, it is like that too.

Yours,

X

As we move and our very sweaty bodies converse in space, a single-songed playlist echoes from my phone in my left pants pocket.

You are my salt. I am trying to tell you of the necessity of you.

Of all of Our permutations.

My voice falters and it comes out in a series of blinks instead.

You are my salt, I say with my dry eyes.