[From: the secretly saved file on his computer and the not-so-sneaky reply]

Dear Ryan,

Dear Laurel,

What are you doing? Well, my dear, when you and I sat together, we were each manipulating electronics while I was sifting through the accumulated media of my life, but now (sufficing to emulate Cortazar) I am manufacturing your sneakily-typed-but-not-so-sneakily-embedded-desktop-letter with this how-many-moments-later-anyway duologue differentiated in time and subjectivity by the emaciated momentum of italicized font. You're hunched over, taking out your contacts. Thats really gross, I'm glad your back is turned. Eyes are not meant to be touched. I like eyes a lot, I like the way they look and work and what they do, and I love all the things they can tell you when you're talking to a person. Wouldn't you agree that the eyes never speak? They are the unspoken affirmation of that persistent question which resists verbalization as well as extinction. Once I was at the Science Museum and you could look through a special microscope thing at another persons iris, to see a close-up of it, while they looked at yours. My (former) roommates are hazel and looked like moss. She said mine looked like marble. Does the amount of information visible in the blown up eye increase or decrease proportionately? Does the privileged lens uncover significant detail or do moss and marble illuminate something unrelated? There was another thing where you could look in and see these red dots floating around on the screen, turns out they were the red blood cells of your retinas. If you blinked a few times lines would appear: capillaries. Capillaries are enormously exciting, these little junctions in the body that exchange blood and could break so easily. All our memories and thoughts and being are tied up in these tiny spaces. Our lives aren't any bigger than that. [La Maga] holds up and inspects the veins of a single green leaf to our astonished silence.

Leonard Cohen is singing with the sound of a clock winding up, the wind-up bird chronicles was a good book. I remember the bird from Slaughter House Five that said: Poh-Too-Weet? You're wearing glasses now. Without my glasses on I look like my mom, and the deep lines below my eyes are painfully visible; allow me that vanity. Without my glasses on distances and definitions are mixed into incoherent textures, and everything within 6 inches of my nose is magnified. When I last saw my mother, she looked at me with a spotlight on her face, and when I saw the age in her blue pupils above her puffy cheeks, I was forever stolen from those memories where she remained invisible. Allow me also the vanity of not touching my eyes, I find it repulsive. Same goes for touching the brain (I saw some video of a brain surgery one time) but that is far less common/socially acceptable. You once said that using a slash like that removes any sincerity from one's writing, or perhaps you meant speaking, because I am prone to say “slash” between two words. I'm talking like people write, because that is how I understand the world. But you were right, in a way, I don't mean it in a serious way, or rather I do it to call attention to the words. Very post-modern, right? I imagine the slash mark originated with geometry or algebra, to differentiate parts within a whole, the fraction, but with words there are no numerator or denominator, which are silly words anyway so who cares.“There is no avant garde, only those who have been left behind” is a poster or a piece of art I saw once. The revolution has been syndicated.

I'm really sun-burned, it hurt when I woke up and when I was lying in the grass yesterday with my hands behind my head. Been writing poetry again after a long time of not doing so. I have been neglecting the following things: Neglect is the guiltiest pleasure, especially when you're right on the cusp of obligation but you lay back against the gushing of the apologies and excuses. At the next opportunity, escape a celebration in the middle of festivities, and sit still while the enthusiasm of your friends courses and floods the hallways from which you isolate yourself...email correspondence with family, letter correspondence with friends, writing of any sort, various friends, looking for a job for the fall, general personal hygiene. That is whats new with me. Wait, is it sun-burned or sun-burnt? It's temporary nuclear shadows.

I want to start a new co-op (with black-jack, and hookers, to complete the tired joke I stole from Futurama. The rest is “you know what, forget the [noun]!). Bracket Exclamation Parenthesis Period. What trite expression would this emoticon signify? Basically I want to live in a house with some friends but have some sort of organization, some stability, but also the ability to get up and leave if I so wish. Something that someone else could make a part of their lives once I am gone. It would also be really exciting to have to work that hard, to do all the paper-work and painting and figuring out that goes along with owning a house and running a small business. And really, I just want to gather those I care about close to me and contain all our friendship in a jar until they all drift away to pursue real life, the rich delicacy of friendship preserves, or rather adult life, or rather families and careers and dental insurance and owning a van. To think we'll have to do this over and over again. Who the hell are you? and me? it's the most poignant and necessary sadness, too, to think that it will always be different, inconclusive, impending, until you look at something and remember a joke so funny that you have to fight to breathe again. Yes, it will happen, but for now we are young so lets be young and poor and glad together.

What are you thinking about right now? Neglecting the hour and rolling these words through my fingers long enough to leave something inside of them. You're staring at the window looking rather glum with your arms behind your head, as you do. Leonard Cohen is being sort of sad, as he does. Poet Sing, Monkey Do. You won't know what you were thinking about, when you read this later. I'm trying to prove you wrong, as I always do, haplessly. Oops, now I'm trying too hard to make this meaningful. If I try too hard, my eyes go out of focus when the ghost of that meaning belches smoke into my brain. But despite our mutual or unrequited intentions, we'll always have our accidents. Back pedal. “Its not the wind that keeps you up, its not the snow, its not the moon like a headlight through your window, its not the thumbnail of a screen that scrapes away your dreams” Leonard sang at me, but he's wrong, the wind does keep me up! He should have known better than to forget that you would eventually exist, or maybe he is right and you'll soon learn that you've been harboring a stomach ulcer, though I doubt it. Someday I'll be able to sleep. And that day will have hosted one hell of a frisbee match? Okay fine- we shall meet in dreams, probably.

Now I gotta save this where you'll find it and get a move on.

Much love,

Laurel

Send in the Clouds,

Ryan