We have all been there – having that one person in your life that you love so much it scares the shit out of you. The fear of being rejected is one of the most common fears faced by all people. You go to speak your mind and no words form.

When it is impossible to say how you really feel a soul bearing letter or lust inspired poem is the most logical therapy. Trust me it’s better than sending a drunken text message (or writing a letter and putting it in a tin foil swan full of pot brownies and putting them inside his unlocked car – which I’ve done).

I have been writing unsent love letters since my first real crush. I wrote about his blue hair, his love of The Misfits, and about feeling butterflies whenever his skateboard rolled past my house or the fact that he chose to sit next to ME on the bus everyday. My unrequited teenage love is well documented in notebooks full of poems that have never seen the light of day. They are beautiful, honest, sincere, and so very naive.

My newest letters are written in the notes section of my phone, generally when I am stoned and feeling lonely. I get naked on stage for a living and my art and blogs focus on the things that most people fear the most, but I don’t give a fuck. Except when it comes to love, I am still the chicken shit teenager watching every crush move on or get friend zoned because I never told them how I felt. How can someone be so confident but so afraid?

These letters are patched together and may or may not be to the same person, may be old or current, and they are definitely real. They are all for “You,” whoever that may be…

You can listen to this while you read them:

You make me smile and your smile ignites my heart’s desire, a panty fire. Your scent envelopes my sensibilities. Smoking whiskey and drinking marijuana. Forever yearning and burning myself on the oven grates. French bread pizzas instead of French kisses. Great. This is that moment when I try to kiss you and if you kiss me back I tell you exactly how I feel and if it doesn’t work and you don’t then I blame it on the drugs and continue living the lie. Lying on the love seat with you on the couch. I’d rather feel you in my sheets, listen to the sound of your sleep, pressing against me with your perfect nakedness. Baring your soul through a wall. Not greater or more real than the wall around my heart. A barbed wire fence like Pam Anderson’s bad tattoo. With a mote filled with flesh eating trolls. I want to tell you everything.

Mister take my hand. It’s not small like the other girls. The nails are chewed dirty chipped. The callouses and paint stains abundant , hands that work hard, hands that love strong, the hands of an artist, double jointed, scarred. Scared. I want to untangle your hair, defeat the demons that haunt you, undo the girls who have hurt you, relinquish the reasons why you hold back. I feel you in these tepid rain drops, I hear you in every song. I want to be the girl you come home to and the one you let tag along. Let’s inspire eternity in each other, make art and love that lasts far after our eyes are eaten by worms or burned.

It’s hard to leave when all I wanna do is stay. Good night ol’ buddy ol’ pal is what you say, and I guess I can’t have it any other way. I love you like the summertime, more than chicken wings or the sweetest wine, I’d kiss your face and say your fine, live in your warmth ’till the end of time. You sweet man, just doin’ the best you can. I will always be one of many, forever just your biggest fan.

You are so beautiful and I’m terrified I never said anything because I knew it wouldn’t accomplish anything. I will always wonder and hope that you will feel the same way, but just like I have no choice in how I feel about you, you don’t have a choice in not feeling the same. It’s just how life goes, wanting what doesn’t want us back.

You ran away and I wish I had chased. You terrify me and intrigue me equally. The more I get to know you the more I want to know. You make me want to swing dance. You are an incredible artist, fearlessly funny, and you can cook! Take me now.

You are everything I could ever dream for in a human. I know we talked about this once, I don’t want to ever tie you down, your free spirit is what makes you so special.I would love to travel the world and do filthy sexy dirty things to you. I want to activate the benefits portion of our friendship.

You know every single time I leave I want to kiss you goodnight right? I punch the cold early morning air when I get to the bottom of the steep stairs and lock the door behind me “Fuck, why am I so scared?” I always hope to hear you stomp down the stairs,throw the door open, with no words, grab me, and make love right there. Passionate kisses and an animalistic embrace. With only some dirty laundry as our witness. Fuck your couch. Oh to fall asleep in your arms. Sweaty and covered in the musk of lust. I want you so hard that I masturbate to your photos. I think I’m falling in love with you, or whatever that means.

I never needed anything until I saw your beautiful everything, I’m floating. I will cook the foods you love the most, play the records that move your soul. I want to make art with you, because of you, to you. You inspire me to explore, the only one who stops me dead in my tracks, no turning back, and I’m scared that you don’t feel the same, I can’t let you slip away. I’ve got a lot to say but draw a blank. The man in my dreams never had a face until I met you.

The first time I saw her, something changed in me. It was at breakfast, in a greasy little diner I frequented around that time. She walked in just as the waitress was setting down my classic eggs Benedict. A vision through the steam which rose from the moist surrender of the hash browns on my plate. Two delicate, quivering mounds, splashed with an obscene sensuality by creamy hollandaise sauce. The sizzling whispers of bacon caused my heart to thunder in my head, and blood rushed through my entire body exhilaratingly. I knew at that moment she was a woman I wanted. To do. Like, in a sex way.

I approached her table and our eyes locked. I sat down without a word exchanged between us. Boy, she was totally a babe. With boobs and everything. Probably other parts, too. She held a grill-plumped sausage between her fingers, lightly, but firm with meaning. Gently she caressed with the sausage’s tip between the tender edges of her short stack, glistening, dripping with the sweetest of maple syrups, until with desperate abandon she thrust the sausage within. A quick spurt of grease trickled out as she raised the meat-filled pancake to her mouth.

My mind was racing, but I kept my cool. “Whoa,” I said, “I totally have a boner.” And she was all like, “yeah, me too, wanna go do it?” Though her mouth was full of pig-in-a-blanket, so I almost didn’t catch it. But then I was like, “totally.” So we went to my apartment and totally did sex. Like, full-on P in V sex. I saw her boobs and even touched them, too. We were all sweaty and stuff, and she made these moaning noises and I kind of grunted. She was like, “wow this sex is such good sex!” And I was all, “yeah, we’re totally having it! Sex, that is!”

After that we couldn’t bear to be apart. We met the next day at a coffee shop downtown. We sat across from each other at small table in an intimate corner, though the dishes between us proved but a trifling distraction from how much we wanted to bone. She swirled her biscotti, taught and swollen with want, through the warm froth of her mocha.

I held a chicken salad sandwich with both hands, roughly, but with a tenderness I could give to nothing but that which I longed for ceaselessly. I pulled it close to my lips, my breath hot and ragged on its cool mayonnaise and diced celery. I was locked with it then for a moment which to the rest of the world sped by in smoggy metropolitan rush hour time, but for me, and the sandwich, seemed to span the flare and burning out of a thousand distant suns. When at last it met my mouth, it seemed for the merest second to resist, to quake at the passion erupting among us. Then it gave in. Gave itself to me completely. And we were one.

And then me and that girl went and totally banged somewhere again. Like, in a bathroom somewhere, I think.

The next few months were a torrid blur of lovemaking and enchiladas. To this day when I close my eyes I see her beautiful face, contorted; in the throes of ecstasy, eating corn on the cob. There was one weekend we spent locked in her bedroom just having sex. It felt really good. Like… like what sex feels like. Y’know, like how it feels? I don’t know how to describe it, but you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, we both complimented each other on how totally good we are at sex, and we high-fived a bunch.

More than anything else, I look back at my time with her with an ache, a longing unparalleled to any I’ve felt before or that I can possibly fathom feeling again. There is, burned like fever in my memory, a picture of a perfect moment. Fleeting, simple, and elegant, it’s a moment I will take with me to the ends of this world and beyond. A burger we shared at a picnic table one sultry summer’s afternoon. I can still see the winding trail of burger juice and mustard rolling lazily down her chin after that first bite. And then we totally went at it, sexually. If you know what I mean.

The vicarious thrill of reliving that moment is all I have left of her. Always will I look back on it, and that burger. With relish.

 

Photo by Harumi Ueda via Flickr