This was the first time we drove down to Southern California, to see the places where he'd grown up, the childhood bedroom, the university housing where his best friend from high school was living with four other uberbrains. They had a white board that covered a whole wall, and a section of the board was devoted to a project they were working on, tracking correlations between the weather and the number of sweat droplets that the cartoon character Cathy had floating around her head that day. There was no correlation. I admit I thought it was a big deal to meet the parents and the friends but probably my car just got better mileage. I had not hung out before with people so entirely devoted to being intellectual, sitting in rooms without furniture and talking about string theory and Derrida. My life had been almost exclusively pop entertainment and human behavior, and I was thinking that this was simply different, like how I liked Eurythmics and other people liked Madonna, but it was soon clear that actually what I had was less, at least to him. But I thought: I will make them like me, and then it will be okay. And I did, I did. I had my insecurities but I also had my shell games for hiding them. I conducted subtle interviews and found the thin threads where their brains collided with mine, the symmetries; I hung stories on these threads, I regaled, I raconteured, one of them laughing until he rolled onto his back like a beetle, legs kicking in the air, and I thought I had won, but then so much of my life is coloring in the lines and then showing my pictures to the blind. "You're talking too much," he said, stopping me in the hallway. "And nobody thinks it's funny when you pronounce 'subtle' wrong; they don't think you're joking, they think you're stupid." Gravity pulled into the equation, the tales I had been weaving collapsed around me, and I stumbled back into the room and tried to play the quiet game until it was time to go to bed. I've moved on since then, I've stayed up late talking in so many places, slept and woke up and tried again, and usually I don't care but sometimes I stop, mid-anecdote, and wait for someone to tell me the truth, the ugly truth, and I feel the knot pull around my heart that was first tied years ago, before this memory even, and for a second I can't breathe. 

This was maybe the summer of 95, living in the apartment near where Napoleon plotted that famous battle that gets replayed every year, the actors falling to the ground again. This film is on a maddening loop. I don't remember much; or I remember so much but this memory comes to me like a series of snapshots, disconnected. I remember pressing my face into the carpet and crying so hard, the nubbins of carpet dug into my forehead. I'd left with just a suitcase, and when I'd been here a month you sent me the shirt I always used to borrow. These clothes, these clothes don't fit us right. I never told you but I wore it for years, long after we'd stopped talking, until it was more holes than shirt and I finally let it go. 

Man, I could cry then, I could WAIL, cracked open and the pain just poured from me, then, and there was so much. I'm to blame, it's all the same. What's funny is that at the time I felt pretty dried up, emotionally. I woke in a pool of blood and moved and woke in a pool of tears and moved and woke and knew that while I would never get over the past I would never have to repeat it, and so all my tears were crystal memories.

You come to me with a bone in your hand. The letters we wrote and wrote, fingers already cramped over the fifth page and nevertheless tearing the sixth from a notebook, poetry, trying to be the more honest one, the more generous. You come to me with positions. Playing emotional chess by post, each move took three weeks and each move counted. You told me how when you were in bed with her, your breath on the back of her neck kept her awake, your guilt for that, the clench in my stomach, the hairs on the back of my own neck at attention to imagination and memory, but all I wrote was that you had misspelled bed, and was calling it "bad" Freudian or what; you wear me out, you wear me out. 

Maybe things were too far gone by then. Years. Self-hurt, plastics, collections. I came home and sold half my things and gave away the rest, walked down the middle of the street with you, didn't want to trade you but couldn't hold you either. Came to your door late at night, broken, and your exasperation with me was palpable. But you didn't want me to leave, either. I was central, I had control. Every time I pulled at the tether you tugged me back until I don't even remember which one of us let go. It's crazy what you could have had. Oh, I can't finish, it goes on forever. But I need this; I need this. Needed.

Oh, this one I remember. Curly mop of copper hair and eyes that saw so much and could hold you still until everything around you faded. He was an artist, a photographer, a sweet heart. He took pictures of me, all eyelashes and cheekbones; I wrote him poetry. We traded scar stories, cooked together, played like a basket of kittens. He wanted my heart and I showed him what I had, still beating but ragged around the edges where it had torn when I tried to take it back from the last love. 

We sat in the kitchen one morning, that last love and I, laughing over coffee. Meanwhile, the photographer squeezed under the bed where it was too dark to see anything, not even a way out. I brought his coffee into the room, surprised he hadn't come into the kitchen for it. A hand sudden around my ankles and I fell, he crawled into me, sobbing and choking while he ate his own heart. You need to be a little braver to love someone than I was then and I felt my ragged heart locking itself away from him.

I saw him years later, and he still looked the same, a little less hair. Softer around the eyes, too, but still able to hold me in place. He'd won awards, toured. I hope somebody loved him really hard. I am sorry I couldn't, but I was so much younger then and even my coffee was weaker. 

In 1994 we went to Telc for the first time; there's a beautiful castle there. This was before Western tourism had really hit the country and we pretty much had the run of the place (now it has the red ropes that all castles buy in bulk). We posed in embroidered chairs at the dining hall table, slid around on the ballroom's parquet floor in the ubiquitous Czech slippers, took flash photos of the sgraffito which was not a misspelling. There was, in one room, a puzzle box. According to the guide, the box had 20 hidden compartments, of which they had only found fifteen. We fiddled with it for a while before zooming off, high on kofola and drunk on antiquity.

In this room now you arrive. With your wide eyes you open one drawer, with your careful mouth you speak and open two more. Clever fingers open the velvet drawer where a woman could store her jewelry, find the hidden latch and the lid flies open, and music pours out of the puzzle box, all the secrets but one revealed now. It is part of your genius that in this moment you pass your hand gently across the lid and stand and walk away, leaving that one last mystery for later, or for someone else, and go on to join the others while the music plays on behind you.

The summer of 1986, and I'd already been through so much. Thinking of the fear I'd had so long. I remember thinking that I'd had plenty of experience with feelings and that I wasn't going to let myself feel anything again. Listen to the fear that's gone. I had just turned 18. Strangled by the wishes of pater, hoping for the arms of mater. I'd started college broken-hearted and for that first year tried to not talk to anybody unless it was related to school. Get to me the sooner or later. I dressed in oversized shirts and jeans and shaved my head down to a soft fuzz that was, I believed, the only thing soft about me. I'll keep holding on. I worked in a movie theater and spent most of my free time in a dark room watching a flickering screen, and I lived on popcorn. Chance for me to escape from all I'd known. He opened the door to the ticket booth and sang "Pure Imagination" and I fell. Cause nothing here has grown. That was the summer we drove and drove everywhere. I wasted all my tears, wasted all those years. We drove to UC Berkeley and spent hours reading all the graffiti in the hallway of the observatory before we finally got to the roof to count the stars and I still thought I could keep it all in my head. And nothing had the chance to be good. One late night he stayed in my room, we slept curled like kittens, gentle and innocent, and in the morning I kissed him for the first time. I'll keep holding on, so tight. When the radio alarm went off it was playing this song, and I every time I hear it I remember how it felt, how sweet it was to open my heart again. That's all I have to say.

In search of a poem that I had mostly memorized in 1990 but was a little hazy on, lo! these many (23? sheesh) years later, I went digging through a box of paper that will either fascinate or terrify whoever goes through my stuff after I die. Here are poems I liked, torn out of the New Yorker in this case, or often photocopied or even copied by hand from books. Notes I took during poetry readings when I used to go, and even some fliers I made for readings of my own. The best reading I ever did was with Scott Soriano, who put a steak on his face and squirted blood out of it while reciting a poem that was a revision of Howl, but about Carls Jr., this was 1989 I guess. Most performance art seems kind of a disappointment to me after that. 

What else was in that box, Anne? Oh, children, gather round and see. Here are poems that a friend wrote, and songs. I haven't talked to him since he left Prague, that was 1995 I guess, but I can still sing one of the songs and every year I tell the joke I first heard from him, that Jan Hus was a man with a lot at stake. Also poems by my former insane roommate, no longer my roommate and probably even no longer insane. Poems by people I took classes with. No letters, because those are in another box around here somewhere. 

So many things by other people. I can't bear to toss it (and anyway it's just this one box) because even though the smell of the mimeograph machine has faded from them, my memory of exactly how I felt the first time I read some of these poems stays fresh, and I am transported back to sixteen, or twenty-six. 

And things I wrote as well. Mostly poetry. Oh, so young and earnest! My love was a tree, you guys, and also a glass of water. Already with the metaphors, and THAT earnest. And also one letter I wrote that I made a copy of for myself, stored separately from the other letters. It is three pages long, and tearstained, and so absolutely naked with pain that I want to get that girl a blanket and cover her. It has the range of a great battle, from the personal to the general, from Greek mythology to Red Hot Chili Peppers lyrics, except it is clear that I was mostly fighting with myself, as the object of my affection had long since left me. I sat there this afternoon, with these pages in my hands, thinking: should I throw this out? Because this does not really go with how I see myself now, and it is so painful to remember this that it is almost embarrassing. Back when I used to find it easier to tell the whole truth than to hold it in, even if it sliced me open on the way out. 

I mean: now, I want to finish something, and I know I can just just sit very still until you go. It's to the point where sometimes I hear the words before you say them, and I smile and say lightly that it was my fault anyway, sorry, and my teeth clamp over my tongue before I can say another word, and I wave goodbye and I don't look back until I know you're not looking. No more tearstained outpourings from this corner, no more bleeding the truth. So now I remember why I keep the letter, and fold it back into the box, as gently as I wish someone had been with me, put a lid on it, put it back in a quiet safe place.