And I keep thinking how you too—the Tara of my reality, the Tara of flesh and bone, the Tara who will not eat carbs after dark and looks at me like she’s trying to drink me in—will slowly burn out. You will age, my dear, you will go old and grey. And I grieve for the beauty you will lose, for the shadow of what you are now that you will become. I grieve for the places my hands and lips like to run down. The watered silk of your back that will turn to weathered parchment. The symphonic curves of your body that will wither and shrivel into a memory of loveliness. A memory of you at your finest. You will become a memory even as you live and breathe, my love, and I can hardly bear the sadness of that. I can hardly bear it at all.

But I digress, don’t I? Returning to the subject of my confession, I find that, differing only in the details, all my dreams are like this. There is always some sort of tragic ending. I cannot seem to conceive of a happy one.

Things seem like they are at a standstill. My life feels stagnant. I seem to be frozen and unsure of where to go.

I do not know but, as I said, I sometimes think I don’t know how to be happy at all.

All my love to you, dear girl.

Jay

Tara,

I have been sitting here for several hours, determined to remember. The first time I saw you, you had seemed so lost, standing alone, forlorn. Looking out over the sun dying upon the water.

The memory has sharpened.

I remember taking a chance and postulating one of my stranger thoughts. It was possible—truly, it was expected—that you would not catch on; I was ready to steer my words to ordinary ground.

But you had understood. I remember that. You had understood me.

I recall, during our sporadic communications, being surprised by how much of yourself you revealed to me. I would have been flattered had I not recognized you instantly—I knew so well what it felt like to be you. To walk around like an exposed nerve, to not to know how to draw up the covers necessary for survival. I saw that you, child that you were, knew loneliness like few ever will and I felt so sorry for you.

Do you remember what I had told you about us, once, long ago?

It was something I had said in passing, during a conversation that I have only now, after so many hours spent staring at the sun sliding off walls, retrieved from some intractable fissure hidden deep within the recesses of my consciousness. ‘We are not happy unless we are crying’—that is what I had told you. Do you remember?

I am going to Berlin tomorrow and must chain myself down there for a week.