I’m in a chilly, sparse room in the middle of San Diego. Aside from the sounds of the city, it’s quiet, and there’s an offramp just outside my window. I’m on Facebook, casually scrolling down through the feed, and I think things like ‘she has lovely eyes’ as I pass this picture or that. No dreams of epic love stories or explosive romances full of sturm und drang (though those, really, are my forté).

Dear -,

I’m in a chilly, sparse room in the middle of San Diego. Aside from the sounds of the city, it’s quiet, and there’s an offramp just outside my window. I’m on Facebook, casually scrolling down through the feed, and I think things like ‘she has lovely eyes’ as I pass this picture or that. No dreams of epic love stories or explosive romances full of sturm und drang (though those, really, are my forté).

In another window I’m reading the strange tale of a programmer who struggled with NULL (the dreaded absence of things) and then became not-a-programmer with a made-up name that satisfied nobody. It reminds me of myself because I understand it somehow, and yet it’s not that much like me at all.

In another window, a few-half thought scribbles of a poem. It makes me think I’ve got something important to say.

And in yet another, code – so much code, pages & pages, some of it mine, some of it inherited, and sometimes I just stare at it and try to suss out its story. These little words and letters build a sort of home, and people fill it with their excitement and joy and sadness, and yet they’re only characters assembled just so. It makes me think you can do anything with the little bits you’ve already got laying around.

Beside me – a queen size air-mattress two feet tall. I didn’t even think to know they made them that big (and for all they tell you about trapped air being an insulator, big air mattresses don’t ever warm up). I can tell you the best way to stay warm is to wrap up the blanket all around you like a cocoon and morning will come with its perky hello just a few moments after you’re warm enough to sleep.

I wonder what other people would think of an evening like this. Would they run back out the door and into the arms of the raucous night, the streetlights and the beer and the smoke?

I like the quiet. I like the emptiness. It gives me time to fall in love and fall out of love with nobody ever needing to know, to imagine countless tales that are mine and mine alone, to do almost nothing with a contentment I don’t know that I could ever communicate.

And these – these characters arranged into words, they tell you to do something, like the code I write tells a computer to do something. They open up images behind your eyes, and perhaps those images unfold into stories of your own. So you’ll fill it with something that’s not entirely you but mostly you, and somehow a little bit of me mixed in.

It’s like this – even in the quiet I can’t become nothing, and I don’t want to. Even without words the stories we tell ourselves about the world will still tell themselves, because that’s what we do. I tell myself I still love her, but no I love the memory of her and I don’t even know that I want her still. And then there are others to whom I feel that pull, and yet I don’t know that I know them yet – just this sense of someone tugging on the other end of a string, ever so lightly, by the gravity of their presence. And that’s how I explain the infinite misunderstanding of ever-present possibility to myself – the heavens in a constant dance.

And there are variations of her – and you – out there who will read this and wonder about the mystery of my vague Presidio ramblings, or who will fill the unnamed space with themselves and smile and welcome, or others who will shake their head and resist, these silly advances I never made. I hear these stories now, as if simply by existing each of us says ‘let there be -’ and creates an infinity of our very own, and our infinities glide by, exerting their gravity upon each other, and sometimes collide and create even greater vastness – a field of stars so unmeasurable that when we look at the immensity of it – when we stare up at the sky at night, we don’t feel as much overwhelmed as we feel a glorious calm. Like god spread out his arms across the Milky Way. Like we are each the artists of our endlessness.

Even the absence of things, we fill up with great parts of ourselves. Quiet is an infinite vessel, and the beauty of it is that there is no such thing as silence. We fill it with songs that are ugly and profane and profoundly beautiful.

This is my greatest hubris and it is my humblest offering of honesty. And yet I wonder whether naming things and giving them containers wouldn’t be the easier path to grasp. But I don’t want you to know. Not yet. I want you to wonder and find out where you want the story to go.

And here in the quiet of a little room in a city as far as I can get from that little yellow room where I discovered there was a ‘me’ distinct from the others but not so far apart (as I mistakenly believed so often through those forming years) that nothing can be truly shared and understood, without crossing a border or an ocean, I can hear these tales telling themselves.

This – the feeling of not-quite-knowing – of recognition teasing at the edges of your mind – that I imagine – and hope so completely – that you are feeling – is the way I feel when I read Neruda untranslated, in words that are familiar enough to Latin that their meaning is only whispered and not written out clearly without longing or distance. I find poetry in the sounds and syllables and the hints; in the things that I know clearly somewhere in my heart – like the stars – even as my head loses itself in alleys and side streets.

And for this reason – I’m resisting the urge to make this mean something, to summarize a point that will make it all clear in a brilliant instant. I want to leave the wall white and yet I want you to know I am here, even when I am silent and unseen, because when my world is most quiet and small – I know you are here because I feel you here.

And if – for some reason – this collection of phrases finds a fertile home in your imagination – you have – as ever:

My love.