I've been thinking for so long now on how to begin, but I must remember that we have already begun, and begun again, over and over again and again, so that this cannot be considered a true beginning nor a false start but always already a continuation leveraged more towards the future of what we can and should be rather than our past follies. What perplexes me is why it should be so difficult to communicate with you now, still, after all these years. What is within me that holds me back even now? What is it about you that intimidates me so? What is this dance we are stepping, how is it working on me and where is it taking us? I have so many questions and so few answers, but I cannot send you a rambling list of inquiries lest you attempt to provide for all of them, which you very well may and as you have noticed is a difference that separates us. Let me address as best I can the last letter you sent me two months ago and all the space in between....

I do not struggle with my feelings for you, as it seems you often suspect. I have ceased to do so since our powerful cathartic scenario in the fading summer days of 2013, an experience I continue to cherish and will not soon forget. This remains to be true and lasting, despite my ignoble silence nor whether you feel this to be true as I know it to be so. Concerning this point of how do I love you, I am no longer interested in elucidating grand mysteries with broken syllogisms and would choose instead to let the mystery remain ineffable and the language to remain broken so as to appreciate them both as grand ruins of our transcendent potential and inevitable misery in deciphering the absurdity of human emotions. Yet I realize you want to detect and dissect, to hold and turn in turns, so I continue now even as I maintain that concretization is not in either of our best interests.

I am not floating, on the contrary I am beginning to take root. Yes, we have no promises which means no economy and no currency. This seems like an overwhelmingly positive attribute of our relationship, yet you continually describe it in the pejorative, as an absence, or perhaps as too abstract, something you struggle to see clearly. You doubt that anything has ever happened, has ever been said or revealed, that we have ever found each other, and all of our efforts to fortify these excavations so as not to repeat old woes. This doubt is not mine, not shared by me, and I am not convinced that it is completely your own or that the origins lie within you but rather from without, infecting and demoralizing everything which we have shared. Maybe this is symptomatic of the language which has formed the majority of our shared experience so that things could become qualitatively different with more physical presence -- that is to say, maybe things would be different if we lived together more with bodies than these sprawling letters - but I have always sensed this overwhelming potent doubt in you, even while we were together, and have repeatedly pointed it out to you. I would like to kill it! To free us both, to invigorate a hibernating energy in our spines and reclaim the throne of our attention for faith in the unknown, for wonder, enchantment, and imagination. It seems to me that these are the things our relationship is based on (when it is flourishing), the antithesis of reason, the parallax of accountability, freedom.

I want to address the crystal clear fact that you have needs that I cannot sufficiently cater to. For your part, you have made every sincere effort to explain these needs in grandiose detail, elucidating their origins and transmutations from the free flowing affective core then processed and mechanized into a logical codex that you seem convinced is closer to my native tongue. You ask for accountability, to be made time for, and for perpetual explications of the present, all of which I have failed to reciprocate. I realize this. For my part, I have not provided you with a clear list of objectives for which you might serve more successfully as my lover, though I have attempted various forays in the past and even recently in NY. I do not feel guilty or apologetic for not providing something that I have been clear about not finding desirable, but I feel a great amount of shame and sadness for not being able to negotiate an understanding with you even after all these years and all these letters, and mostly for your feeling unsatisfied by me. I am sorry that I am so obstinate to your needs, that I am so diligent in refusing your wants, that I consciously and repeatedly deny giving you what you consciously and repeatedly ask for. In the months leading up to August 2014 when we were finally reunited I tried to describe to you a scenario for love that is not based on a standardized economy of value exchange, of buying or trading. I desire to sacrifice myself to another -- to you -- and in a way would consider the willingness of the other to sacrifice themselves for me to be the ultimate symbolic exchange of love that I could never accept, so that it is only through this tragic embrace, the potlatch of creation and destruction, this cosmic dance of love without regret, that we could be joined into a singular entity without competing identities. I did not know what was going to happen in NY that summer (how could I!?) but I do know that I came with an open heart, prepared to put everything on the table if only you would do the same. Maybe I'm fucked up, a fool in believing that I was in fact willing or able to offer this, but regardless you made it very clear that you were not willing, too tentative and skeptical and honestly a bit jaded after everything that we have been through. I cannot provide you the presence and promises you have requested, and you cannot assist me in attempting this admittedly insane and antisocial alternative economy of love. This has always been the case, so there has always been a distance between us.

You are often in my thoughts, often on my mind. I long to share conversation with you, to jump back in to the shimmering pool of free exchange we once had. Our exchanges in NY and all communication since has seem castrated -- to use your words -- by a kind of visceral violence. I can no longer bear your warring nature, and while I still find your thunder tongue endearing I cannot absorb the brute of its force when it's directed at me. It makes me feel literally castrated, impotent, and numb -- psychically and physically. As attracted as I am to your body and your spirit, your temperament sends chills through my corpus, as we both observed through our failed intimate encounters. I have always been more interested in the psychic dimension of sex than the physical release, of mental flow rather than streams of pleasure, so upon reflection this encounter makes sense to me even if at the time I felt humiliated and confused, even more so by not being able to provide you with a reasonable explanation. I'm not trying to pass blame on you or make you ashamed for who you are. I love who you are. I'm just being transparent with you about the effects you have on me, on how you affect me. It has become so that I almost dread our interactions, so saturated with doubt and fear and judgment have they become. My anxiety has manifested in more and less conscious avoidance and denial, which has only made things worse. I am only sorry that I do not have the energy to continually remind you of who we are and where we stand, that I don't have any more fight left in me, that I have come to feel that this time and energy in reassuring you has become destructive to myself.

You asked me to be transparent about my feelings for you. Well, I love you deeply, sincerely, and without regret. I also feel a toxicity between us which in the past I have unfairly attributed to an aspect of your identity that you were refusing to acknowledge and now have come to understand as a result of our gyroscopic dynamic - I acknowledge my role in the dance. All of our attempts to dissipate this shadowed presence seem to have ended positively, in some new headspace with fresh eyes and open hearts, even though it was bloody war to get there. However, you exhibit a recurrent amnesia followed by an inevitable nostalgia so that I find myself dealing with the same problem over and over again. I am not fond of this process, of the war or the explanations or the conveyer belt. I love you and want to be with you but it seems I cannot, I refuse to. I will not fight anymore, with anyone, especially someone that should know me so well. I would rather not participate. I would rather not be present. I was very clear about this in August and the months preceding. Neither of us feel this relationship is "healthy" so it should not be maintained. We both feel excluded from the other's desires and we share in seeing the obstacle outside of ourselves.

Yes, I want you to forget me, all of me. Or else remember me completely. When you forget just a portion I become fractured, muted, mutated, incapacitated. Keep me whole, whether within you or not. I do not feel "tangled" in a paper reality, I use words for what they are, juggle the signifiers and relish in the infinite stream of associations. There is no fucking piece of paper, if anything you are the piece of paper, there is no you or me, there is no signified, even the language is a compromise. Nothing concrete, nothing more real than anything else. When it's all thrown out it can all come rushing back in again. Clichés are wonderful memes for collating bygone histories (I'm not against them!) but I want new words, new combinations, new patterns of thought to describe a reality in the making, an anticipation of what could be, otherwise what else am I living for? We make the reality we want to inhabit and I no longer wish to live in the past or the present. No more expectations, no more rules, total emancipatory anarchy. Maybe this sounds like I'm running away from you or something? That I don't want to commit, be tied down? That I am a fool, or just an idiot, or more kindly just overly idealistic? I want this reality, and can describe it more and more clearly so that I can inhabit it, but only alone it seems as no one else will accompany me there. I thought we could build this together, live there together, but it requires a dramatic split with the world that you have been clear in being uninterested in. Hence, we continue: separately. I will not tie things up, synch it all up into a tactile form -- however malleable -- for you to contemplate. I refuse this world and its previous inhabitants. In my mind it is they that are the fools, as foolish as I am at least, so there is no reason that I cannot carve my own path through the crust. This is a letter to tell you why I left.

I was also thinking about relationships for a period, specifically during the summer when I wrote so many letters to so many loved ones and was conducting so many conversations about so many things with you. All the letters went out and nothing came back, except from my parents and from you. Maybe you and they are all that I have in this world. Maybe you know me better than anyone ever has or ever will, that we are bound eternally and inextricably. I think so, I choose to think so, and that is not something that can easily be tossed aside nor would I want to. I never question what constitutes our relationship. I never question who you are or why I love you. I know these things and I won't forget these things. I have no doubts about you, about us, about what we have had or what we have, or ever question that it will continue. This fortifies me, fills me up, makes me feel alive. You are my pharmakon.

Perhaps this is still all inconclusive, unsatisfying, or otherwise unsavory. I never want to take you for granted. We cannot be together, not because of time or space but because we both realize that it is in fact not healthy for either of us, and this is not news. I know you will love some portions of this letter and completely despise other aspects, just as you respond to how I think in general. I accept this, I accept you, and I look forward to our ongoing relationship which is very true and very real, always already.