Dearest Wendy,

I won’t be here next Monday — I’m going west to Seattle and then to LA for some story — but maybe, hopefully, I can come to the second event. Otherwise who knows how I’d see you! Would we be forced to take a walk to a coffee shop? Would we join an athletic league in a lesser park, where before the dubious contests began we would find ourselves divided into teams? Into like, schools of form? Cliques? I call not-being with the language poets. Or with the noted sons of language poets. Though now that I think about it I’d rather avoid the noted altogether. How are you? What can we do? Can we be in the femme vulgarian sect of whatever church we join after coffee? I think you’d need to buy a lot of dark honey and put on a dress that looks like an apron and not ask questions — like, for a lot of days, no questions of anyone, so that the priests are in a total terror, how are we supposed to take silence for an answer from a girl who is literally always silent, is always answering with her eyes, is a total bloodsucker for questions if questions are blood, never lets blood drop from her sight. One day she points at the Scandinavian flapjack-eating priest she wants and says so, laughing and laughing, saying, when she can stop laughing, that she’s inviting him to take her confession right up the ass. Everyone else would be laughing, too, since the flapjack-eating priest is actually a genuine worker who happens to be fixing some electrical izz in the vestibule.

If I sound confused it’s because a stranger was just telling me about her own rape, which did not occur in a fantasy league by any means. It occurred in a bed that she had paid for herself with her dad’s money. Her dad doesn’t know which I have to assume is why I do, but why do I have to remember it, Wendy remember when you said you felt like you wanted to tell me things, secrets, we barely know each other, you didn’t know why? Do you think you can find out? Harness the genie? I want it back in the bottle so I never know anything about a stranger again I’m so secretful and fucking dead at heart. God! I am, I’m sorry I said that. A walk to the coffee shop sounds good, but so does trying heroin on Wednesday.

Wait, when is the second event? When in the season?

All my luck!