1.
I left a comment on your blog. Rather than using my real name, I used my handle and linked to my own blog. You would have had to click on my profile to see who I was, and then you would need to have recognized me from the photo in which I am dressed as zombie Che Guevara two Halloweens ago. I understand that you did not reply.
2.
I @ replied to you on Twitter. My Twitter username is @GoGoGrizzly and my account is linked only to my GalleryBlog where I post photos of anthropomorphic cloud shapes. My profile picture is a drawing I made of a very old G. W. Bush being ejected from a bright orange rocket ship. He is wearing a tuxedo instead of a space suit, and his face is distorted by hollow cheeks and bulging, fearful eyes as he is sublimated by vacuous blackness.
Maybe you weren’t sure who I was?
3.
I sent you a message on Facebook. I would have written on your wall, but you did not approve my friend request. This might be because I jokingly made my Facebook page as if I am a ninety-year-old man who has been living as a woman since meeting a handsome contortionist while stationed in Cairo during the Korean War. I thought you would get it, though, because there was that one night, many years ago, when we joked about the characters behind our pseudonyms and I told you that Jeb Rett Bookman was precisely as he is now described in my profile. I hinted towards this in my message, but I did not wish to break character. I was sure you would understand. And yet you sent no response.
4.
I wrote you an email, but I could not send it. I do not have your most recent contact information and, on your website, the only way I could contact you was through your publisher. I am certain that this faceless corporate entity could not possibly understand the connection we share. She/he/they would never understand the nights we spent sitting on the sidewalk across the street from my apartment building, smoking clove cigarettes, giggling softly and shushing each other so my roommate would not hear your brilliant words filtering through his open window. Only the two of us knew that you would wake up in Victor’s bed between 3 and 4 a.m. and unwrap his sweat-stuck limbs from your body. In your silk paisley bathrobe, you tiptoed to my doorway to pull me from the binding glow of the computer monitor. You would request a cigarette by waving two fingers in front of your lips, and those lips would arch upwards at their edges as if you meant to appear guilty. But you could never fool me.
I could never explain to anyone else how I stored our glorious sleep-deprived moments in a velvety pink balloon that floated in the back of my mind. Those memories were only recollected when a negative pressure set over me, causing a lightning storm in my mind and popping that thought-filled bubble. Vaporous images of you seeped into every recess of my consciousness. I cannot wash them away.
I wonder what you would have thought when you read how dearly I wished for us to revisit our time together. Do you think you would have written me back?
5.
I am publishing this under a code name on one of your favorite websites. I know your reading tastes will have changed now that you are a famous novelist, but I am sure you will read this and acknowledge that those moments exist beyond my mind alone. You must remember. What we had should be treasured by two.
I have quit smoking, you are married to Victor, and we can revisit the past only in our dreams. I think I loved you then—the thought of you still triggers a sinking in my chest, as if my heart is riding a tiny roller coaster built for hamsters and garden gnomes. But I cannot leave my wife and child for a woman I knew only in scented smoke and street-lit shadows.
Surely you will understand. Please, do not contact me.