Will you go to Target for me? They have more than tar there to get. Do you think you could get it there? If you like, you can go to Ikea instead or really wherever you think they might have it. Maybe they have it at Bed, Bath and Beyond? They have so much there- Maybe Best Buy? There’s a hardware store right down the street…
      I just want you to get me the thing that will be the right thing to handle the situation and then I want you to come here with it. But please don't just hand it to me and say, "Here, this will do the trick," because I won't know what to do with it. I don't even know what's wrong, just that something most certainly is and it has to do with me. I'd like you to ascertain what is wrong and apply your purchase to the wrongness. I'm not asking you to be my doctor, more someone who knowing how I usually am and how I could be again, knows what to do about the current situation. That’s why this is a love letter. The love part has to do with my confidence in you being the right person to do this. You won’t say, “Do it yourself. No one can fix anyone else.” That’s not what this is about. You will understand that my allowing you to do it is doing it.
I'm sure opening it will be difficult because the packaging will be complicated and unfair in so many ways, but I just want you to prevail over the packaging and get to the heart of what is inside the packaging. You can use knives to do this. I don't mind. You can even use my knives. My knives are your knives in this love we share. So yes, I'm giving you permission to wield knives. That should give you some indication of how serious I am about this and how necessary I feel it is too. 
And once you do open it, once you get past the packaging to the thing of it even if you have to wrestle and wield and swear and sweat, I want you to be able to unfold and decipher the map that comes with it in order to put it together. Please, saunter around and know what you're talking about. Say, "Right, right we just need to put this here and this here and now hold on, hold on, just hold on." If you like, you can pretend much of this, but try to be a good pretender. Okay? And then please say, "There, it's done. Well now, that was easy. Look, that was all you needed. Everything is assembled and everything is in place. Everything is right again. You're good to go. Now what would you like to do?” It would be especially great it you could smile when you say that last part like you already have all kinds of loverish ideas up your sleeves.

   I’m not any kind of seamstress, but still, even so, I’d like to express my strong and unwavering support for the NRA. I believe the National Ruffle Association’s stance towards the placement of ruffles in every school in America is utterly fabulous and I have no idea what in the world everyone’s getting their feathers so ruffled up about. I have always felt ruffles add a great deal to so many outfits and I believe school principals, teachers, and students would all look so much cuter with as many ruffles as they could manage to bear. 
   Furthermore, think how much happier the cafeteria and janitorial staff would be if only they were adorned daily with ruffles. Ruffle -borders fastened along the perimeter of chalkboards would, no doubt, help render learning an occasion that is both festive and celebratory. Ruffles in gymnasiums would add team spirit and camaraderie among both players and fans. Why use test-scores to stand out when spectacular ruffled displays could so easily be employed instead? Ruffles along corridors in schools could remind everyone that the road to excellence is what we make it and that we should, of course, make it beautifully ruffled. 
     Frankly, I vote for a ruffled world. Think of flamingos and peonies. Think of Flemish paintings. Think of bed skirts, valences and pleats. Yes, NRA, let this begin at once. Wait, what? Guns? Rifles? Well, that’s just plain nuts! More guns don’t keep people from getting killed. The more guns there are, the more potential there is for harm. These people must have been ruffle-starved during childhood. I’ve heard it called flounce-deprivation. We must remind the NRA through our words and through multiple ruffled actions that it is ruffles, not rifles. Ruffles, not rifles, ruffles not rifles- again and again. We must try to be patient. Hopefully, they’ll get it eventually and tiny children will be allowed to grow up, each with his own precious new body, including two whole arms, which he has every right to keep and use and bare and bear.

    I had a horrible dream about you! In it, you told me you were moving to Paris. That wasn't the horrible part though. The horrible part was that you were moving there exclusively to do heroin! Yes, that's right. You weren't going there to travel or look at art or teach or write or study, or even to just sit around eating delicious things made with large quantities of butter. You weren't interested in any of those things at all. And worse, it sounded like you'd just lost any kind of connection to a meaningful life- interior or exterior. It was like the you-ness of you had just disappeared. I was absolutely furious at you. I shouted, "Heroin? Paris? What? " I could not believe it. "Oh, you! How could you?" I paced around and waved my arms in a jazz of shock and dismay. I wept bitterly. I pounded the floor with my fists. "Why? Why?" I cried. 
     And you said, "Oh come on, don't you think you are being a bit dramatic?" You stood and opened a drawer on your nightstand and pulled out a guide to doing heroin in Paris book. You'd underlined many passages and had made multiple notes in the margins. On the inside front cover there was even a convenient pocket for needles that you proudly pointed out to me. You insisted that I had no idea what I was talking about. You said I was misinformed completely. You'd done research and I hadn't. "You know nothing about heroin in Paris," you said. "Nothing at all." 
     Then, I was somewhere else, maybe in Wisconsin,in someone's backyard, reading a postcard. It was from you, from Paris. Printed on one side was a drawing of a fountain. I turned the postcard over and you'd written something illegible about children, only you'd spelled children, "chilled wren," which made no kind of sense at all. I called my friend M. about it and straight away, she said, "Classic addict behavior." 
     "But, it was a dream," I said.
     "Still, she said.
     So anyway, you're not going to Paris in real life are you? And if you are, it's not for you to go do heroin right? Because if you did do that, I would think about you and worry about you so much and I would curse that dumb heroin book and the dumbshit moron who wrote it and I'd curse the empty demon that built a nest in your brain to live in and ruin you. And if you never came back, eventually I'd have to let go of you and I don't want to- I don't want to because you are so delicious and these sentences between us form a shape that I just never want to stop making.

     I seem to possess an unreasonable feeling of personal gladness about your existence. It's similar to the way I've felt about kitchen matches, the wooden ones that come in the cardboard box and which open like a drawer. Kitchen matches thrill me because they are more or less a fire-kit inside a coffin. And how many coffins have striking panels on both sides? An argument could be made that all matches are humble spectacles, even the flimsy ones that come in books are books of fire. I have also at times had to restrain myself from tasting paint-chips, but that is beside the point. The point is, that if I even remotely liked the expression, "You pull at my heart strings," that is what I would say to you, but I have never liked the idea of strings attached to anyone's heart, as if the heart were a marionette or worse, a tampon. I like to imagine hearts without strings. I do however think it is lovely that hearts have chambers like bed and breakfasts in England. I've never been to England so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but you do occupy some little part of my heart, some room. You don't live there, but my feeling for you has redecorated a little alcove and I sense an improvement; as if someone came in and made up the bed or swept. In any case, what I'm trying to tell you and what I should have said at the beginning of this letter, is that I spent some time, some hours, making you a wikipedia page. I listed your accomplishments and some of your happy features and I left out any unfortunate details because no matter what anyone says, I still believe there is such a thing as privacy. Since you don't have a name I simply listed you as Beloved. Unfortunately, the people at Wikipedia felt you weren't famous enough to merit a Wikipedia page, so they took the entry down. I received a confusing e-mail from them, which I answered and which was returned undeliverable in which, I tried to clarify that I was not in any way writing about Toni Morrison's excellent novel which coincidentally shares your name -Beloved, that I was indeed aware that there already were pages for both Toni Morrison and her book, nor was I trying to make light of the information super-highway or abuse wikis or pedias of any kind. I tried to explain that I just wanted you to be googleable so that you would come up, as you should come up, as a flower or vine, as an elevator, a ladder, stairs, a morning, a bird, a subject...