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.

So I tried to call you today and you weren't there, but I got the voice of you instructing me to do the usual, so I did. I didn't leave my number because you have my number. Mostly I asked you about whether you thought the music of head-rubbing was interesting music, because one's ears are so close to the fingers moving upon one's head that it sounds a little sea-shellish. I asked too if you thought it was appropriate to call that music or if you would just call it noise? I said something about music being in the eye of the beholder, but then I corrected myself and said ear of the beholder. Then I laughed a little. I said something about Susan Sontag too and how I'd read this piece of hers about the differences between art and nature and how she said something about how no one describes a sunset as interesting and so I asked you if you'd ever seen an interesting sunset? I have seen some, but only after reading that thing by Susan Sontag. Then I asked you if you thought there were any positive aspects to shyness because I couldn't think of one. Then I said in this very serious voice, "Shyness is the enemy of the human." Then I asked if you could think of any positive things at all about shyness. I said if you could, to please e-mail the things to me because I'd been beating myself up a little for my own shyness problems. Then I practiced eye-contact with an invisible you, the kind of eye-contact where you are not boring a hole into the person's eyes, but more of a pleasant gazing kind and I completely forgot I was on the phone. Then the recording came on and asked me if I was satisfied with my message. I didn't know if I was or not. There wasn't an in-between choice. There was however an option to listen to the whole thing, so I chose that just to buy some time. In the end I chose to re-record, and started telling you about the eye-contact thing, but truthfully that sounded insane. Then I wondered exactly how much a telephone is really like an ear and if it were possible to convey the head-rub sound through the phone. I held my phone to my head and then realized it wouldn't work if it wasn't your head and it wouldn't work anyway. I got a little confused about what was possible in the whole regard of hearing. I thought then that there should be phones that looked like ears and felt like ears so one could talk on an ear. The possibilities of shapes and colors were stunning to me at that moment. Then I tried to say something slightly erotic, but realized there wasn't really a lead-in after the ears so it could have been slightly jarring. So, I just chose to re-record again and that is the message you finally got, the one that said, "Hi, it's me. Call me back." But it occurred to me later, because you hadn't called me back yet, that maybe you did hear the other two messages. Maybe you even heard them as I was leaving them? Maybe I pressed the wrong buttons? Come to think of it, there may have been three messages. I decided then though, that if you did hear them you listened to them in this very compassionate way and with the deep enjoyment of someone who loves me in return and appreciates all I comprise.