Dear K,

I am all the things you imagine me to be. I am out there somewhere in the dark smoking a cigarette making new friends with my discussion of the inconsequential things that don't matter. I am happy, and I am sad. I am gripped by things.

I am out here on the prairie under the sky, the ground is lit a sickly orange by sodium lights. Falling stars leave their tails in my vision. My glasses are dirty and my thoughts are clean. I want to walk away. I want to hop a train. I want to run alongside the great iron horse and jump into a boxcar filled with the insane and eccentric.

I spend my nights in bars, listening to jokes about the state of things. About the worlds of people I know only because we've spent so many nights talking to each other from the stage. I hear ugly things. I hear hate. I hear sexism, racism, and all the other negative isms. I listen to jokes about cum and jizz and tits and ass and pussy and bitches and cunts and assholes and the gays and lesbians and black people. Do you want to know something curious? At the end of these ugly things, people laugh. They fill themselves with air and shake. They let loose. They get drunk and yell at the stage for more. You see it in their eyes. They're at a buffet of ugly things. A Golden Corral, but instead of half cooked things under the warming lights, there is only the dark side of humanity.

But still they laugh.

They laugh at themselves too.

And then I take the microphone from the stand, and I spill my silly words from my mouth. Like a person at the dentist, mouth shot full of novacaine.

I'm going to get fired from my job at the end of the month. There are a lot of reasons why. The main one is that I don't care enough to keep it. I'm not a person who should be lit with florescent lights. My back hurts from sitting at a desk. My wrists ache from typing. I need to stand. I need the endless night of a dark theater. I need the blinding numberless suns of the stagelights. I need the roar of the audience, cut with their silence and disapproval. I need humans. I need pain. I need joy. I cannot bear this monotony much longer.

But I have too. I have to grind away my years until I have paid my dues. I have to throw away those countless hours before the stage. Or in my writing, I have to throw away my youth for the old age I want.

I wasn't born handsome or rich. I wasn't born with enough talent to get paid for the things that make me happy, and I think I'm better for it.

I am nice. I take my victories like my meals. I work for them. They are not given to me, and they are all the sweeter for the hunger spent on them.

I hope I leave a body of work behind me when I die. So my friends have something pretty to read. My family will say nice things about me at my funeral, but they won't know me. I come from people who live in daylight and think of things in nice orderly rows, boxes to be checked, and categories to be filled. They put me in a box long ago and have, either through habit or comfort, neglected to change that box as I have changed.

To them I'm still the strange child who read greek myths at the dinner table. I'm still the weird kid who couldn't say anything profound, and now they won't listen to me. That's the danger with getting to know people. You don't allow them to change and grow.


But I have waxed.

I miss you.

Regards,

K