Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.
The other day I wrote down the following wish: 'When passing a house, to be pulled in through the ground-floor window by a rope tied around one's neck and to be hauled up, bloody and ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture, walls, and attics, without consideration, as if by a person who is paying no attention, until the empty noose, dropping the last shreds of me when breaking through the roof tiles, appears on the roof.
I feel like we've been forgotten, I feel like we're all dying of anorexia and heartbreak and everyone--you--you just turn the other way. I read Ms., flipping through its pages like a tornado, looking for anything but what's there. I don't have a career, I don't have a husband, I don't need to know how to raise my son. I need to know what to do when I stop wanting to be an astronaut and start wanting to be Bobby's Girlfriend.
