Dear Mr. You by Mary -Louise Parker

from that bike of my lover, help me hold the burn, thank you, mister, which confused him, but then I put my leg on a stool and pointed, and the sight registered to the bartender, who was sympathetic. Minutes later I limped back with a tube of Neosporin in one hand while holding an ice pack to my leg with the other. You were now lucid, and I realized I was hungry too, but you’d eaten all the chips in the basket. I was getting light-headed from my flesh wound and from breaking the sound barrier on Ventura Highway when our foodarrived. You looked at my plate and said Beauty, you ordered so well. You didn’t glimpse at your own dinner as you dipped into my guacamole. I eyed your plate. You had in front of you a similar combo, including guacamole. I stopped moving entirely and watched you dip a chip in my guacamole and say “What is that but just altogether fucking yum.” You weren’t looking at me as you continued to eat my food and I couldn’t move from rage. There was such a fog around me that I felt like I had entered a Whitesnake video. I had a rush of leaving the physical plane and I watched from the ceiling as I took my fork and stabbed you in the hand that was reaching, again, toward the last of my guacamole. The fork made contact and stayed lodged in the fleshy part at the top of your hand, the part they tell you to squeeze if you have a migraine, and then I removed it and reentered my body. I didn’t feel recognizable human emotions, but knew my name and could maybe quote some of the liner notes from Bat Out of Hell. No one moved. You stared at your hand and said softly, whoa, you drew blood. You leaned back and smiled. Babe, you said, what did you do with that Neosporin? I said I must have lost it. Go get more at the bar and could you order me some guacamole while you are at it. You put your hand down the back of my shirt as you got up and said my legs belonged in a museum. I smiled but didn’t look up yet because I knew that when I did I would see someone who was a former and not a current, so I focused on beer as I wiped the last little smidge of your blood off of my fork and onto my napkin. I helped myself to your Negra Modelo and thought about the lovely sound of the word cerveza , and how much better things sound in a romance language, even when it’s only food. I looked down at my leg, realizing the scar would be the second of two that I’dgotten that year. They would both be there in twenty years, like the faintest freckled mouse ears that really, you would need a map to find. It would take me almost until now to suspect that you were a good guy and I didn’t even know you that well, or for that matter, a good many of the people attached to my scars, visible or not.

Dear Mentor,
    Before you, I’d catch a fish from time to time, but I needed someone to show me how to bait my hook in this one way.
    Most everything you said in the rehearsal room as a director was applicable to life. You said
    Let go of what happened last time
    And
    Start with what you know
    And
    Don’t expect a response
    Our first week rehearsing together, we were outside on a break and you asked me what my character did at night when she couldn’t sleep. I rattled off stuff I thought was super-interesting before I said, “and I feel like she’s the kind of person who . . .”
    I kept on, but something I’d said had given you a twitch. Your face was very close to mine and I remember the direction our bodies were facing in the courtyard, all of that. You put that one finger up, the index that you always gestured with by making those swirls in the air by your breastbone, like a kid swinging chewed-up gum around his finger, or the guy with headphones when you’re on television signaling to you to WRAP IT UP. I don’t know what that was about but I always found it endearing. Your fingers were small for a man, almost delicate, but your pirate’s swarthy complexion and that long wavy dark hair gave you an air of exotic sensuality.