Dear Mr. You by Mary -Louise Parker Page B

way to take the voices you loved, they would have to stay behind, so you took the ellipses.
    She sat there talking with you repeating, I think because you knew what might actually last. What you were allowed to keep.

Dear Young Leman,
    “I think about why it stopped. Why you left and what was truth? What was blind passion, and I don’t know, maybe the passion was the truth. Maybe the only thing that slipped away was the blind part.”
    That’s what you wrote after we were done and put away.
    You were right. Temporary blindness is useful. How can we see anything when we’re so busy being seen? When we’re being whipped up into those soft peaks.
    It was sweet, being looked at by you. You were so young. We would spend hours calculating our age difference: “When I am Q you would still only be N and that will continue to suck,” I’d say. “But wait!” you’d say, sitting up suddenly. “When I will be P, you will be M! That’s not so terrible, right?” I’d try to picture it. “Maybe,” I’d say, “but you still won’t even have a yard. Or legitimate regrets. Do you even have your wisdom teeth?” You’d growl at me for ruining your idea. Threaten to bonk me with thechampagne bottle. “Maybe when you’re this many?” I’d hold up fingers to indicate. “But by then I’ll be in a wheelchair.”
    “So what. I’ll push you around,” you’d lie back next to me, not needing to do anything other than roll over and put your hands behind the small of my back.
    I flew you to Denmark and you showed up with a backpack and a Shakespeare textbook. It was good there. We looked the same in age so no one knew. We could fall on each other in the park or ravage each other by the elevator bank in the hotel, right there. “Going down,” I said and you didn’t look to see if someone might be getting off because you were busy getting off yourself and didn’t care if we were caught. While you slammed into me I moaned too loudly, slid over, and pushed the call buttons with my hip. So used to hiding, a part of me wanted someone to catch us so I could say who cares. Who cares if I am hiding out in him, I thought. Go find your own dysfunction. Who cares if you loved me that well and you were that young. It wasn’t against the law. Unlikely to make it another two months, I savored it. Binged on it. I thought go ahead, rip me open, and while you are at it, rip up my life’s agenda into tiny pieces. It isn’t working out so well anyway.
    We went to the park after you got there because I wasn’t working that day and it was warm out. Approaching the hotel we could see the flags in front slapping each other around. My skirt blew up and you caught it and held it down; a sweet gesture of chivalry from you who’d just put your fingers inside of me on a park bench, and there it was, in that second. That was the man you would be one day, holding down a woman’s skirt in the wind, though by then you’d be able to buy drinks in any country. I knewin that instant I’d never know you as an older man, with reading glasses and a newspaper. That moment had been my glimpse. As we entered the hotel you said
    Part of me would like to fuck you in a really expensive car and
    Part of me would like to fuck you in a really cheap car
    We lazed and read our books separately on the bed like two older people. I realize now that I was still terrifically young too, but you were so much younger.
    Close to midnight we woke and took a taxi to a Biergarten . In the cab you went on about how we can’t ever reach anything according to quantum physics; we can only really travel between two points. I said does that mean we have to walk once we get out of the taxi because I am tired from all the sex, and you said, no, listen, if I am here and you are there, I can come to you but it’s only half the distance of our two beginning points, and I said, okay. That’s far out? But I’m hungry. You can draw it for me later.
    We’d sit and draw diagrams about