dear jason

Although you were straight — and still are — you were totally and completely in love with me. It's extraordinary, I can't imagine being in love with someone I didn't want to touch, or suck, or fuck, but you were totally and completely in love with me. I think this is to both of our credits, and it was such a sad story, ultimately. I think I was in love with someone in high school — not entirely sure, and I don't think about him much, or write about him much, at all — but I still count you as the first person that I loved.

You will not be at all interested in this, but — I think love is purely material, like a mark or a sound, just music or noise, and it has no content, signified, to it. If you ask someone, "why do you love so-and-so?" there is no real answer there, the disaster of love illuminates the abject failure of the human technology of the word to overwrite the material of the earth. There really is just nothing to say about it. I could go on about you, you were so funny, and kind, and charismatic, smart in a sly way, subtle, all of those things that I love about you, but the feeling that I had — the materiality of love — just entirely resists the symbol. It's futile, a failed effort, at the start, to try to symbolize your qualities, or why you (anyone) might love someone. I think this is the terror — on both ends: there is no reason, no calculation, no thought, rationale, justification — it simply is a feeling and, if one holds to it, notices it and acknowledges it, there is not much to do with it except find spatial proximity to this person who is the object of the affect of love.

I'm glad things in New York are working out nicely, feel free to send money. I've been emailing with Doug recently, he wouldn't say much about you but I suppose he wouldn't at this point.

You sketched the outline of the man I will love. I doubt I will have to take you down again.

Patricia W,

Michael