Dear Neil:
Is that how you spell your name? I have to go with sheer probability on this one; it is the more common spelling, after all. Still, you seem like more of a “Neal” to me – something softer, stranger, a tad bit girlier. I’ll never know how you spell your name, just like I’ll never be able to send this letter, but I’m writing it anyway, because I miss you. Funny, isn’t it? I only knew you for six nights. But I’m listening to Diana Krall tonight – “Narrow Daylight”, which I know is your favorite – and I had this thought that my life glimmers more since meeting you. It’s subtle, sure, but also omnipresent – I think of you on cool nights when the wind plays at the hem of my skirt, when I cross polished lobbies or see flashes of piped neon, when Delilah plays Bette Midler.
I remember the first time we met, at Jeanne’s wine bar, the way you cooed, “Ooh, a lesbian. Have a seat, girl,” and scooted so that I could move right into the middle of things, as if I belonged there. It was really only a few weeks since I’d been fucked over; it was the first time I’d really had to walk around alone since, getting hit on by burly middle-aged men, feeling exposed and threatened, and you didn’t even know, but you let me slip right in as if I were brave and bold like you, as if what I’d weathered made me tougher, more intriguing, like you were. You believed all of that, and said it so often that the other guys began to believe it, too, and it was this lie you all passed around until I gave myself over to it. I wore my skirts shorter, sang saucy renditions of boy-band melodies, sipped cosmopolitans and danced to bad hip-hop tracks in the club. I became, for six days, someone who wasn’t terrified and lonely and frightfully inhibited. And sure, it could only last for that week, but I haven’t forgotten, and I won’t, what it was to be free that way, to be so easy and wild and fun, for once.
So I think, every day, of you: feeding me the maraschino cherries you stole from the other guys’ drinks; dragging me onto the dance floor when “Buttons” came on; the way your skin shone almost blue under the lights, there, and your insistence that you were really black, just albino, which later turned out, improbably, to be true. The way you requested “The Rose” from the flamboyant piano man, and we danced cheek-to-cheek, and passing women stopped to watch us, to snap pictures, and we whispered as we moved, slowly now, smiling so hard that our pressed cheeks lost their color as we danced. The way you called me “kitten” and walked me to my room at the end of the night, like a perfect gentleman; the way you wanted to set me up with your hockey-playing, Home Depot-employed friend Kathy, and spoke of adopting me as if it were really an option. The way you laughed, trilling and so loud, so fabulous, that I could hear you from clear across the ship. The shock you mustered when I reenacted my latest gynecologist appointment, and the way we swapped wild stories, acting appropriately scandalized even as passersby confused our communion for a harder, messier kind of love. I wouldn’t trade those nights for anything. It sounds cliché, but that’s okay, I think, because it’s true; because you’ll never read this, never know how inadequate these words are. Because I have to put this out there, just in case you’re not lost to me forever. You live in Toronto. Your boyfriend’s name is Howie. You frequent hockey games and think that white Calvin Klein briefs are the hottest thing a man can wear. Perhaps these details will lead me to you again; maybe they’ll just bring you back to me on nights like this, when I stay up later than I mean to, when I feel sad and scared but full, somehow, and better off, because I had you for six nights, and in a world where that can happen, I can’t quite lose hope.
‘Til we meet again, darling,
Jen.
