My darling confidant,

I apologize for my expected tardiness in responding. Just imagine the usual path of the Pony Express was delayed a bit longer because of the recent hoopla of the holidays. Norman was perhaps a bit too far off the beaten, snow-shoveled path; they just decided to wait an extra week or so. They figured it would do the inhabitants good to wait a while, for once. Think of it that way, and it seems rather sweet. Perhaps you needed a reminder of how good it felt to be surprised, just when you thought things were beginning to fizzle. This one’s too good to go flat, though I’m pleased to report.

While things are finally beginning to settle from all the festive goings-on, I’m less ready than ever for this break to end. The colorful bulbs of Christmas are finally being strung up and tucked away into a cold, dark storage unit and I’ve never been more ready to see them go. It was the best winter I can remember in recent memory and it couldn’t possibly last long enough. The icy chill was easy enough to shrug off, but more joints and muscles are sore from sitting awkwardly hunched over in front of the monitor, waiting for my life to start happening.

This year’s winter was perhaps even better than those innocent childhood mornings when Santa was even more mysterious and mythical than my current sex life. However, it feels damn good to know the truth after the fall, even if we were kicked out of the garden...  God’s ain’t got nothin’ on what’s growin’ in our minds.

 

Typing like a madman, my thoughts are in a frenzy when I really get going: something that doesn’t happen enough. It’s all fits and starts and constantly referring back to your comments and feeling ultimately like there’s nothing I can add to what you’ve already said, so flawlessly. You say everything just as I’d love to be able to, with a voice so familiar and steady, it’s hard to believe it’s not my own. Your words always edify and intoxicate me.

I’m very much relieved you’ve decided to break out of your impersonal shell.                     

It distracted me from the real point of these coded correspondences: essentially just for us, individually and together, to make sense of our uncannily poignant and indisputably stirring mutual perception of the world. I can’t imagine our secret sessions ever being any less than wholly soul-fulfilling.

 

Inevitably, I doubt you will ever realize the wonders you work that never cease to humble me.  

You constantly remind me of who I am and who I most aspire to be. 

You know I have more reverence for you than any living person I’ve ever known.

And if you didn’t, you certainly should.

I long for your diction like babies long to be held.

You know, we never got those promise rings we talked about.

In an equally random and distracted end-note, keeping with my current and oft utilized stream-of-consciousness approach: I so love the exciting prospect of a new relationship that blossoms out of meeting new and interesting people. It serves to renew my faith in the ability of other people to be unexpectedly and pleasantly engrossing. It reminds me that I cannot consistently expect the worst from people, even though perhaps I should. Instead, I’m always thinking that this time, things will be different. I see new people in my life as the ideals of what I would hope they could be... and as we both know too well, that is almost always grounds for disappointment. I need to fine-tune my ability to be pleased with what is concretely there in others, without any of that other pointless waiting, hoping and wishing.  What else is the internet for but to maximize our longing?

 

-Your envious admirer,

consistently ed·i·fied (ěd'ə-fī'd)

1. to build up, establish, or strengthen a person, institution, etc.; to uplift

2. to instruct or benefit; to inform or enlighten intellectually or spiritually

Etymology:

Latin aedes 'building' + -ficare 'to make'