Letters not sent, #1

Dear Ansel,

Insurgente Lola writes, "don't hesitate, love profusely." It's frightening work, but it's the only way I know how to do. I think that this is true for you, too. I feel like animal tracks in desert dust, and you know how to read me. Like a constellation in the night, and you know how to find me with a naked eye. Like the moon roused during the day, and you can sing me back to sleep. Maybe you are a library and I am a book kept inside you. You are stamped across my heart a hundred times since I met you and counting.

But then again Mom says, "You don't need to overdo it. He knows you like him. So stop it. Yeah, I can say hes a cute son of a bitch. But you got him, stop mooning. Don't be boring. Talking doesn't make it real. It only says 'this person can deal with this amount of stuff from me' but you've got to let it evolve. You've got to meander through the thrush with it and see how it evolves and see who the person is without you putting them on the spot. You have to let his part in it show itself so you can know who he is in a relationship instead of what you demand from a relationship. I think he knows how you feel but you don't know how he feels so you need to make room for him to start to have his own discussion, to bring up his own conversation about it so you can actually see who he is and not who you think he is or who you want him to be. Who is he really."

I'd like to think I know a lot of what you think about relationships but the truth is that I initiated all of those conversations out of some pressing need to know the answer to a particular question. Like your definitions of "friendship," "relationship," "non-monogamy," and so on. You said, "It's not relevant for other people to know if I'm sleeping with one of my friends. We should be friends first and lovers second. There is no useful or productive basis for a relationship except friendship/kinship. I don't see lover categories as a productive basis for relationships or romantic love as a totally different basis for a friendship/relationship. Especially if there's more than one. For people I want to know we're lovers, I can tell them. I think it's dehumanizing to label someone through the status of your sexual relations."

I've been thinking a lot about why I've found it so difficult to untether myself from standard relationship terminology ("relationship," "partner," "primary," "lover," etc) when, in spite of the language we choose, we relate to each other in a very particular, honest and tender sort of way. So why do I crave labels? What do they mean to me? Shakespeare asked in 1594, "What's in a name?" and I am still wrestling with the same question.

So far what I've been able to come up with is that relationship words do a particular kind of work, beyond relying on shared meanings. Relational words are a shorthand way of achieving the desire to be claimed. This was my revelation: I want to be claimed. Not possessed, but claimed in the sense of being proud to be with me.

I thought about presenting this new discovery to you but I held off and then at your birthday dinner everyone was talking around the table and you asked if you could tell how we met and I said yes. You told everyone, "We met on Craigslist." Someone asked how, and you said that you posted a personal ad that I responded to and that you think I'm totally awesome. I felt claimed in a way much more particular than the blanket terminology of "girlfriend."

Yet, at the same time I don't know if I can agree that friendship is a very effective term when it is so vague. In the new and frightening territory of tenderness, perhaps what is emerging is the unnameable-ness of the way people actually relate to each other. How serendipitous that you read to me Jack Gilbert's "The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart" on our first date. I could quote it here for the hundredth time or I could say chirp, chirp, chirp and let that stand in for my love for you.