Dear Mr. You

by Mary-Louise Parker

Time, that cold bastard, with its nearlys and untils. I think, what a shame. Time should weep for having spent me without you.

I didn’t need to interpret you, I wanted to take your hand and kept touching your arm. I nearly grasped it at one point, but the way you would with a brother or long-lost friend. It was everything minus the one thing that usually ruins it all in the end. I don’t know what you call the sum total of that.

If God wasn’t mad at you for drinking wine and chain-smoking and being a homosexual, he might forgive me for stealing a kitten and trying to hide it under a blanket in the back of our station wagon. Certainly that God was preferable to others who wouldn’t let you in Heaven if you said bad words or drank Mountain Dew.