[Dear_Trent_#_26: The_Mean_Reds*]

Dear Trent,

Sometimes it gets a little exhausting, being in love with you all the time. I mean, how many different ways can I say it? No matter what, I know it doesn't make any difference. You are distant, impossible and impervious, and I'm only one in a million, all gushing for you, all the same. I write you all these letters, and send them into the ether, to no one. Who cares.

I dreamt of you last night, for the first time in months. In my dream, I saw you in a restaurant I always go to, here in London, and when I introduced myself to you, we started talking. Our conversation was about art, Carl Jung, the notion of a collective unconscious, and religion; a really interesting talk, and satisfyingly full of little correspondences of mind and feeling. When I had to go, you asked if you could call me. Of course I said yes, so you did, almost immediately. We kept talking for hours, until my cell phone battery was dying. I asked you for your number, because I wanted to call you back sometime, and just as you were about to give it to me, my battery died. I spent the rest of the dream searching for my cell charger, and woke up full of regret at not having been able to find it, the need to go back to sleep and keep searching urgent in my half-conscious brain.

Then I realized that, in truth, I had really only been talking to myself in my own brain. Is the man I'm writing to now nothing but a beautiful dream that I've created in my own mind? I wish I could convince myself that dreams and feelings like the ones I feel for you and your work -- feelings that are undeniable, purely authentic to me, and mortifyingly enough, all too fucking real -- represent a true correspondence between souls. Maybe they do; I don't know. What I do know is that, as nice as it had seemed to talk to you while I was dreaming, when I woke up I felt like aching for you for all these years is really the most seriously my own stupid heart has ever betrayed me.

Sorry to be so grim. I think I'm still feeling a little sad these days. Perhaps regrettably, I still love you, even if you're only half real. There's no comfortingly concrete math I can break out to prove it, but I know that something I see and love is really you.

Be well, dear Trent, and get some rest, ok?

Love,
Dierdre

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