Artificial Intelligence

Dear O____E.

The rowboat in Central Park, the big black goose that attacked me, the canoli in that cafe on Broadway…I pushed you on the swings at that beach, the waves crashed in the background, the locomotive barreled by, the rush of existence pounded in our fresh hearts. These images are as much a part of me as you are.

For the longest time, others tried to have me believe (the blind we shall call them) that you were a derailment to the things I “should be accomplishing.” For years, I believed them, even though I know that I experienced—no, lived—true meaning with you. They were right, not in their hateful holier-than-thou tone, but in the idea: yes, you took me off-course. Thank God.

When I first saw you again, the tomboy all grown up, I knew that you contained something true, and following my insatiable curiosity, or OCD-ness, I needed to find out what that truth was and assimilate it into my existence, if I were to continue to choose to live. At the time, I saw your aura, a golden spirit beneath that braggadocio and somewhat deviant and what the blind labeled simply as “mean” exterior.

Over time, I came to realize what drew me inexorably into your embrace and intertwined into your life was that the aura represented your potential for love—great, boundless love, a capacity unlike what I had sensed in others before. In fact, from you, I learned that love was not simply passionate feelings or mindless reaction, but rather love is a well that some dug deep while others left shallow.

Those three years apart from you, I hated you, and thought that you were a derailment from my natural place in the socioeconomic pyramid of unsatisfying consumerism. How could you waste my time and my soul that way? I fought for you, gave up everything for you. I crossed that barrier separating the ego and the soul and shared with you who I was. How could you? I rationalized that I must have just made some terrible stupid mistake that I could have prevented, like ruining my credit, something concrete and avoidable like that.

But no, I was wrong. I speak to you now so many years later, and I see that my instincts did not lie after all. You’ve developed that potential into a full and realized capacity to love. I can tell from the way you literally wouldn’t hurt a fly, to the way you mourn for your corgi, to the way you guard my feelings in our awkward exchanges where we want to be nice but don’t quite know how without feeling really awkward, to the way you see past superficialities that you used to worship, to the way you’ll never say anything negative about anyone or any situation, to the way you value others for their unique life paths and hidden talents.

Thank you for derailing me. I want to apologize to you by now, for my lack of generosity when it came to my love and my time, but I know that I don’t need to, because you understand. Thank you for taking me off the path of discordant conformity and condescension, my need to achieve simply for the sake of “better” without justification, at the cost of isolation from the human spirit.

I can tell that you are afraid afraid of interacting with me now, and that is fine. We were a terrible match, and thus were meant to meet and separate—both occurrences I accept now and am truly grateful for. I have this stupid fantasy where you see how I defend you now and stand up for you now, five years later, when strangers trash you because of seeds I planted long ago—but of course that must never happen for it would violate…some rule of the universe. As you know, I’m ruthless when it comes to wielding words as weapons: the first time they say anything bad about you becomes the last, because you are better than them, and I will not tolerate it.