To the person who already knows: I’ll tell you the truth until it’s gone.
It came to be that I had an aunt in New York. My parents never knew you. I barely knew my parents.
More than anything else, I grew up wishing I wouldn’t be so alone.
Somehow, you made a habit of sending out messages in little bottles that, despite everything, reached my unlikely shore. Like any good teenager with too much time on my hands, I read them passionately and wrote back. I made a habit of it.
That dialogue of little jokes and observations through the years saved my life because it told me a little bit each day that I wasn’t crazy or bad, just a little different. That meditation is not just the good trouble I needed to find my way through to another land.
It’s how I came to New York just to pet your dogs and buy tea in the East Village.