Dear Tara,
Today was filled with fear.
I don't know what happened to you. I haven't hired a private investigator or paid $19.95 to an internet snooping service. I did a Facebook search, twitter, instagram. I googled your name. All turned up nada. I left it at that, guessing you don't want to be found. I understand and respect that desire.
You never posted here. Never knew about e2.
This may be a conceit.
This may be therapeutic.
This may be nothing but a way for me to speak to myself about the hard truths self-denial buries so I can get on with my day.
I wonder if you're dead. I wonder if you're alive. I wonder if you've grown like me to become at once less and more than you were.
I am less arrogant. I want to believe you'd appreciate that. I remember how my arrogance turned you on, how the confidence in my ability to fly made you want to hold on so you could also swim through clouds. Then you left, I learned I was human, struggled with my lack of immortality, then came out the other end a greater man.
Are you ok?
Am I ok?
I have days like today, when I teach my son the word dystopia and show him scenes from Blade Runner 2049 so he can see what climate change would (will?) look like, what unregulated pollution will wrought, what nuclear fallout will lay to waste. We watch fields of synthetic food. We watch cities choked with smog. We watch vast deserts with dead trees and nothing green. We watch Las Vegas turned into an irradiated ghost town. I note that he will be my age in 2049. I tell him this is just a possible trajectory based on our worst fears. He says he understands and promises to help build a better world, then goes off to play video games.
I open twitter and read our reality TV president threatening nuclear war because he thought a bellicose dictator implied he had a small penis.
Remember when anxiety was about getting into elite grad schools and how we could arrange a threesome?
I wonder if we're already living in a dystopia.
My SO is my Rachel, but the memory of you is my Joi. It's the only way I can get on in this world.
I suspect it's the only way any of us can.