� Pam Houston, in "Epilogue"

I understood (typo: "understodd"; oh god) the point and the concept of love-yourself-first, but I wish someone had explained to me that this might mean I�d have to love myself enough to make up for everyone else who wouldn�t or couldn�t. That is going to be the hard part.

� me, in e-mail to Catharine Monday morning

Yeah, liking dick sure does turn out to be a fucking tragedy most of the time.

� Vanessa to me last Wednesday as we were chatting about boy stuff during "The Bachelor"

As Detective Mike Hoolihan would say, it�s down. The AIM conversation is from late last Tuesday morning when after a few false starts the letter was starting to take shape (now you know why I wasn�t writing in my diary early last week), and the letter itself went out in the wee hours of Saturday morning (now you know why I�ve been so shaky this week). Todd got back from a band tour sometime on Wednesday (now you know what my big hurry was to get the tattoo), so I am assuming that he�s read it. Now I can put it here as well. Now you know everything.

Why publish such a letter in my diary? When I realized that this was in fact what I was going to do, it felt like a not entirely pleasant surprise. The most obvious answer, I think, is that when someone is calling you a liar (etc.) and there's no way to prove that you're not, all you can do is scream the truth at the top of your lungs, hoping that you can drown out or outlast the other things that are being said about you. It was also surreal � last week Number Two asked me what it felt like when after the August rodeo he was telling his friends that I�d been cheating on him, and that�s the word that came out of my mouth without me giving it any conscious thought � to be telling him things I felt so strongly, that were so purely *right* to me, and to have him not even acknowledge them except to deny them, as if the sum total of what he was saying to me was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. I felt gaslighted. Or, all right, maybe I'm stretching there for the sake of the hopeful Ingrid Bergman comparison. But here: I almost edited "worldview" out of the letter because it�s one of those weaselly words I just don�t like, but I didn�t, I used it twice. I don't know what other word there is for what was taken away from me when all the words I said and wrote and always chose so reverently because I needed to be true to the incredible wonderful things they described turned out to mean nothing except wrong. So it makes sense that in wanting to refute the wrong I should have come to a place where my worldview is not only the coin of the realm but that my worldview built � the diary's continuity becomes its own proud resilient kind of coherence, its readers or maybe just the fact of its existence testimony against whoever denies its architect. Todd always used to say that the Monitor was a huge part of my life, not even necessarily suggesting that this was unhealthy, and he would get angry with me that I disagreed, one more tedious instance of come-on-just-stop-lying-and-admit-it. And while I certainly liked this particular kind of writing and enjoyed having a forum in which to try to do a good job, and on some days it did feel like my tether to reality, I thought that he was overstating its importance to me. It wasn't what I was all about. (It still isn�t.) But maybe he sensed in what he read an undercurrent of relief that I could not sense myself, my fluent writerly homecoming to a place of no wrong. If that was the case, then who was it who brought me here, me or him, and does the bringing merit credit or blame? I don't know. I'm not sure if it matters anymore.

By the way, I want to be clear about the fact that I know I�m not a perfect girlfriend. This isn�t a case of me being a saint and him being Satan. I have my own issues. I�m not good at asking for practical help or emotional support, I can be quite bitchy when I get called on the phone and don�t feel like talking on it, in the matter of gradual braking with an automatic transmission I seem to be ineducable. I fretted too much about whether Todd�s friends would think I was a dork even at the same time as I wanted them to like me for me and not on account of my good stories and in spite of my non-job, and although I wasn�t exactly jealous I sure wasn�t thrilled about the fact that his best friend who never wanted to hang with me did have designs on him. Fine. Sue me, I�m human. But my point is that all of that and all the rest of it was moot, none of it could matter, because the immovable object was what he thought I thought of him and then insisted on believing � this is different from religion because religion acknowledges a lack of evidence and believes anyway; what is it when your belief requires you to ignore the evidence that is there? Totalitarianism? Egomania? I was trying to work on those little things, or thought I was, but as long as he thought that underneath the whatever I was a liar and cheater who didn�t love him, everything I undertook was just so much rearranging deck chairs. I don�t like to make things into a case of who was right and who was wrong, where the moral necessity of a black mark being made also requires that only one soul be stained by it: dumb things were done along the way. People can and should forgive each other the dumb things. Not believing the person who says I love you, I dare you, I want you with me, though � is *that* moral? What kind of way is that to live? I cannot fathom it.

Also another reason for putting the letter in my diary feels like the opposite of Stockard Channing�s great speech at the end of "Six Degrees of Separation," when she says I will not turn him into an anecdote and challenges herself to retain the memories of the Will Smith character as unmediated "experience" about which she allows herself to have real feelings. (Another dichotomy: anecdote vs. experience.) Well, I do not anticipate having any fucking problem at all holding onto the experience of Todd, my guess is that the experience is going to have me in an emotional chokehold for a long time to come. And I would call the telling of the experience not anecdote but history, and as history I want it recorded, painted on cave walls like a monument to the act and process of its painting, the intrinsic good of having wanted to paint.

And now you can also guess the subject matter of the dream I had on Tuesday morning. In the dream, the last show on his tour was cancelled and Todd came back to town a day early � and somehow this was while the letter would have been in transit � and while in California he�d had an epiphany about (a) the bad ways he�d been treating me and (b) how his constant suspicions regarding my perceived bad treatment of him were a kind of projection, and he missed me so much and had realized all over again how great I am and how no online-personals scenester girl could ever measure up, and he wanted to tell me these things for hours as if to make up for a deficit, he wanted to prolong being in my presence for as long as possible; in the dream he was looking at me like he loved me like crazy, loopy yet serene, and it was spring and gorgeous and we were lounging under the apple trees in my backyard and the whole world looked like a million dollars and I was dizzy with happiness. On Sunday when we were at Septieme Vanessa said that lately she�d been feeling like everything in her life was going to work out fine (hooray, Vanessa!), and that is the feeling I had in the dream, to the tenth power, ecstatically with my whole mind and body as though it were a cross between love and Pentecostalism. By writing the letter, I had discharged all the bad juju between Todd and me and it had spun out to some mysterious other dimension in which it was transformed to good and then it boomeranged back. I thought briefly of the letter, but I knew that I could get Jeanne to intercept it for me and together we would burn it, only burning it would be sufficient. I probably deserved a dream like that: on and off all day Monday, I�d catch myself entertaining fantasies in which he�d receive the letter like a thunderbolt to the subconscious and would indeed come straight to my house and say "No, this is not the end" and oh-sweetheart and I-love-you and a lot of other stuff too. But in real life he wouldn�t do that, and when I realized this, I wondered how exactly he would receive the letter if not like that: would he take it upstairs to his room for privacy, or would he open it and read it in front of Jeanne in the kitchen like it was just another credit card offer? Would he get through a few sentences, figure out what was going on, then look up at her and say, maybe with a rueful smile, Well, we�re going out tonight and I won�t take no for an answer? When she assented, would he skim the rest of it, then toss it down in an impersonal manner or put it in the recycling bin en route to heading out for the Tin Hat? Would he be whistling tunefully as he walked out the door the same way I imagined he was when he quit my old apartment in August, this time thinking only of the tasty Guinness awaiting him at the end of the car ride? Would he care that he�d hurt me? Would he be sad that he wasn�t going to see me anymore? Would he be, oh god, relieved? And always: what can I possibly have meant to him, when he thought so badly of me? I thought these things and I had no idea how to answer any of them, and I realized also that a person to whom my heart is such a stranger is not a person I can pretend to know anymore (at the same time as I realized that even in thinking so I was partly rationalizing). And in a peculiar way this made me feel� not better, really, or not at all, but resolute, ended in ice, filled to the brim with the heaviness of acceptance and so grounded by it. Vanessa also said on Sunday, as someone making a pronouncement, that clearly Todd had loved me, she had been able to tell from watching him be around me and react to me that what he had been feeling, and viscerally so, was love. She told me this in such a way that it felt like she was giving me both a present and medicine, and I knew that she believed what she was saying and I loved her for it and for being my friend. But myself, I do not know anymore whether it was true for real, by which I mean true in the sense in which it was true to me. In this breakup�s hotly contested pageant of The Saddest Part Of All, that�s right up there.

Last Friday night at bowling we were talking about my tattoo-to-be, and Cheryl asked me what I would tell my grandchildren about it, she warned me that they would be expecting a good juicy story. I said I�d tell them I got the tattoo at the moment when it began to seem completely impossible that I would ever have grandchildren to tell its story to. She laughed. I wasn't joking. At home, the letter was on the slaptop, ready for me to copy it out, and although my original plan had been to do that on Sunday, I was aware of it and by and by I was dwelling on it, and in my mind the fact and inevitability of it were growing bigger and bigger like a malignancy. My game went to hell and I got skittish; the noise of a ball knocking pins down was a physical thing inside me every time it happened. So I excused myself from the afterparty and went back home and did the deed. The office-girl clothes I�d worn to Gastro that day I kept on, because there was no comfort to be had in this act, and the idea of putting on jeans or sweats felt like a mockery. I sat at my desk and did the grim, hands-shaking-making business of copying. When I was finally done, I sat for a moment and drank some water, and then I was seized by the need to go to the post office right away and get rid of this thing I�d done, it hit me hard I do not want this in my house. I got in the car and drove and I mailed it. That was surreal too, that whole errand. It was as if I was narrating events to myself, probably because I needed at that moment to pretend that I was only narrator and not perpetrator: Oh, now I am driving to the post office at a quarter to three in the morning to mail a Dear Todd letter to the boy I love most of all. Now I am stepping over some dry ice that for whatever reason someone has dumped in the gutter outside Jack In The Box. Now it is done, and that short man in the army jacket is the first person I have seen in what amounts to my new life. Now I am driving home, listening to Eminem because I need to be ironic and perverse, because I�m terrified of what a real feeling would do to me at this point. Now it�s over. And now you know why I didn�t get done almost any of the things I put on my agenda for last Saturday, basically nothing but the tattoo reservation. I don�t know how the fuck I expected to feel the on the day after it all became irrevocable, but how I did feel was as if everything I needed had been ripped forcibly out of me and I was just waiting to drop dead of acute futility. Saturday was dark and rainy and cold, the heat was off in the house as usual, and although I could recognize that in my normal life a day like this would inspire me to look up some complicated recipes, go shopping, and then simmer soups and bake bread all afternoon and then go feed somebody, I could barely motivate myself to eat some toast. But � and excuse me the Pollyanna shtick here, it�s all I�ve got, and although this is not the note on which I want to end this paragraph and on which I feel the paragraph ending, I think it is the right one to try to hit � at least I could still see that normal day off in the distance somewhere, at least it did not feel lost to me for good.

And how am I doing, by the way, with that once-and-for-all crying stoppage? Here�s a hint: those cds Todd burned for me, the ones that replace a couple dozen of those that were stolen from my car this year? Although among their number are a few of my all-time favorites, I can�t listen to them. I can�t even look at the block capital letters spelling out what�s on each one, because the sight of his handwriting triggers the waterworks every time. I�m one hell of a sorry sap. But I think by summertime, it will not hurt so much. I believe that because I have to.

I won�t be writing again for a few days. I need a break. Thanks for reading, though � it helps.