Old Letters & Love Hungry Image Drops

Cleaning out the drawers, finding old letters. Keep them or not? Old love letters. It's a regular genre, love letters. Sometimes I wonder when I read old letters from women I knew, courted, loved, slept with, made an imaginative, psychic connection with, and I wonder how much of this connection, the intangible feeling and "relationship," was beyond any physical touching and connection. I feel as though I was an image-drop (love hungry) in their minds, a picture, a character that they constructed, and in the process of knowing me I helped shaped with my own intentionally ambiguous words, coquettishness, vagueness, double meanings, ironic puns. I made sure that this person they wanted to know and strove to shape with their own desires was ever-changing, always puzzling, yet always offering the promise of a better life together.

I'm likely to think that when we get to know people, we shape ourselves as much as we shape the person we try to love. We use them to shape ourselves, access our own selves. Because it's very hard to know who we are, to see what we look like, to know how others see us, when we get the chance to know someone deeply, intimately, we are able to project out the things inside us that otherwise we have no way of seeing. The significant others, the person we love and become angry with and frustrated and also care for, becomes a conduit of our own otherwise unknowable personality traits. A mirror, an ink blot.

Relationship: The stage on which we act out the characters of our own becoming selves.