When you didn't call on our appointed tuesday, I contacted your office and was told you were on break and had not checked in recently. While on tour, I tried to reach you several more tomes without success. I spent the holidays on various barstools in new York city -- if I could have drawn a picture of my mental state, it would have resembled a biker emlem, a skull with flames lashing put through the eyeholes, a representing not true anger but a hostile form of depression. Despair with teeth. I couldn't sleep, I shouted at friends, I broke up -- none too gently -- with Anna Malloy, I pissed away business opportunities, I threatened editors, I hated the sky. Whenever I was among a group of people I would grow impatient and leave the gathering and hurry home to be alone with my thoughts, prefering a depressed solitude with you at its center to the illusion of conviviality. My dreams were tapestries of violence and frustration, I wa tormented by reveries that left me jagged with insane configurations of desire. In hopes of restoring myself, I accepted an assignment that took me to Chiapas in Mexico for most of January, and there I gained a perspective and began to understand what must have happened. Often at night, whether lying in a jungle hammock or on a hotel bed, feeling imprisoned by your silence, I would conjure up your eyes as I did years before in china, an growing ccalm, seeing he dark shapes sliding through heir depths, reading heir design, I knew we were not yet done. On returning to new York I found that I had received eight calls from a 1-999 number, signifying the use of a phone card, all dialed during he week after new years. You left no message-- I suspected you thought Anna Malloy might pick them up-- but I had little doubt as to who had made those calls. I realize now that we had been found out, that eiherbyour husband tumbled to some behavioral cue or else you were provoked into a fit of defiant honesty, as has happened before, and told him about piersall. And following that, traumatized, your gears frozen, wracked with guilt, subject to a passive-aggressive style manipulation, you sat and watched our Tuesday pass, and went on to endure the anxious complacencies of the holidays. After six weeks, a length of time that approximates the period of your past recoveries, you tried tocall, and when you received no response, you thought I had moved on. But I have not moved on-- I don't suppose I ever will. On returning to the states, my first impulse was to call you, but then I considered what we almost certainly would say. You would explain and I would forgive you. I would ask what all this meant for us, and you would say you didn't know. We would attpt to repair the damage and fill one another in on the previous six weeks, and we very likely would begin to grow easy with one another, to joke and tease and laugh. But in the end you would say you loved me in a voice that sounded as though everyhing in your chest was broken, and by this I would understand that love had once again become a problem, a deviation from what has always been expected of you, a chaotic element in the bland symmetry of your days. We have had a hundred such phone calls, and I see no purpose to having a hundred-and-one. Yet since I cannot let you go, and you cannot let me go, a response is required. And so whithin a week I will bw arriving in California. At some point I intend to stand in front of your door and knock, and I will then learn he answers to my questions, and we will determine together if smog has properties in common wih fog, if los angeles is a county where we can live wihout regret, or if natural disaters are our only hope. For now I'll send you this valentine. This complicated construction that has at its paper heart new memories, a painful history, and some simple questions of its own: Where are we going? What can we hope for? What should we want? Will you be mine? Valentine - Lucius Shepard