maybe one day I’ll be an artist like these guys 

Dear Nicholas, my mother used to come home late in the evenings, maybe so late that the edges of the sky burnt a little orange. I don’t know, I’d be sleeping by then. And listen; the other night I put on your Strings + 808 + Beat, and then I played that one minute and eleven seconds through, then again and again. Boom cha-cha, boom cha-cha. It’s a wicked waltz you’ve created, not at all like the one she hummed when I was dancing on her feet. But I am writing to let you know that I liked it very much. And it reminded me of her all the same. 

Dear Sufjan, when you said the evil, it spread, like a fever ahead, how’d you go on after your mother was dead? As for myself, I’ve no songs but the one I composed at six years old, it doesn’t sound anything like yours, but it is similarly my contemplation of a loved one’s mortality. Yes, listen: the sound of my grandmother’s voice, counting from one to a hundred because I asked her to. I am a child, for whom one hundred might as well be infinity. Until it is not, and actually, neither is a lifespan… which prior to that moment, right around number sixty-three… did used to feel, quite, eternal. So I read: 

Dear Ms. Hurston, the other day I was pages away from finishing your book, and I got to the part where you said: “Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets.” You got me thinking with that line — about the shape of shores, about that time we went for a swim on the coast, the afternoon before a typhoon, and how I have never seen the waves crash and roar like so. Swimming and scared. At the beach just down the road, the bay bends in, and the waves are wading puddles of still mirrored glass. The bottom of my coffee is bitter, the sound of your words are sweet. But it is nearing nine o’clock now, and I am due for my return to reality. Closing, getting up, returning my ceramic cup. Tell me where my eyes should look to find god, won’t you? Until then, I don’t have one. Very faithfully, 

Dear Richard, who the fuck is Jeff? I didn’t get that part. I had to search up “what is the meaning of Jeff Richard Siken”. I did not get most of what you wrote in Crush, actually, and maybe that makes me dumber than I’d like to think. It’s the verbs though, keep it up with the verbs. I like how you command. Open the door again, you said. Open the door.