Dear You,

I am writing to you having just revived from a fatal nap. I saw things, how people in comas talk to the ghosts of their fathers or sit at poker tables with the Lord Jesus and call his bluffs. Reentering the world, the recessed lighting had such luminescence and the television’s volume turned up to such magnificent levels that I felt for an instant my bones begin the process of turning into salt. My right contact lens is fogged up. The world is lopsided. I appreciated in an instant what I ignored for twenty-seven years: the world requires bifocalism. Everything is meant to be in pairs. The lonely among us, irrespective of noun distinction, are harmful to the outcomes of countless equations the reproduce and multiply as our reality stretches onward. If you are alone and reading this: stop. Don’t stop reading, stop living. Find the nearest tall thing and jump off of it. Or better yet, take a deep breath…and hold it in. Good. Hold it in until you won’t have to anymore, and you’ll enter a world of bright wonder and magnificent noise, the world of comas and deep naps, and you will find there a tranquility in freedom, the freedom to say, I am alone and my loneliness harms no one.

ns.