I’m not sure who to tell because I’m not sure who will care, and I don’t want to explain the whole thing to anyone. It was impossible for my parents to understand the reality of Igor when he was alive, so why would they get it when he was dead?
A year later I have to change my screen name because a boy at school, a massive hairy boy with a face like a Picasso painting, sends me an email saying he’s going to rape me and cover me in barbecue sauce. He’s the only guy who likes me in that way, but I wish he wouldn’t. He mentions having a machete and attaches a photograph of a kitten that has been stuffed inside a bottle and left to die. My father is justifiably angry and calls my uncle, who is a lawyer and says the police need to be involved. For the first and last time, I am escorted home from school by the cops. When they go to his house, they find he has printed and saved all of our instant messages, pages and pages of them. One of the officers implies I shouldn’t have been so nice to him if I didn’t like him “that way.” I tell them I just felt sorry for him. They say I should be more careful in the future. I am ashamed.
My new screen name includes my real name and is only shared with select friends and family, but I transfer all my contacts, so I can always see who is logged on when. One day, in my here to chat bar, I see him: Pyro0001. The world goes fast, then slow again, the way it does sometimes when I get up to pee in the night and the whole house sounds like it’s saying Lena, Lena, Lena.
“Hey,” I type.
The name disappears.
I walk around for the rest of that day like I’ve seen a ghost. I type his full name into multiple search engines, looking for an obituary or some evidence that he existed. I mean, Juliana knew him. She met him. She heard his accent. He was real. He is dead. Fake people don’t die. Fake people don’t even exist.
Years later, I will give his last name to a character on my television show. A smoke signal, so that whoever wants to know can know: he was kind to me. He had things to say. There was a way in which I loved him. I did, I did, I did.
——
September 27, 2010
A.,1
Before I get back to writing I had to jot this down to you.2 Like, the last six times we’ve spoken it has ended with a series of long silences where I say something, then another thing to modify it, then I sort of apologize, then I sort of unapologize.3 That would be funny as a scene in an indie rom-com,4 funny the first few times it happens, but it doesn’t need to happen because I should just be able to get off the phone and say “enjoy your day, A., I’ll talk with you soon.” I’m obviously fishing for stuff and then explaining it away between silences.
I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn’t heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.)5 The dynamics of romantic relationships are obviously fascinating to us both, artistically and theoretically.6 Ditto sex. But it’s harder to incorporate into your actual working life in a way that’s comfortable.7
I obviously like you a lot. Not in a scary oppressive way8 and not in an “I just came looking at a picture of you” way (though I did do that)9 but in the way that I am going out of my way to make you a part of my life, or just to figure out what it could be. I was so ready to spend four months in Los Angeles really embracing this alien city of bad trees, letting my parents visit me and hiking and maybe dating some douche bag just for the story.10 A week before I met you I quipped to someone “I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.”11 Jokes aren’t just jokes.12
It feels really good to check in with you, and I’m intrigued by the possibility of sharing certain kinds of concerns regularly.13 Because I’m here and you’re there it can’t happen totally organically, and because I’m me I have a hard time sitting with that. So that’s why I try to understand if I’ll see you when I come home, or if you think about me when you jerk off,14 or just how available you are to have your life futzed with a little bit.
The night of the party when we met, when you told me to meet you on the corner, I was really sure that I would go out there and you’d have tricked me and gone someplace else. And then you weren’t exactly where you said you’d be but you were nearby.15
OK,16
L17
p.s. If you don’t have anything to say back to this email it will be some kind of incredible poetic justice.18 Also, sorry this email is so unfunny.19
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