My sweet jellybean,

No. That’s not right. She won’t be reading this. She isn’t reading this. This all started off, really, as one long love letter. But I got confused, or it got confused; and anyway, it isn’t anymore, a love letter. If it ever was.

For the longest time, we were Teflon. We said. Nothing stuck. No harm, no foul, no shame; nothing would stick. That’s not the way it is anymore. She was right, all along. I needed her to be perfect. Whatever perfect was. And of course, because I made her my muse, I was crazy possessive and insecure. A muse is a slave. No good will ever come from calling someone your muse, especially if you mean it. It’s a pointless and dangerous notion.

Last Christmas Eve, it wasn’t so perfectly snowy as it is today. She took me ice skating. And, for my insecurity, I resisted. But as much as I resisted, she insisted. And she could persuade me to do nearly anything. It was late enough, but not too late, and rather chilly. Because it was Christmas Eve, we had the rink nearly to ourselves and she sang me Christmas carols. She made up words for the parts she didn’t know. And, when I stumbled, when I wobbled or wavered, and yes, even when I fell, she had a way of laughing at me that didn’t shame me. I could fall and she could laugh and it wasn’t the kind of laughter that hurt me.

She made funny eyes at me, and at the top of her lungs, she screamed, “Alvin wants a hula-hoop.” Hot chocolate followed. I was relieved to be off the skates, and exhilarated. Here was something I had forgotten, a sensation, only. When you release your feet from the skates and put on your shoes, or your boots, your gravity is different. You feel like you are floating, you feel — as I felt about jellybean — less attached to the weight of the world. The hot chocolate was frothy and warming. We drank it amid abandoned and brittle looking ice sculptures sparkling in the night.

And though her parents were coming in the morning we went to her place after. She had windmill cookies for me. I gave her a book of poems I had printed and had bound. And she smiled at me. I left as late as could with just enough time to get home and in bed with my eyes shut tight before midnight.

My Christmas wishes, which I was so assured of last year, did not go terribly well. We were not Teflon after all.

SS