I've been sitting here with these letters and notes, now misshapen and smudged indicators of the reality of time passed. I have carried them everywhere with me. From strip clubs to campgrounds, used as bookmarks for The Elegant Universe and Midnight's Children. Where, in the coldest of the nights I spent homeless in my car parked outside the local Wal-Mart I would lay, buried beneath a bundle of clothes and blankets with only the streetlight to illuminate the pages, and I would memorize their words. They were the writings of a lost man, unto himself, wanting--but unsure of what and how. Before me, he turned and turned in his own hand, staying still and burning himself up. Yet in my own little world of banality and survivalism he was an example of the possibility of love, something magical--possibly violent. He was as real as the earth and I could taste him in the spring wind, breathing me to life again and again.

That's what I remember most about the beginning. My hands shake a little thumbing through them, and our pictures, the little journals I've kept, as I try to recapture us and peddle back to a time when he looked at me and saw a soul mate, talked about art and music like it was sex and wanted us to spend our lives together, have a family together. I just don't know where it fell apart.