Dear Perfect Man,

I want to know how often you think about me. (Is it often?) Do you wonder what I'm doing? Do you picture the next time you'll be able to look in my eyes and feel that little pinch of guarded excitement in your heart? Do you wonder if I think about you as much, at such random times throughout the day, as you think of me?

I wish I were brave enough to tell you that I wonder what you're doing and I feel that pinch of guarded, fearful excitement in my heart when I think about the next time I'll be able to look in your eyes. I think about you, at the most random times throughout the day. I wish I were brave enough to find you. I wish I were [*see Biff's comment] brave enough to be honest, to take the gamble, to recognize that the benefits outweigh the risks, and tell you everything.

PM, you'd know how to make me feel better about being achingly honest and tell me that it doesn't make me psycho, right? Because I don't think I should have to play the "game" if you really are Perfect, and that's all the game's about, right? It's all testing each other's emotional boundaries to see if there's a line beyond which you'll stop appreciating my quirks. But then you wouldn't be Perfect, right?

PM, this would all be so much easier if you'd just find me and convince me that you're you. Because I'm having a hard time trusting myself to not get hurt by being more carefree and giving with my emotions; I'm finding it difficult to not care. Which means fear has been shopping around my conscience, looking for where best to set up residence.

PM, can't you just explain yourself to me? Can't you give me a brief list of things I should know about you like I did? You shroud yourself in perfect sunrises, in tree boughs that bend just so in the wind, in the magic of the lake's alternately glassy and tumultuous attitudes; you remind me of you in the glory of everything that's around me in nature, of what perfection would feel like, of what your beauty and intrigue and challenge should evoke within my soul. So that meeting you should feel like a brush with an old, comfortable, favorite book who's suddenly revealed a hidden chapter that completes the story in ways I never knew complete could be.

I'm so hopelessly idealistic and scared (untrusting?), and I'm beginning to realize how that makes me the biggest block to me ever accepting you, PM, or believing that you could possibly be you. But you'll fight for me, right, PM? Please fight for me. I need you to fight for me when it's easier to not look you in the eyes.

One last thing, PM, before I end tonight's plea into the great human abyss that is the world wide web (always hoping that some word, some word, will resonate somewhere and mean something, anything, some word; it's like when you search haplessly for something when you don't know what you're searching for and you feel somehow closer to finding the unknown by at least putting the wiggling worm on the hook before casting out your line with no clue of what you're hoping will clamp on), why is the latest DVD release of new seasons of The West Wing always available in the UK before here?

Love,
Jen

PS I worry I'm the dead weight on the end of a pendulum, swinging back and forth between remembering my dreams and consciously taking action to pursue them and wondering how to know when my dreams have changed and how (or if) my actions should follow suit.