Dear Bailey McGinnis,

I should clarify something: you're really not dead, you just committed suicide by letting your parents drag you away from my hometown when I was seven years old. So you kind of killed yourself, or I still believe you didn't move, but slaughtered yourself, because everything inside me that was not there before you came was dead when you left, and I think you killed it, and that means it had to have died inside you, too. And what other murderer could there have been but you, Bailey McGinnis.

You were my sister's friend and she has a picture of you which I haven't seen in a very long time. I don't care to look at it because I know you've changed so much in the last decade and that's probably the same as I've changed, but I'm not sure about that.

Why do people kill themselves? That's the only serious philosophical question, but there are other philosophical questions which aren't serious but merit some examination, Bailey McGinnis. Why did Elliott Smith kill himself? Did he kill himself? And why did you kill yourself, Bailey McGinnis, that's the more pressing problem, at least right now...

When I was six years old, I haven't told anybody about this nor written it down in any journal or diary, I took a steak knife and held the point up to my stomach because the time was crushing me. I couldn't drive, ride a bicycle or even put on a pair of shoes and I had to learn how to walk upright in less than fifteen years or I would be destroyed. The world wouldn't even bother to stand me up in front of a wall and machine gun me to rags like I was a gringo in Chihuahua. It would pull my hobo beard over my eyelids and nail my toes together. It would turn me into a bum and that's like a delayed death sentence, but I'm sure you heard. What was I going to do?

That was a decade ago, Bailey McGinnis, and in that decade I haven't put a steak knife up to my belly because I've got no strength of will left over to watch myself die or to feel my blood exit a wound of my own creation. It's awfully bleak, but to be honest, the things I bitch and moan about every day, the laundry, the homework, the yardwork, the painting and scraping-off of old paint, even the writing, it's all just something I decided to do ten years ago in place of stabbing myself.

My question is this, Bailey McGinnis. You were nine when I was six, and you were ten when you left. Why did you do it for three years before offing yourself? Did you grow to hate your own eyes?

Eventually, Bailey McGinnis, I will become old, or half of my life will go by, and I will wake up and know one day that the high-water mark has finally been reached, and all this yardwork, homework, juggling and sweating and gyrating, was one enormous hesitation. And maybe then I'll stab myself, but I'm not sure yet. I'm reserving judgment. It's a writerly thing to do.

If I were an artist I could draw your portrait on a cocktail napkin if I met you at a bar, or if I were a mathematician I could multiply and factor and divide and re-divide your credit card number and steal the breath out of your mouth, Bailey McGinnis. But I'm none of these things. What the hell does a writer do at a cocktail party, Bailey McGinnis? What do I do at a frat party except get hammered in a corner and go in the bathroom and vomit tears into the toilet bowl while thinking hilarious thoughts about a porcelain womb...

I also never told you about my only other real aspiration, which is to become a great kisser. I don't just mean by kissing people. I'll get occasional eyeballs full of the human condition from waiters and waitresses at Chinese restaurants, which aren't all Chinese, I'm sure you know this, Bailey McGinnis. I'll go into McDonald's and ask for some french fries. The thing about that is I won't tell them what size french fry I want. So the cashier'll have to look at me and judge for me what size french fry a guy like me would like. I think that's kind of sexy.

I want to become the kind of kisser that could lick the words off the tongue of a queen, Bailey McGinnis, but I'm sure you know what I mean, and I know none of that from experience. I'm pretty sure they don't do that at cocktail parties, the polite cocktail parties, and doing that at a frat party is like carving "sleaze" and a swastika on your forehead in one sweep of a Bowie knife, but you understand, I think.

Anyways, I loved you, the same way I love people when they turn corners and stare around at the strangers looking for that one crazy asshole on the verge of collapse, and the way I love them when their eyes hit me and almost swear when they blink, the same way I love the eyeball present and staring out in every book ever written, the human mind's eye, which I really believe, with each book I've read, that it's just the same organ, the exact same structure, but held at different heights with different narrators. And eventually all that I love will be gouged away, but I'll still stare at the hair pin while it's digging into my eye socket, and your eye socket, and in this way my eyelids really resemble my belly.

If anything, I ought to apologize for the revealing nature of this letter, but fuck you if you want to shove that back in my face. I'm only kidding about fucking you, that's weird, Bailey McGinnis, and you're too dead for weird to affect at all, and that's pretty damn dead. All I really remember about you is the color of your eyes. They were blue, and your skin was freckled and white.

Yours,
___ _____