From September 2011:

I bought a postcard to send to you, just like I promised.  I just never sent it.  Perhaps that's because I didn't know what to write; or else because I knew a million things but nothing seemed quite right.  We had said that if one of us sent the other a postcard, the sender would write “I like you.”  But you already knew that.

So I kept the postcard I bought for you.  For a year it stayed tucked inside the back of my notebook – my travel notebook with the world inked on its cover and my world inked within.  That's where I kept your postcard, in the back of my world.  It came with me to England and to Scotland and to Turkey; and to the Czech Republic, Austria, and France. 

Finally, from Chicago I wrote to you about the postcard, about a place I'm not not from, even if I say otherwise.  The postcard was a picture of the letter “M” that had been shaped out of white rocks with lay upon a hillside with a small red barn nestled in the sprawling green-brown fields below.  When I was very little I little I believed the “M” to be for Molly.  When I got a little older, I learned the town was not for me. 

I bought the post card in a grocery store called Piggly Wiggly that used to be called Dicks.  I wrote that I bought it a year ago; the last time I was in my hometown.  I didn't write home, though.  That's wouldn't be quite right. 

I wrote that I have two younger brothers, one of whom writes songs the way I used to write songs.  When my mother was gone and I was young and my brother was younger, he and I would sing and dance for hours, day after day after day.  I'm not sure he even remembers that. 

It's funny the things a person can forget: the date, an appointment, why they're angry, the way, a word...

Then there things that stay with a person far longer than a paper postcard.  The things I can not forget are postcards made of Technicolor-terror-dreams, stamped into my mind's eye.

I didn't write to you that when I was young I thought the right person would know how to save me – that maybe that's what love would be: salvation.  (Maybe the next time I send you a post card I will write about how I saved myself.)