Elsie Platzer Letters to AK
1. Let me say this: I don’t mean to write about our romance, to describe it, or to explain why it happened. These are the kinds of things I did when first coming out to my friends, in late-night messages with the requisite picture attached, in order to receive their questions and their excitement and their exultation. I think of that as a kind of gossip-rag journalism, a juicy news update, and not worthy of literature. Rather, I want to let you know that when you asked if you could kiss me on that carved ivory bench behind the steps of Low Library you dropped a pebble into clear water, and that concentric circles have been expanding from that point of impact ever since. 2. Here is how I think about relationships, beginning from when I was very small. When she was in middle school my sister hung a poster of teenage Anakin Skywalker, from the disastrous 2003 Star Wars reboot, on her wall. In the poster, Anakin’s skin is simultaneously glowing, as if buffed, and peppered with marks from some presumably deadly Jedi battle: splashes of soot, small, manufactured scratches, like marks from pen nibs. He is halfnaked, the outline of his six-pack lovingly contoured. “My first celebrity crush,” she says, perhaps imagining even at this very minute going back in time and canvassing the landscape of his musculature with her tiny, preadolescent hands. In my mind, ironically, she is the paradigm of Healthy Development, in that she has picked out an appropriate object of fixation.