Dear Kitten,

I think that we are mad, and we will never stop being mad. 

We will never stop because once you've tasted madness, nothing else tastes as good. 

When we reach for our keys, when we go walking, when we wake up in the morning, we think, "Maybe today," when we should not be thinking at all. 

Nothing feels as soft. Nothing smells the same. Nothing makes me cringe like when I'm mad with you. 

We are meeting, laughing, talking, writing, dressing, talking, talking, too much crying, sleeping, holding, laughing, writing, reading, breaking, leaving, crying, crying, crying, together, alone, writing. 

We do this in real time, setting fire to each other's insanity again and again, timed like a circus act. 

We are most alive in the back of our minds. It feels like home to us. 

We make our beds of memories and we lie in them and lie and lie and lie, too afraid of the dark to wake up. 

Dear Jinx,

If I had the audacity, I would cover your life in yellow roses. Every day I would litter your walkways with fresh flowers to trample. I would dissect a perfectly good posy just to pile the petals onto your bed, make you a nest of something soft and alive. I would keep myself a secret. I would learn to make masks out of marigolds and morning glories. I would learn to be two-hundred different people, and all two-hundred of us would spend all 4,800 of each day's hours knitting you a brighter life out of daisy stems.  We would learn to hide under rocks. We would learn to thrive in shadows. We would learn that transformations are easy, if the weather allows. We would live and die weaving you a sunflower dream from behind a fat oak tree, watching you read on the bench nearby. We would use up our 6 trillion breaths on sighs so that you never had to waste yours because I know that you've spent a lot of time sighing already. We would do all of that for you, the one, the only one. I would do it for you. But I won't risk it on the all-too-likely off-chance that you'll pick up all my yellow rose petals and piece them back together in the shape of a mask that perfectly fits my face.