Lee, I forgot to tell you that I was in NC for a week last December and I was cleaning out my old room and I found a clipboard with a bunch of poems that I'd copied like "What Happens to a Dream Deferred?" by Langston Hughes and Robert Frost's "A Road Not Taken". I remember copying and decorating those poems with colored pencils while you and I talked on the phone as we did so often back then. They reminded me of the fact that you were on the phone with me during a couple of my worst high school memories, I mean you were there for me, as support. Remember? I was on the phone with you that day when I was looking out the window and watching Larry Harris and his friend come up the street toward my house and I knew I was being fucking stupid. I was so scared of him because I knew I would fuck him in spite of what he did to me. I guess I can look back now and see that I was compulsively re-enacting the trauma, in the worst kind of way. All I knew then was the fear and the feeling that I must be possessed, I knew I didn’t want to be with him, so why was he walking toward my house with a condom in his pocket? I remember saying ⠀œShit, Lee, what should I do?” over and over, before you could even answer. Then, after he left and I was left with, yes, a feeling that I had recovered some control, but I had also lost even more self respect, and of course, the condom had popped. The other time was when Reggie (that man I met at the rec center who lied and said he was 16 when he was 21. I was in love with him until he gave me the crabs, then lied about it and gave me the crabs again.) Remember one day he called up and said "I don’t love you, I never loved you, and I have a little girl and I live with her mama.” It knocked the wind out of me and all I could do was hang up on him without saying a word and then called you crying. I could see him through the window and hear him out there driving around my house on his loud ass motorcycle trying to get my attention but I stayed with you on the phone. Then he called and did an "emergency breakthrough" on the phone (my mom couldn’t afford call waiting back then) and I got off the phone with you and he said he was just kidding, he did love me, he just wanted to see what I would say. I don't know if you remember that stuff, but I remember that you were always on the phone (since the bus didn’t go out where you lived, I never ever saw you in person except when our schools played each other and we, the band geeks, would meet around the side of the stadium). It was weird to hear from you in a letter so soon after I found those decorated poems that had been long forgotten. And now I am trying to be here for you, on the phone, overseas, in spite of the 3 to 5 second delay and the beeps from the army reminding you not to disclose anything confidential and the calling card reminding us how many minutes are left. I am trying to be here for you though you are going through shit nobody should have to go through, doing a job that is so unnatural, especially since it is just a job, just a way to pay the bills. So I just wanted to say I appreciate you and wish I could be on the phone while you go through that shit. With love…