Dear Mary Angel,

I've thought of you often these last weeks, hoping you were well; that the Lord smiles upon you. I had wished to write sooner, but found the process prohibitively time-consuming. In truth it's so difficult to write-- I spend much of my time correcting spelling and gobble-d-gook. My thoughts race, and wish to fly... and can't. This letter has taken three days to write.

And yet, prohibitions aside, writing you is necessary, especially now. You may think otherwise; that I presume too much, that I clamor for memories that were, perhaps for you, brief... fleeting... but unbeknownst to you, all these years, I have had your ardent ear. You have been, perhaps, my best friend. my closest confidant, keeper of all my hopes, fears, and dreams. My vision is abysmal, who else can I retreat to, but you? My wife, you say? How can I trust her who doesn't care or want to know me? I know... pathetic. And why should I rely upon inferior ears, when there is you?

In 1995 I bought a computer, an IBM Aptiva-- an impulse buy. It was state of the art: a 1 gig hard drive and 68 Mbs of RAM. Powerful. but for it's power the only thing I ever felt delight in was writing. and I wrote a lot... poetry mostly. I began writing you letters, occasionally at first, but over the next year they grew into a full fledged journal.

I don't know what compelled me to write you that first letter, or why I continued to write you, but over time they become a part of me; something I identified as uniquely me, something I did each day, like brushing my teeth, or dressing for work. It made sense. And up to that time, nothing ever had except God, and He and I were not talking much. In the intervening twenty years I have written you more than a thousand letters.

Te amo mi amiga