Dirty Letters(10)

I read her letter twice more and then grabbed one of the half dozen notepads I kept lying around the house for when lyrics or music came to me.

Dear Luca,

Three things I’m afraid of? How am I supposed to answer that and still sound like a tough guy? I sure as shit can’t tell you I’m afraid of the dark, or spiders, or heights. That would ruin my street cred. So I’m going to have to go with some real scary shit. Like failure.

If you want to know the truth, which I’m pretty sure you do, I’m afraid of failing. Letting others down, letting myself down, letting the . . .



I was just about to say letting the fans down. But Griffin didn’t have any fans. I didn’t want to start lying to Luca, so I’d just have to be careful how I phrased things.

. . . letting the life I’ve built out here in California fall apart.

What else am I afraid of? Death. Fearing something that is inescapable might not be the most productive use of time. Maybe it isn’t even death that I fear but more the fear of the unknown. Do we really go to heaven? I think anyone who has a healthy fear of death must be skeptical of that answer—because if I was certain that I’d go to a place where there’s no pain and no sickness and everyone gets cool wings and meets up with their old chums, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t fear death.



The last fear was a new one, one that I debated back and forth about sharing before eventually deciding to be honest. I mean, she’d shared some damn scary shit with me. It was the least I could do.

The last one is a relatively new fear, but that doesn’t make it any less real. I’m afraid I’ll fuck something up and scare you away again. So let’s make a pact, okay? If I screw up, you’ll let me know and not just stop answering my letters.

I think at this point, we’ve exchanged enough heavy stuff to hold us for a while. So let’s move on to the lighter portion of Luca and Griffin, Part Deux. I’ve got eight years’ worth of unanswered questions:



Did you finally have sex? If so, you owe me your first-time story, since I shared mine and you promised to share yours. (Is it fucked up that I sort of wish you haven’t had sex yet?)

How do you feel about bacon? I mean, you mentioned you have a pet pig, so I’m wondering if this means you don’t eat bacon. Or maybe you’re a vegetarian like half the people out here in healthy California.

If you were going to sing karaoke, what song would you choose and why?



Later, gator,

Griff

P.S. While the thought of you showing me yours is extremely enticing, I’d like to hold off on exchanging photos for a while. Let’s keep the mystery going.

P.P.S. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia—fear of long words—sixty-five points. Makes your little nineteen-point agoraphobia seem like child’s play now, doesn’t it? Get a real fear, Ryan.

P.P.P.S. Do you have genophobia? I definitely don’t.





CHAPTER 5

LUCA


I ran to the dictionary to look up the word genophobia: The psychological fear of sexual relations or sexual intercourse.

Great.

Well, he definitely wasted no time speaking his mind. In that sense, it was like no time had passed.

His questions certainly gave me a lot to ponder. The funny thing? I knew how I wanted to answer them, aside from one: how I felt about bacon. That was a dilemma I’d often struggled with. Gah! Why did he have to ask that?

I knew I wouldn’t be writing him back until tonight anyway; I was late for an appointment with Doc. While we normally took walks in the woods, the weather wasn’t cooperating today. So we planned to meet at Doc’s house.

It was a good thing I had agoraphobia and not claustrophobia, because Dr. Maxwell had a tiny house—literally—like the kind you see on those shows featured on HGTV. Until Doc, I hadn’t ever met anyone who actually lived in one.

Doc pointed to his favorite bird painting hanging on the wall. “This one still has to be my favorite, Luca. The hummingbird.”

About a year ago, Doc decided that he was going to strive toward a life of minimalism—thus, the tiny house. Apparently all he needed were air and birds. He also concluded that he no longer wished for me to pay for my therapy in dollars, because he had enough money. He insisted that I instead choose another way to compensate him and asked that I come up with something I felt was suitable.

What do you get the man who doesn’t apparently want or need anything? I knew it had to have something to do with birds.

Besides my writing, I’d always dabbled in art, just simple oil paintings. One afternoon, I Googled how to paint a bird. Over several months, I perfected the craft from the feather details down to the beak formation. I taught myself how to sketch and paint several types of birds but only presented him with the very best ones. The rest I kept in my basement. It was like a mortuary of birds down there. The one commonality among all the birds I’d painted? They all looked stoic, never flying, just posed. And their beaks were never open. We’d dubbed my art “The Stoic Bird Collection.” Doc theorized that the birds’ expressions were a reflection of how I felt inside. That’s some heavy shit. Anyway, my framed artwork now graced every small corner of Doc’s house, and I sort of cracked up every time I looked around at my creations.

Doc took a seat across from me. “So tell me, Luca, how has your correspondence with Griffin been going?”