I want the best of life and I’ll not settle for less. I want to sleep on a bed that doesn’t give me back pain, wake up to a fridge with bacon in it. I’d like milk in my coffee. That will help me get to work, where what I’d most like is to toil until I sweat and then see the results resting in my palm, cradled by my life lines and shining. I hope to bring in an income that allows me to wash my sheets with ecofriendly laundry soap. Then I’ll pull on clean socks and crack open a book about mysteries, pages lit by the low light of the fire.

When I have something to cry about, I want to call you, my friend. I’ll call you from the living room and you’ll come even though you were in the middle of washing the dog. You’ll sit by me and give me a wet-dog-shampoo-hug and say, cry.

“My dear girl, you go ahead and cry.”

Then you’ll say, get up, move on, here’s a comb, you really must brush your hair. You’ll hand me my deodorant and we’ll take a walk on cement streets lined with resilient trees. I’ll tell a story to make you laugh because I’m grateful. I’ll smile with you, lips closed, breathing through my nose, looking at the ground, walking forward. You’ll know by my story that I wanted you to laugh because I’m oh so grateful to you.

And when you call me, needing permission to cry, I’ll bring two spoons to go with the chocolate peanut butter ice cream. I’ll sit at your feet and pass the pint up and I’ll turn my face down so your tears don’t get shy and run back into your eyes. I’ll stay with you until we both find the courage again to go into tomorrow.

All I want is for my heart to keep beating. Oxygen being breathed into muscles made for moving. Any number of things could stop it beating – test results, sad songs, steady growing bacteria, a loud bang, taking a drink of hot coffee while watching a comedian, one quick catch of your overly blue eyes. I can’t complain, my heart’s done pretty well so far, keeping blood in constant circulation. It’s only stopped a few times.

Am I crazy to want you to tell me what I’m doing wrong? Can I ask for my bull shit to be called out? Don’t spare my feelings. Don’t be discouraged by my turned back, I’m listening. I’ll keep listening especially if you end it with “I love you.” Like, “Dear, why did you say that? But I love you anyway.”

Don’t stop noticing when I lie. I love your look when I lie, clear and cold and sharp. Would you love me enough to tell me when there’s ketchup on my face? Or the real test – you catch my eye at the moment when it’s filled with judgment and wordless, you see right through me to the blush of shame. You see right through me to the tiny embryo-hidden-me who learns to accept unconditionally.

Yes, you might say my standards for life are high. I want a lot out of it, this living thing. I want to be able to keep houseplants alive. I want to drink cucumber infused water after a hot day. I want to go home and plant things in the ground and trim them with care. I want to look behind me and see better and fuller things and not get on the other side of the bridge and realize that I took what wasn’t mine.

If I could, I would fill my life with your quiet side-ways jokes that make me snort and with letters to my far away friends. In those letters we would realize the value of rough edges and words thrown together like someone packing in a hurry. How if we time the silences right with the noise, we might figure out how to say something. If we say it slightly strange and one of us gets confused, then we’ll cut and paste and insert an emoji and mail the letter again until we’re reading the same page at the same time. We would remember the time we walked around the glass blowing store. How the translucent colors filled all the spaces and the shimmering and tinkling chimes meant something, we weren’t sure what. Until we looked back from where we are now. The picture memory brighter than the moment we’re in, the place where it takes 4 days for a letter to arrive.

I would write a letter to you, too, at least one, that says I’m sorry. I know by my actions it seems like I don’t love you. I do but I don’t do it well. But I’m practicing. Then I would ask for the same present you gave me last month when you knew I needed patience and you gave it to me wrapped in listening and tied with a ribbon that said “Come on, you can do better than that.”

All I really want is to get a letter at the end of a full day. To spend the morning with everyone dear, in a forest on a mountain and we have to share the water bottle and we’re a little lost. But then we find the path again and we make it home in time to grill burgers. The charred smell spreads over our fence to the neighbors and it mingles with the smell of our vigor and we can’t chew for laughing. Then there are waves goodbye and you walk me to the mailbox. You take my hand and say “the brownies were a bit burnt, love.” You put my fingers to your lips, eyes are bright and we carry the stack of letters back to the house where I slide a finger across an envelope and pull one out that smells like cinnamon.

I want to believe that a rock could be a jewel and my very believing would make it so. I could be a jewel too, if you can believe it, even though now I’m dull and muddy and my edges are jagged.