In third grade my teacher asked me to draw a portrait of a person who made my heart stretch in diameter. I drew a picture of my grandpa’s dentures on his dining room table.

Last night when our power went out, I realized that I had never before seen you carry a plate of tealight candles up the staircase. Is that acceptable, after two and a half years? Also, I must say that the lack of light made your hair look a shade darker, reminding me of the time when you washed it in the sink in my old apartment, your neck bent toward the spigot as you lathered the shampoo into your scalp. I ate off my plates and out of my bowls quite differently after that.

When we went to see the new play by the local theatre company last month, I was hoping you’d refrain from clapping at the end. The play was bad. Terrible, even. Just because an audience claps at the end doesn’t make something good, and it certainly won’t help make it any better. The audience claps out of obligation, you see.

I love your habit of crossing your arms at stoplights because I can’t tell if it’s a sign of patience or a lack thereof. And the way you cross your seatbelt over your chest! I have never seen a seatbelt look so good on anyone in my entire life.

In a few years, I am going to open a thrift store that I’ll call “Not My Brother’s Keeper and Not My Sister’s, Either” and I’ll hope that this clever name will beckon people through my doors so that I can sell them lampshades and belt buckles and canning jars that once meant something to somebody but now mean nothing to nobody yet have the potential to return to meaning something, anything.

So do you like that flavor of gum? Is it too fruity? I know you don’t much like fruity gum, but I don’t prefer refreshing mint this, cool mint that. If you don’t like it, you can spit it into my palm and I’ll throw it away for you. Gladly.

I used to be scared of thunderstorms. I thought that it was too easy to be struck by lightning, that all you had to do was stand in the wrong spot in your house and—boom—down you’d go, dead you’d be. My mom, bless her soul, always told me that I was safest in the car during thunderstorms because the lightning couldn’t get me there. That’s why she couldn’t blame me when I locked myself inside her four-door sedan and waited it out, watched the water splash on the windshield, listened to the bolts crack loudly overhead as if someone hovering above me was breaking stale bread through the largest megaphone ever manufactured.

Three years ago today, my bank teller died of a heart attack. Yup. Three years ago already. Isn’t that sad? I can still remember the way she counted my money, how those crinkled bills slid off her fingers and into a neatly stacked pile that I’d envelope on my way out the door, anxious to get home so that I could count the money again just to make sure she didn’t make a mistake.

Sometimes, when I’m driving my car down the interstate, I wish so badly that a bird would fly through any one of my open windows and build a nest in my backseat. Tell me who wouldn’t want to witness baby birds hatching on the way to work.

Sidenote: way too often I spot dead birds in the middle of the road, and there’s nothing worse than spending the rest of the day thinking about how birds seem to be the least likely to qualify as roadkill because the wings attached to their bodies can quickly lift them off the road and into the sky. Could it be true that sometimes their wings fail them?

Last weekend I found a spider crawling near your reading glasses; I discovered that it had built a web behind the lenses. I considered leaving the web there, but decided that maybe you didn’t want to be unexpectedly tickled by the result of all that spinning.

Remember when you asked your friend about my lousy fertility?

I take comfort in the fact that one day I will be placed on a sanitized operating table and a surgeon with kind eyes will unglue my skin, pump my stomach full of confetti, and staple me back together.

I think we should both stay home today. Call off work. Talk to each other about the goods and bads of the 1990s and overfeed our pets and try to remember the last time we went grocery shopping together. I want to go grocery shopping with you. Fill our cart with bags of potato chips and cups of yogurt and boxes of cereal that will grow stale in our cupboards because we will forget about them as we reach—like we always do every morning—for the gingersnap granola.