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Literally | May 09 2005

Looking for something else, I just found an email I wrote to M, nearly three years ago, while she was several states away, breaking up with her live-in boyfriend of five years so she could move to New York and begin a relationship with me which as it turned out lasted exactly thirty days. I wrote my email in response to one by M, the subject line of which was “sorry.” Hers went:

literally dying for you today.

i know it is somehow wrong to say that. my other life continues, strong and real.

but there it is.

i am doubled over with the force of how much i want you.

My response:

Isn’t it amazing that my first thought on reading this is that you don’t mean literally? I imagine being your editor and saying, “You lose the reader’s trust with literally. The reader thinks you’re over-dramatizing. What are you going to tell the reader when you’re literally dying for this man, say, by taking his place in a hostage situation?

That’s where my response ends. I never finished it and never sent it.