Dear Yoko Ono

Dear Yoko Ono,

I like you.

You're strong.

And I think I understand you. Mostly.

Some afternoons I sit here in this very spot that I’m sitting in now and I watch you on my computer screen: burning it with all your clipped words of white-hot love. It helps me sometimes…I think.

It helps me think.

Either/Or.

And there you sit across from me in the screen, sitting the same way every time: being positive, elegant, generous and loving and all of the things that we all should be. We all should be…and yet none of us are. No one I know is. I try to be. I know I’m not.

But you! You are.

Even after the merciless and horrible things the universe has brought upon your tiny little head, still full of your shiny short hair at 73 years old, you are.

See, if I were you, Yoko, I don't think I'd ever be able to say I love you again.

And you! You do. You say it every day, to everyone and no one at all.

God, you’re so fucking strong, Yoko.

You make me entertain the thought that I, too, could maybe be as amazing as you are one day even though I’m admittedly selfish (and, quite simply, not as amazing; simply in that I never want to have to be). But I still entertain it. I let it loose up in my head, like hair that’s been confined from tight braids it’s been in for weeks, like a child who’s eaten nothing but Pixie Stix for days on end and runs up and down the block to burn it all off.

This kind of simplicity? It’s so nice to have sometimes.

I wonder, Yoko, if you too sometimes get sad or bored with yourself, and the feeling that you’re not actually very good at anything at all?

I try to be creative most days.

Most days I can't even tell if it's working or not.

Most days I think I could do anything at all and none of it would matter to anyone but me.

Or it could matter to everyone, but I think it would mean nothing to me either way.

What is being creative anyways? Just…creating? Well, I could create anything then. I could write you a letter, I could draw pictures of paper coffee cups piled up on desks with words like I’m so fucking sick of this scrawled over them, I could draw them over top of worse renderings of with tiny waists and long legs of extra-terrestrials spreading their fingers atop the open palms that face their audience in surrender, saying come in, I’m letting you in, have a fucking look and don’t fucking look at me and I could make a million dollars.

People make a million dollars making much stupider, much dirtier, much more inane things than these.

I wish my mind was clean.

I wish I could make a million dollars.

I wish I didn't wish to know everything all the time.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is…I feel like you must sometimes feel like I do, Yoko.

Do you?

You certainly never show it. I'm working on that, too, the not showing of it. Not letting it get in me in the first place is hard enough, but at least not letting it out...it's kind of like those affirmation things that you’re supposed to do when you’re depressed. Someone told me to do them when I thought I was depressed, but I don't think I really was. Just sad. I did them anyways.

So tell me Yoko, please, because I actually need to know whether or not it’s true.

Do you ever get sad? Do you ever go on your early evening walks and feel nothing but loose street gravel below the soles of your little feet, do you alternate between conversations and shapes and numbers in your head, do you find yourself unable to speak of it, not because you don’t want to but because you don’t know what your insides are made of, let alone what words to use?

I hope you do, Yoko. I hope you are sad sometimes. I hope you hate sometimes. I hope you’re just as confused and fucked and afraid as the rest of us.

But as much as I need to know that you’ve got bad on your insides too, Yoko, don’t worry. I know you don’t. It’s why I like you.