Dear Jake,

This isn't how I wanted to begin, but nothing is quite how I wanted it. It's not exactly like me, I suppose, how distracted I've been...really since last January. I wanted this first post to be the description of the purpose of this endeavor, how I should have started this long ago. But the truth is rather simple: Every day there is something I want to tell you. What happened today, things that made me laugh, things that made me mad, or sad, or scared, just...everything. But I can't.

Hopefully, the next post will be the one where I lay out my plans, but as for this post, let me just tell you what happened last night!

I got out of class last night, you know normally I stay on campus on monday nights, but last night I just couldn't be here. It's not you every day. I mean, it is, but sometimes the whole of my life here is just too much or too little and I have to run. As we've discussed, I can't run as far as I used to anymore, but I can go down and stay and the barn and sleep in our bed without you. I guess it's just my bed now, but it'll never feel that way.

Anyway, I grabbed chinese food on the way down and was so excited to watch prison break and the shitty terminator show which no one must ever know I like--especially you. I settled in, ate your favorite meal, and considered how difficult it would be to relocate myself and our horses down to Panama. Of course, then I remembered I hate being hot and living in places with terrible tropical equine diseases. But for about thirty seconds it seems like a great plan. I wonder if you are going to Australia next year. I mean, I know theoretically you are quitting school and joining the military, but I am still skeptical about this rumor. That'll be a whole new post. Moving on, even when I sit down to watch a show and am really interested in the characters and what happens, I really just can't focus. I need to be doing something at all times, so all TV minus the news is me trying to remember that I'm supposed to be paying attention, that I care. I can't tell you off the top of my head what happened in either show last night, but I do know I thought for a moment how Brian Austen Green didn't suck nearly as much as he did while he was on 90210 and I was 12. He is certainly one who's better when he's older. I'd like to think I am and will be.

I fell asleep at some point. I don't sleep well at all. I wake up in the middle of the night a lot. I didn't used to. I have bad dreams with increasing regularity. I had a nightmare featuring John Kerry last week. I can't explain that one at all. I like John Kerry.

(Barack Obama is giving his victory speech right now. I don't really care for him, but I really dislike his wife.)

Somewhere around 12.30am I awoke to what sounded like gunfire right outside my window. Four shots. It couldn't be gunfire, because how could I ever feel safe again if it was? I convinced myself that it was Ernie banging around in the garage, perhaps not realizing I was in. I mean, I have a dad who decides to undertake home improvement projects with power tools regardless of the hour or who might be sleeping. "God damn it, Ernie!" I thought, rather like writing a script to a play where he really was just messing around, "don't you know what time it is?" But when I heard the tires screech down the driveway, I knew there was someone out there. I lay in bed when the police arrived shortly thereafter and listened to Ernie explain the pick-up that had pulled into the driveway and fired a gun into the field.

Likely hunters trying to spotlight deer on our property, and the four subsequent shots were Ernie firing at them.

I think about it the phone call we got last week about a pony whose owner shot it in the head, my friend Kim going out into their field when we were kids and finding her horse vivisected, every story on the news about home invasions and robberies gone wrong. I hope they were only hunting deer. I feel unprotected alone in our bed. I'm sleeping in your t-shirt, I do most nights at the barn, but that can't protect me from everything. I think about your having dreams about shooting me and how hard it must have been to share that. How scary it must be to have those thoughts.

I hear Ernie tell the cops that I live up above the garage and how he worries about me being up there alone. I hear Debbie go out and head down to the barn to check on the horses in the field. Crazy Gwendolyn wants her horses out all the time. I know they care about me, I know a lot of people care about me, but it can only do so much to alleviate the loneliness and nothing to eliminate the fear of waking up to gun shots in the middle of the night. I wish you were there.