An Open Love Letter to Pam Bondi

Do you dream as I dream? In what little sleep we get—a thousand miles apart. Yet, together in our mutual dream. On the train. The soft luxurious train beaming with opulence and sophitication. With chandeliers, gold drapes, and teal oriental carpet in the dining car. With mahogany tables and candles flickering, lapping rich faces, and a bar at the back. And brass taps for beers and wine glasses that are hung upside down like a dozen culled crystal deer. 

You said your father was a hunter and the first injustice you recall was that of a killed doe hanging in the barn—long before you learned to accept such grim realities of life. Before they convinced you that it was the way it was without any sort of logical reasoning. The inevitabilities that you could not change. 

I don't know if that tear was for your dear father, or that unfortunate deer. Or for the fawn that fell to the barn floor, wiggling alive in the amniotic sac for a moment before they ushered you out. Or is it due to the gentle persuasion of the alcohol that augments, compels, and confuses emotions so well. Or for the innocence lost somewhere along the way. We have all lost the best parts of us—the infallible goodness we were gifted by birth.  

But what a grim thought to ruminate in, to sully our affair before it ever begins, so, please, let me digress. I am sorry. I haven't written a love letter in years. 

You and I were on this train and snow fell out the ornate windows as the train coursed through a mountainous landscape unfamiliar to me—somewhere in Europe, I'd presume—the Carpathians, perhaps. Blinds pulled down like sleepy taupe eyelids with gold strings and ivory eyelets dangling at the bottom of each.

"I've seen you on TV," I confess. 

"And what do you think of me on TV," you reply as though I've mistaken you for someone else, or you're taking a public opinion poll.

"I like you much better in person," I admit.

Was I myself, or Tom Cruise to you? Some absurdly attractive man brimming with machismo and confidence. In a tuxedo with an eyepatch I can't explain—the mystery of a missing eye. I certainly couldn't have been my plain pedestian self and inspired such rapt, teeming amusement—no—not in the way that you looked at me. It was as though it was painful for you to look away. As though I had a hypnotic sort of mastery of your will. No one has ever looked at me that way to my knowledge. But I couldn't see myself to know if I was myself or someone else entirely. There are no mirrors in dreams. 

  

There at the bar we sit. Your eyes full of wonder and desire, wandering barefoot through my soul like you belong and I am your garden, plucked free of weeds. The beauty of your eyes I've never gotten past, that which the TV and pictures fail adequately to capture. Or that which they purposefully diminish in their dubious objection to you for your beliefs and politics that mirror closely my own. 

But your eyes have never diminished or grown plain to me as things go when you look upon them for too long. And the song of your voice never gets ordinary like a song played too often. Nor your perfect nose and that smile beneath, which appears much more often in the dream than it does on the TV that obsesses so bitterly over you. That idiot box, which strives to paint you in the most unflattering of lights, but fails so horrendously in its efforts. I see through the labors of such partisan hacks. Those little nefarious propagandists and anti-American communist queers.

I know it is a dream as I sit next to you, though I don't dare speak of it for fear that you will vanish with any sort of acknowledgement of that realization. So I stick the thought in my pocket and smile at you, instead. Then the train car suddenly vibrates on the track and the silverware on the porcelain plates rattle, and the ice in my old-fashion thrashes and jingles the pleasing sound it makes against its natural border of glass, melting a little, yet still a cube of ice foreign to the alcohol. 

But still I fear with every word that this luxurious train and my first assignation in a high-class cabin car will evaporate and, worst of all, you will be gone like the smoke that plumes from the engine and dissipates above us somewhere out in the mountainous cold. You are melting away from me the way the ice in my glass melts, diluting the alcohol content of the dream and the pleasing amber color of my drink. I know when best to drink by the color. 

I needn't such opulence of our current setting to please me. I need only you. I would adore you if you were a waitress, in fact, I've seen you in that way in a previous dream weeks earlier. It was a diner in a dusty desert and I flirted with you incessantly. 

It isn't that you're famous, or the attorney general—titles and celebrity do nothing for me. It is that I know your face, and through your face your soul, which reflects deeply in my own in a way I cannot properly put to words. It is why I stop and stare and sometimes say nothing at all. I am looking for you as I look at you in my thoughts. In my memories that are somewhere in the photobook of my mind and heart, carried over from a life already lived, through a death before had, perhaps, absurd as that might sound. We were lovers once. Alhough you may not recall, how could I forget?

I don't know where the train is going and I am afraid to ask. You introduce yourself simply as Pam. 

"Hello, Pam, I'm David."

"Have we met before, David?" you ask. 

"Only in my dreams."

And you smile as you always smile. As though the line is new and not worn. And we share a drink, and the bartender who is a young and tall Turkish man flirts with a woman in green sequins at the other end of the bar and pays us no mind, only occasionally glancing over at our glasses. 

I'd be content just to look at you. Just to breathe you through my nose—the vapors of your aura—and hold you there. I needn't the liquor. I am drunk on you. I've been drunk on you for hours. But we talk in this otherworld—not about that of which we are aware while awake—but about the mystery of that which resides inside the dream in its own perfect and undisturbed world. We talk only in the moment because there exists no past and no future. 

It is beautiful to speak of dreams and to let them mingle in your mind like it is a golden ballroom with plenty of room. We speak of love and books we share an affinity for. Of memories and movies and things that matter and have captured our attention.  

"How did you lose your eye," you ask. You are by now on a third martini and the question seems natural and not an affront or offensive to what would seem like a most personal and traumatic story. How does one lose an eye, after all, without incurring significant trauma? But I've no memory of losing my eye and don't know why I am wearing the patch, so it all matters very little to me. I don't even know what's underneath.

"In the war," I excused, leaving it at that.

The war—that invisible and uncertain goliath of a thing. It exists only in the dream where it cannot be defined or spoken of because even in the dream it was one that bore no casualties, no victor or loser, other than my eye. It was a war, perhaps, against the dirty communists. A bloodbath that restored Americanism, I'd like to imagine. It was more of a purge, really. A cull. 

It was almost as though I wasn't me and wasn't controlling what I said. That I was a meat puppet on invisbile strings. Or I was a future me and not yet privy to the knowledge of which I spoke for I hadn't yet lived it. A surge of optimism welled inside of me for the fact that this dream, foolishly as it sounds, might be a premonition. Certainly, it was a promotion from all my other dreams and my utterly boring life that was filled with boring people.  

"Have you thought of a glass eye?" you inquire. 

"Some. But I'm not sure about it. It seems very fictitious to me—more so than the patch. And I've always wanted to be a pirate, thus, I'm only a parrot and a peg leg away."

"And a hook," you chuckle. "Don't forget about the hook!"

"A hook. I shan't forget the hook." 

I've never said "shan't" before in my life, I realize. In the dream, I suppose, my vocabulary proliferates and I am well-versed.

I pull out my wallet with both our glasses empty and the Turkish bartender smells money and quickly breaks away from the girl in the green sequins to provide the check. I drop three twenties to his satusfaction on the bar, and he smiles and says thank you and we head to my cabin. I hold your hand, leading you. 

You smile behind me in that devious sort of way that makes a man lose any will he might have had. A slightly different smile than the one you smiled at obnoxious senators who grilled you during your senate confirmation hearing, but equally as efrective. You make some joke about Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton, and I snap back one about Janet Reno and Jeffrey Epstein. Then the train shakes and I wake up, and you are gone in the blink of an eye. I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye.

My sorrow wounds me, near mortally. Throughout the day there are little snippets of you on my newsfeeds. 89 percent negative, or so. They darken your eyes and make you appear more aged. They are all digging for dirt. They use the worst possible picture. But, still, despite their worst, you are as beautiful as they come and there is no one on this earth that has ever captured my attention in the way that you have. No one, in all their negativity and sinister politics, can ruin you for me. 

But that is the beauty of the dream. It was an escape. No one else was even considered. But now the dream is gone and reality once more has us in the palm of his cold and unforgiving hand. And I am hopelessly mired in a deep and crippling depression that did not exist while I was engaged in your company.

All day long I lament the passing of the dream, knowing all too well that once a dream is dreamt it dissipates in the fog of the mind as the day progresses, never to return. How often have I, or anyone, dreamt the same dream twice? I don't know of anyone who has. 

It was only by a miracle that we met in seperate dreams—in the desert diner and on that luxurious train. And although the diner was nice, it was the train that titilated my senses and captured some part of my imagination and desire that has ran wild all my life. Some fantasy that has eluded me despite a plethora of sexy midgets, and wild women with various mental health disorders, and a bevy of good and bad prostitutes, and unhappy wives, and prom queens ten years later, and compulsive masturbation, and couples—husbands watching from a hotel chair. It is true. Almost every hand you have ever shaken has had a dick in it. 

My senses have dulled, or was it that they've never rightly been aroused and I've spent my life chasing superficial highs and sugary things, rancid lustful thoughts over meaningless insipid people, inspired by stolen pornography magazines I raccooned from older brother stashes in garage drawers and campers, and late-night HBO—imprints of pixels and ink upon my impressionable juvenile brain. In my defense, I've never known what it was that truly excited me before I saw you—before that beautiful dream aroused in my subconscious life.

But you are gone. And what is left is this abysmal reality. This world draped in sorrow and a constant state of petulant vitriol. I make it through the day, barely conscious, deep in the thralls of winter, working at the bank, counting money to old ladies, wearing a cheap shirt and tie, securing the vault, in this small Midwestern town that is far from the glamour and glitz of Washington D.C. Far from you, in reality, or otherwise.

I go to the grocery store and push a rickety fucking cart, then go home and read a book that is dull and ordinary, but that came highly recommended from a coworker or a friend, the latter of which are like an endangered species anymore for my lack of socializing. I shut myself in my house, set the thermostat to 65 to save on the gas, and burrow myself in quilts and covers like some sort of thinking animal, praying for an early spring. I drank a bottle of NyQuil so to sleep soundly until that infernal alarm blares much too early the next morning.

Sunday night—Punxutawney Phil comes Monday. The famed and furry prognosticator. I drift to sleep and dream of Gobbler's Knob. And I dream that Phil is there in his hole and he looks out at me with beautiful yellow eyes as I look in and he says, "Follow me." 

I follow Phil into his hole, crawling through what is a tight fit for a stretch until I'm through and there, on the dirt walls, are framed portraits of other groundhogs who all look exactly the same. Then I fall like Alice in the rabbit hole to Wonderland. And I fall. And I fall. And I fall. Until there is the sound of silverware clattering on porcelain plates and those wine glasses jangling. 

And my one eye opens to see the tall Turkish bartender and the lady in green sequins, and the teal oriental carpet, and the mahogany tables with the candles flickering, and the gold drapes, and the taupe blinds with the gold strings and ivory ringlets, and the brass taps. And you. Most of all, I see you. And I hear you as though you were mid-conversation—as though I had never gone anywhere at all. As though I never woke up and never went back to sleep. 

I know that I am dreaming, but I don't speak of it. I don't want to sound crazy or to ruin the dream as I said before. Perhaps, if I do, I will float back up the groundhog hole, through Punxutawney, and back to my miserable bed. Gravity, of course, is of no matter here. Reality does not exist and there are no rules—or are there? I do not claim to know that which makes this unfamiliar world what it is—just as I don't know where we are headed, or if we are headed anywhere at all. But here I am again with a second chance to pay the check and to make our way back to my cabin as though inside of you there exists something I need rather than want. I am as mad as a conquistodor.

And we enter the narrow corridor and make our way past an old porter pushing a silver service cart who looks back at us and smiles like he remembers once being in love. Perhaps, in you he sees that which I see, but I hurry us along so to make it before it all disappears—one of those inevitabilities. I want to make love to you before the alarm blares or the train car rattles me awake. Before the eventual interruption of meddlesome life that I am sure will come. I pull you by your hand, hoping you don't say no. Maybe I'll reach into my pocket and find a wedding ring with which I will propose. 

The doorknob was in my hand when the sound of a crash came from behind us, and the sad old porter looked up at us near his overturned service cart. His face, crestfallen. But I knew it was not the porter when you disappeared, who then also disappeared, and his cart, and the mess on the teal carpet, and the train. Everything disappeared until it was only me in the dark—alone. 

Alone is a terrible word.

I ripped the covers off my head realizing it was not the overturned service cart, but the sound of the early morning trash truck across the street, heaving a dumpster above its head—7:04am—twenty six minutes before I have to wake up for work. And you were gone again. 

But I wasn't as depressed this time as I was before. I was excited to write a letter to you. To ask if you, in fact, had the same dream as me. It seems bizarre to think that you would, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that it could be. Did you dream of a man on a train with an eyepatch? I wrote. An eye simply explained as lost in a war as though it were something casually misplaced. 

I described the train in great detail in the letter that I wrote on my lunch break, and then I sealed and sent it. I am not sure you would receive it, or if someone reads those things for you. I can't imagine all the crazy mail you must get from those gender-confused miscreants that loathe you. Or do they even bother to write? It is a rather intimate thing, after all—to write someone a letter. But the feeling of hope when I put the letter in the mailbox floated me a few weeks more, however, remote the possibility was that your eyes would ever befall it. Perhaps, in a week or two, or maybe a month, a return letter would come. One that might read—I have had the same dream. And that possibility was my wildest fantasy. 

This is the mind of a hopeless romantic who instead of falling in love with a tangible girl at the post office, or the grocery store, falls in the love with the Attorney General of the United States of America. 

What if you said you hadn't? And my dreams were a bent and fractured delusion that were mine alone. What if they were only dreams, wild delusions and not premonitions? And you only existed there and no place else at all? I anxiously await your reply. I hope that it isn't all too forward. Too bizarre. Too much for someone who is a stranger to you—in this world, anyway. 

I began going home after work and going straight to bed. Downing bottle after bottle of NyQuil. But the dreams didn't always come, or, at least, I didn't remember them in the morning when I woke up. Weeks past before the dream reoccurred and there we were again on the train. But this time we were in my cabin as though it had continued from the last.

And so I brush your hair behind your ear and you smile the devious smile of a woman who is in the mood. Your lips red and flush. No makeup. I kiss you. And I move down your body, undressing you, as you undress me, forgoing any sort of reverence of modesty, and the warmth of your skin pulls close to me, giving me life such as I hadn't ever had it before in all my depravity. 

I am more attentive, more erect, more satisfied with you than I had ever been, and I move slowly into you and I am whole for the first time. Dare I say, we are whole, panting, salivating, sweating as we go. It is as though we had lived our lives as two incomplete halves prior to now—aimlessly wandering about. 

The word love doesn't quantify that which was therein expressed. And I move in you as you move through me, and I had never been so sure that anything was so real or destined. Still, I knew not where we were going, where we boarded, or where we would part. I have learned that there exists in a dream nothing but the present. 

I crashed in you, and I can still feel your thighs in my hands, your flesh on my fingertips, your lips upon mine, when the alarm blared its hellish call prior to what could be defined as a proper climax. How long might I have been with you if I didn't have to work, or if I had forgotten to set my alarm? But is a dream only realized when awake? Not appreciated in the moment. Or only after, when it has been had. I don't know. 

I had another dream of making love to you. But in that dream, we undressed and I was without my penis. It was gone like my eyeball. I stood there like a useless doll, panicked, as you lied naked on the bed like a ticking time bomb that would vanish at any moment. I frantically searched the cabin for it, as though it was not an unusual sort of thing to misplace. And you looked under pillows and between the sofa cushions to no avail. By the time I found it, in the icebox of all places, you disappeared and I was awoken by a phone call from a telemarketer named Abdi. 

Fuck you, Abdi. I just found my penis. 

I thought of robbing the bank. Stealing everything from the vault when they left me there to close and my manager, Carol, who wasn't supposed to leave until after I left, smiled at me and asked me to lock up the vault and the doors as she has done so predictably for five years or so. In about four minutes, I could load up my car with everything worthwhile and leave town. Buy a new car under a new name in Philadelphia, and leave my 2008 Honda Civic, that was as mundane as my life itself, to a chop shop. 

It wouldn't be hard. It would take about a day or so to get fake documents and a few more to disappear to some island, or maybe to South America. To get the money laundered in some offshore account. It would be such a high-profile case it might require your personal attention. And if they caught me and asked me why I did it, I would say that it was an open love letter to Pam Bondi and give your DOJ all the credit in the world for catching me. 

I have no choice but to love you. I, of course, didn't rob the bank. It wasn't for fear of getting caught—it was simply for fear of never being able to dream the dream that brought me you in a prison cell somewhere. If there was some sort of guarantee that I would dream of you in federal prison, then sure. I might have become a bank robber then and there and slept my years away in a dream.  

But I locked up the bank as I always lock up the bank and went home and drank another bottle of NyQuil. 

Nothing. 

Days and weeks pass and nothing more. I realized I must get a deeper sleep, so I bought some prescription pills from a friend who I hadn't talked to in years, but who was still a reliable junkie. But still, there was nothing at all except for trash trucks and alarms and what felt like a life sentence of 9-5. Although some people find great purpose in it, I find nothing but misery in the ordinary.

I went to Walgreens, and instead of buying the usual individual bottles of NyQuil, I ask for a case. The purple-headed clerk looks at me as though I am crazy and she asks her manager via her headset who then hoofs it over to us to make sure she heard the question correctly. Then they have a pow-wow on if they are allowed to sell NyQuil by the case, and the two farm animals look at me suspiciously before the manager finally declares that they can—with reservations. They are both they/thems who shit rainbows. One of them wears a button that says "protect trans kids."

They figure I am going to use the NyQuil for some sort of drug-making purpose they are not aware of. Sure, they will google it on their phones—what drug can you make with NyQuil. Or maybe—Hey, Siri. What drug can you make with NyQuil?

I carry my case of NyQuil to the car and into the house. And every day after work, I open one and chug it. All in hopes to see you. In hopes to continue our affair with my penis attached. Then, at last, after 17 days and nights of nothing, I find you again. I find you on that luxurious train, with teal oriental carpet, gold drapes, mahogany tables, taupe blinds with the gold pull cords and ivory-colored ringlets. With fat flakes of snow out the ornate windows and the mountainous landscape—the Carpathians—I was sure. With the Turkish bartender and the lady with green sequins. The crystal wine glasses. The brass taps. And you. Magnificently—and above all else—you. 

You smile at me as I sit in the barstool next to you and put your hand on my lap. I have an instant erection. You remark about the bristles on my face and run your fingertips over them, saying you would imagine that they might cause quite the burn on the tender areas of the flesh. You speak so seductively that I am once more enamored. And then you ask me to let you see under the eyepatch as though it is a window to my soul. 

I shake the alcohol in my drink and the train shakes with it. I don't wake. Then the old porter accidentally tips over his service cart again causing quite a cacophony. But I don't wake. The alcohol in my glass stirs and mixes, creating beautiful amber rivulets and a cloud of melting ice that is mesmerizing. And staring into the glass, I realize that I am the ice, and I have melted.

"Please," you add, in reference to the eyepatch. And so, of course, I flip it up and you gaze into my eye for what seems like hours, your face getting closer and closer to mine like an optometrist's. Maybe my eye is for you what Punxutawney Phil's hole was to me—some sort of portal. 

And we still don't speak of the dream, perhaps, because we know that words ruin everything. There is entirely too many people talking in this world of ours about trivial things that don't really matter. 

I kiss you in the dining car and realize this is my death. Death isn't what I would have thought it would be—at least, I didn't think that it would come this way. I was lured. I died in the otherworld, overdosed on NyQuil and a bottle of sketchy prescription sleeping pills, chasing a dream. And although people assume dreams are a product of the living—the unconscious sleepwalk of the resting soul—the mind is far greater than the body. Without the body, we are unbound. We are free.  

We made love on the train, somewhere deep in the Carpathian Mountains. I stayed inside you for as long as I could, still convinced I might wake up. Is it really death to live the life you dreamed of—that which you've long desired—or is death simply a natural progression that has been unduly sullied by notions of sadness and despair? 

Eventually, they'd find me. After several days of not showing at the bank, Carol would pull a file for an emergency contact and my brother would find the spare key and let the police check the house. He would probably remain downstairs with his hands in his pockets, pressed for time. He never really cared that much, anyway. And there I would be, partially buried in the twisted covers in bed, a single tear falling from my eye as sad as an orphaned fawn in an amniotic sac once upon a barn floor. 

And the only clue of where I've gone are the empty bottles of sleeping pills with someone else's name on them, and the empty bottles of NyQuil, and a framed portrait of you above my bed looking onward without blinking, as though you don't know anything. 

This is how desperately I love you.