Dear Bob Dylan,

I feel I should be going to Austin to see you. I believe the only reason I ever bother with traveling is because you have always been my destination. Of course, I enjoy the cities I visit, the unfamiliarity of a different place with different buildings and different trees and people I don’t know and do not have to get to know, and the lack of structure, the timelessness of it all and you, you. The leading up to your show. And then the actuality of your show! The real you stepping out on stage, the music, your band, your voice. The tenderness of it all. Seeing your face under a black hat, seeing you move and play and breathe and sing under a sky I do not have any ties to. Sensing the starlight and the moonlight and the strange faces all around me who seem to love you almost as much as I love you. Being there surrounded by your songs, the lyrics I read myself into. The sequence, your tone, the atmosphere of the crowd. I am not lost in a foreign city when I am at your show. If anything, I’m found.

I mean, how many lives does a person get really? I want my life to constantly be punctuated by yours, for as long as it can, as long as the possibility exists.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I might fly to Austin to see The White Stripes. I don’t know, dear heart, how I can be in the same city on the same night as you and not see you.

I think just the idea of you being within a certain range of miles might bring me euphoria.

I’m still not over Tucson. I’ll never be over you.

One day, those who believe in the wisdom of their words say to me, soon Lisa you will find that you’ve been loving for ridiculous reasons, that perhaps the love you think you feel is not love at all, but yearning.

And yearning only has so much viability. It can be adequate at best but for only so long.

But, they did not see you in Tucson. And they didn’t see you in Indianapolis or Kansas City or Sun City or Las Vegas or San Diego or wherever else I will travel to see you.

It is possible (everything is possible) that some day I will not feel so vexed by time, by the passage of months between shows. How I anxiously await your return, how I scour the dates to find one I can relate to. How I buy every magazine with your image on the cover, and even those with the small promise of a few words.

My thoughts about you are not garish. I do not exploit you in anyway. I love you respectfully, from a great distance. I scrape along through life like so many other people do. It isn’t flesh I want, no not even an inch, though if I had it I’d treat it with the utmost care. It isn’t even attention I want. I don’t crave your attention.

Perhaps there are no words to accurately describe what it is I want. I suppose the best I can come up with are these: ardent hope.

You give me hope. I feel entrusted with it. As if it is something I can touch, something I must protect.

That I might come off too strong, that I pronounce myself by writing you letter after letter.

I like to think of the millions of people, those before your time and those that will come after, who will not experience the joy of knowing you in the flesh, as your songs are being sung out from your own mouth. As the voice that carries them is your voice. And the spirit and passion behind them is your spirit full of passion.

I think of them, especially those further down the line. My children’s children for example, who will only know you through hearing your songs or reading about you but will never have the opportunity to visit you in the flesh. Though your spirit will endure, as all spirits endure, I want to be one of the many that inherits your memory, and whom shares the love to those who could not inherit it directly for themselves.

So the choice is mine, people say. Continue to exalt him or move on with your life.

Silly. Don’t people realize, I have no choice.