Dear Bob Dylan,

Once the last ray of sunlight dissolves over the McDowell mountains and the grey of evening is tossed like gravel over the horizon, it’s no small wonder that I should look to the sky for those first few stars to appear like praying cells and the moon, that oyster which shines like a mission bell.

I find, after so many years, the same inner visions. I follow the path of your dreams. Wherever you turn regardless how awkward, restless or profound. Despite obliviousness toward my own stale and imminent future. Devotion to you remains my fate. Nevertheless.

Seems to me you will always be the fuse, the one in action that enters the room of my mind, your face full of faculty and asking so what are your intentions, what are your interests? Inspired for the trillionth time this year by your sufficiency with words, I will step into the same river twice. A flood of answers will cloud my brain, most of them quite ordinary. Just sentences.

So I will come to myself, beneath this sky which is for all its expansiveness still keeping the stars locked behind and mention, well, I mostly just focus on the songs.

Dear Bob Dylan,

If one day by some Godish brush-stroked twist of fate I should happen to meet you, among all the great occurences in my life, combining each and every aspiration I’ve ever illuminated upon inside my head, including those considered then forgotten, those that seemed impossible and those that have stagnated into indeterminacy, I know I will anxiously look back to the days when you were the unreachable, the unattainable, the dream stitched across my dreams like a beautiful star and feel somehow lessened, as if my ordinary and ordered life had suffered some great loss.

Having met you, if this should ever be the case, I would no longer have the constant heartbeat guiding my footsteps, the immense hope of possibility, the incessant urge of wonder, the flight, the chase. With no illusion to complicate my life, no belief beyond belief, nothing so resplendent, so colorful, so lovely to think and talk and write about, no longer the feeling of never feeling satisfied, I am afraid I would cease to care about anything.

If one day life finds us in some completely particular way with you there and me there, perhaps it would be best for you to turn your back. And yes, it is true that such a certain grace would unstring me while saving my future. By not speaking to me, by not making any sort of connection be it with your saint blue eyes or willing smile, a few uncommon words spoken from your mouth to my ear, the very legend of you would be diminished.

Whatever small stone of bliss I carry heart-hidden inside of me would also cease to exist, for my ordinary life would become extraordinary. I would have nothing to look forward to, no idea to pin my soul upon, nothing to absolutely dream about. The insurmountable idea of meeting you would dissipate into shadows and the shadows into expendable sighs of nostalgia and loss.

Sometimes I think about this. And I grow weary.