Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 20:15:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Rory Bowman <bowman@pobox.com>
To: Kate Carter <ccarter@reed.edu>
cc: Marti Dell <mdell@hevanet.com>
Subject: “Talk to my Lawyer,” she said. How charming.
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.10.9907261045150.17557-100000@amon.reed.edu>

Marti is a basket case (psychic boyfriend who carries several guns? give me a break! but then again, what judgment have I shown these last four years…). The last conversation I had with her was very curt, a regular commercial for how well she is suited to work with documents and not people. I have nothing to say to her, and she seems to me as poor an advocate as she is an adviser. Tasha and Lia are a much better bet, but then this email is a flaming brand thrown down on the bridge of whatever hope I’d left.

The package contains an undelivered graduation card and the few things of mine (or yours) you had wanted returned. I am “getting my affairs in order,” as they say, packing up and distributing my things. Forgive me if in my desperate grief I intruded on your comfort or sense of propriety. I really don’t think you’ve left me anything to lose with you, and I honored the relationship years ago by rejecting my family for what I thought was more worthy: a pearl of great price and all that. Ha.

I take it that your below email means you have nothing to say to me. Such is life; negative results are results. Thanks for at least acknowledging receipt.

I shall “honor the time we had together” (assuage your guilt) by taking what thoughts I’ve left of you (dark and cold, warm and sweet) into poems or the crematory. Certainly they seem wasted on you, or who’ve you’ve proven recently to be. I gave away my heart, health, family and self-respect. What is left?  My soul?  Right.

Please hold the trivet dear (or as dear as you can manage) and give my love to the cats.

“because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.”  (- unknown)

“The heart-breaking beauty remains
when there is no heart left to break for it.”  (-Jeffers)

- R

On Mon, 26 Jul 1999, Kate Carter wrote:

> Rory,

> I was distressed by your cryptic email of last week and the information that you sent a package to my parent’s house.  This seems strange and out of character, and it is upsetting me.  I am asking you to please honor the time we had together by not continuing with this behavior.  I have asked you repeatedly in the past to not contact me (or in this case, my parents) directly, but rather to contact Marti.

> I wish you well.
> Kate