Honestly, I don’t know why you insist upon blaming this whole thing on me. The restraining order, the profile on the local news, that parody song that was a hit for a while. You act as if this was all my doing. I could perhaps understand some clod from the sticks believing that way, one living far removed from the particulars of our situation, gleaning what tiny shred of insight his brain entertains from television newsmagazines and gossip on the Internet. But not you, you’re in a position to know better. One could say you’re practically bombarded with the truth on a daily basis. Do I even need to speak the words out loud? You made me love you.

I saw you that morning, six short years ago, beating your kids with that big wooden spoon and I knew in that moment you were the woman for me. We weren’t alone in that park, you and I, and frankly I’m more than a little surprised I was the only one to fall in love with you that brisk autumn morn. But never you mind, that’s the loss of that morning’s other parkgoers and strictly my gain. Because I have to think that the voluminous declarations of my love for you might have made somewhat less of an impact if every Tom, Dick and Harry from here to the North Sea were bombarding your home with telephone calls and paper airplanes inscripted with amorous verse on a daily basis. And as for your protestations, the tender barkings of a heart not ready to be so loved, so completely fulfilled… I have to imagine they’d have meant slightly less to me had those sentiments been mailed out in triplicate or, I shudder to think, via a mass email.

No, that morning was made for you, and I. And Jordan, who had just urinated into a bird feeder and was in that moment tasting the heavenly sting of your tough love. And who could forget Darla, who was giggling angelically with glee at her brother’s bittersweet lament? Nor Dulcie or Marzipan, the twins, or little Marcel, your beautiful deaf son. But of course this is not forgetting sweet Rocko, he of the impish grin and robustly shit diapers, him I could never forget. And last but not least, little Balfor, the apple of his mother’s beautifully enraged eye, gurgling musically as his mother lit into Jordan with an ass-beating fury that could not be tamed by any nearby joggers or the local constable. Yes, that morning was made for you, and I, and your seven children alone.

After I got to know you, through quizzing your neighbors and tracking down your high school classmates, my love for you grew like a berserk vine rooted in radioactive solution, yearning skyward and flattening any obstacle in its path. I came to understand the quality of your love, its potency and the reason why it could not be hoarded by any one man, hence your seven children and their eight different fathers. I loved you from afar, and at times from really afar with a pair of high-powered binoculars, and all the while my love vine grew and grew.

I loved you from the mountaintop and I loved you from the jail cell, biding my time and cursing the security system your ex-husband had installed at the house. But even that love-defying tuna net of a barrier could not quell my thunderously beating heart, nay.

Sometimes I wondered how you could not see the trueness of my aim nor the volcanic throbbing of my virtue and dedication to you. But when we went on Jenny Jones together and you talked about losing your virginity to your high school gym teacher it all became clear to me. You were not ready.

Even a creature of such angelic beauty, one so able to turn on the world with her smile and open a beer bottle with her teeth, can grow weary of drawing sustenance from a poisoned well and close her petals to the sun’s balmy glow. This I understand, my love, and I will wait for the day when your flower again blooms, like one of those paper fortune-telling things the kids used to use where you pick a color and a number and then when you open the flap it says you’re a gaylord. For if my crime is the ability to see clearly too far into the distant future, to that island of bliss in a sea of not-yetness where we exist together, then slap on the handcuffs and book me in the jail of your love, my dear.

For in this matter, not even the Gods can order my restraint!