I had a crush. He was a bearded Sloven­ian, no­tably di­sheveled usu­ally. He would never know my name, but I read his work with the thrill of know­ing I was too far out, over my head, get­ting in on a se­cret I didn’t yet un­der­stand. When he came to speak at Pow­ell’s, my god what a thrill. I now know a bit more: what it would have been like at ages 11 or 12, front and cen­ter, Back Street Boys Into the Mil­len­nium Tour. Enter fan­boy.

He fid­geted and spouted, fill­ing the air with in­tri­cate, bab­bling the­ory, with con­fi­dent para­noia, with dirty Balkan jokes (How does a Mon­tene­grin mas­tur­bate? He digs a hole and waits for an earth­quake). We lis­tened, al­most com­pre­hend­ing, like in­fants used to Moth­erese talk­ing to an un­bend­ing fa­ther. Chil­dren in the au­di­ence tried to ask ques­tions, par­rot­ing His dif­fi­cult lan­guage, but not quite break­ing through. I wanted to tell Him: write every­day write down every thought that crosses your mind write and send it to me. I wanted to be closer to Him, my philoso­pher.

What could have made me hap­pier than the day I found His Twit­ter: @[He]speaks. A dig­i­tal win­dow! An ex­tended hand! A place to just check in once in a while (every­day). It was all there: end­less ref­er­ences, his fa­vorite youtube videos, heady ban­ter: I fed off it. Maybe I should have known what would come next. After all, his last book jacket showed him seated be­fore a mir­ror that re­flected only the chair. The book’s title: [He] does not exist.

I was still sigh­ing over a par­tic­u­larly charm­ing post, “Writ­ing an essay on the potato, the first post­mod­ern veg­etable.” when some­thing went wrong. We were back where we started, it was all be­yond me: the curt mes­sage from Twit­ter, the stan­dard robin’s egg back­ground, that’s all there was. Oh and the bird, that in­fu­ri­at­ing bird, that un­wel­come, un­speak­able, tweet­ing lit­tle bird.