Eve of the 4th. Winter.

Sophie--

I don't want to say that I miss you more than rain.  I consider it an accomplishment to have maintained restraint long enough to have inserted words before that phrase.

I feel I am mad.  Smoke is constantly whistling in my face like some sort of vicious eel made of transitive carbon.  I think of you often.  I am, after all, living above a bar.  I am surrounded by the filth that quickens my pulse because it is the shadows of you.

Do you remember Patrick?  He's gotten so still, Sophie my cherish.  I think one of these days he will fall from the perch is so stubborn with, and I'll have to ring for some hazardous materials officer.

Despite the racket from beneath my floorboards that shudders out the sky, I feel alone most hours of the day.  I go out, I drink awful stuff.  I wanted to try to indulge as you did but the nosebleeds have ruined enough of my linens.  I have failed to have inherited my father's sense of clotting.

Sophie... this man... this intellectual senator of Hollywood... I hope he treating you wretched so you'll run away back to me.  I scarcely recognize the walls without you.  Maybe it's me.

Abernathy sends his half-eaten regards.  The story goes he's been poisoning his brain.  So he keeps ringing me on, thinking you've stopped back in.  I don't know what your mother was thinking.  But I suppose without him and the starlit sky, and a dozen whiskey tire-irons you would not have struck into this world.

Christ, woman, come home.  I haven't any money.

Love, Viktor

p.s. It has been six weeks since I've written this and I am now off to the post.  Sorry.  Patrick is dead.

p.s. again, Sorry love, another week since.  Patrick sends his best.