Letters I'll Never Send: I. "Thousands of demonstrators stormed a government building and imposed their own "people's governor". "

Scores of people lost their lives. More than 400 were injured. This is the day that changed the course of history in this small, mountainous former Soviet state. The BBC News

Love,

We miss so much here by way of revolution. Our news talks of the 'revolution' of the iPad, or on some runway in NYC. Things are 'revolutionized' every day: the blender, the espresso machine, the vacuum cleaner.

Who gives a shit?

They're revolting over there, love, where I'm supposed to go, an orange-hued spatter on a map of the world that I've rested the next two years of my life upon. Thrown a dart at it, and hoped it might hit. Light years. It's taking light years to reach the dartboard, and yet, in a day's time, the real revolution has rained down on that country, and now I'm keeping vigil, like so many others I know, waiting and wondering. It's a question for a WANTED poster: dead or alive?

It's not just my friend I worry for. I worry for myself, because these things are not, ever, unselfish. What kinds of new bureaucracy arise from an emergency state? I don't know if, or where, they'll send me now. I only know I don't want to be here, here where you can have only as many branches as your social network, who you've had drinks with over the weekend, here where the mountains-the very monoliths I escape into-are closing in around me, reminding me what I've not done, what I've yet to do. I've rested the next 24 months on this, on a village and a classroom and a landscape I've never seen, a language I've never spoken, an absence of things I've never lacked: perhaps running water, perhaps heat, perhaps you.

I miss you, too, the revolution/revelation of the smallness of your bed, the impossibility of sleeping apart. And this frightens me too-the ease with which we disappear into our individual continents: the bodies we shore up against, the dreams we pursue that finally consume us. What if there's revolt where I am too, where I am when I think of you: the certain shape of your lips and the cadence of your speech overrun by water, by the landslide of distance, of the way we say nothing when we do speak.

What if there's a revolt where they send me, where the people have been rising, for years, to this explosion of ideal, of anger against injustice?

What if I never get there?

These days, the sun rises early here. I drive through it every morning: the confluence of winter and spring, clearness and cloud, mountain peak and sky. It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful place on Earth, I'd say, even knowing there's so much of this place I've not seen, will never see. I don't miss you yet, for all I don't know.

I miss this already.

A world away, they're shooting policemen, searching for equal representation. The streets are red. My friend is buried in all of this, not responsive; no on can raise him, though god knows we've tried.

By nine in the morning, the sunlight is the color of asphalt. I'm waiting. I'm keeping a vigil for him, for these countries, for the ways you never kissed me on our first night together, alone.