Love, Stargirl

January 1 Dear Leo, I love beginnings. If I were in charge of calendars, every day would be January 1. And what better way to celebrate this New Year's Day than to begin writing a letter to my once (and future?) boyfriend. I found something today. Something special. The thing is, it's been right in front of me ever since we moved here last year, but today is the first time I really saw it. It's a field. A plain old vacant field. No house in view except a little white stucco bungalow off to the right. It's a mile out of town, a one-minute bike ride from my house. It's on a hillthe flat top of a hill shaped like an upside-down frying pan. It used to be a pick-your-own-strawberries patch, but now it grows only weeds and rocks. The field is on the other side of Route 113, which is where my street (Rapps Dam Road) dead-ends. I've biked past this field a hundred times, but for some reason today I stopped. I looked at it. I parked my bike and walked into it. The winter weeds were scraggly and matted down, like my hair in the morning. The frozen ground was cloddy and rock-hard. The sky was gray. I walked to the center and just stood there. And stood. How can I explain it? Alone, on the top of that hill, in the middle of that "empty" field (Ha!write this down, Leo: nothing is empty), I felt as if the universe radiated from me, as if I were standing on the X that marked the center of the cosmos. Until then I had done my daily meditation in many different places in and around town, but never here. Now I did. I sat down. I barely noticed the cold ground. I held my hands on my thighs, palms up to the world. I closed my eyes and dissolved out of myself. I now call it washing my mind. The next thing I noticed was a golden tinge beyond my eyelids. I opened my eyes. The sun was seeping through the clouds. It was setting over the treetops in the west. I closed my eyes again and let the gold wash over me. Night was coming on when I got up. As I headed for my bike, I knew I had found an enchanted place. January 3 Oh, Leo, I'm sad. I'm crying. I used to cry a lot when I was little. If I stepped on a bug I'd burst into tears. Funny thingI was so busy crying for everything else, I never cried for myself. Now I cry for me. For you. For us. And now I'm smiling through my tears. Remember the first time I saw you? In the lunchroom? I was walking toward your table. Your eyesthat's what almost stopped me in my tracks. They boggled. I think it wasn't just the sight of melong frontier dress, ukulele sticking out of my sunflower shoulder sackit was something else too. It was terror. You knew what was coming. You knew I was going to sing to someone, and you were terrified it might be you. You quick looked away, and I breezed on by and didn't stop until I found Alan Ferko and sang "Happy Birthday" to him. But I felt your eyes on me the whole time, Leo. Oh yes! Every second. And with every note I sang to Alan Ferko I thought: Someday I'm going to sing to that boy with the terrified eyes. I never did sing to you, Leo, not really. You, of all people. It's my biggest regret. . . . Now, see, I'm sad again. January 10 As I said last week, I wash my mind all over the place. Since the ideaand idealis to erase myself from wherever and whenever I am, I think I should not allow myself to become too attached to any one location, not even Enchanted Hill, as I call it now, or to any particular time of day or night. So that's why this morning I was riding my bike in search of a new place to meditate. Cinnamon was hitching a ride in my pocket. As I rode past a cemeteSpinelli, Jerry is the author of 'Love, Stargirl ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780375913754 and ISBN 0375913750.