Since we’re both traveling Latin America, telling you what it’s like here doesn’t seem much fun. Plus, it’s all I talk about with any of the gringos on the streets here during the day, “Oh, yeah, I went to MOUNT BLAH BLAH and the sand on the beach was dark, can you believe that dark sand?”

So anyway, I figured I’d talk to you about human drama. Now, I’m sitting in this internet café next to the sexy sexy girl who works here. As I was logging on to write to you, I told her that her boyfriend, a young surfer kid with a shell necklace whom I’d seen her with earlier when she smiled at me, looks like a baby. I’ll see where that gets me.

But serio: along with all those problems in my first weeks here, parents and angry friends, lonliness and financial insecurity, and just the overall incident of being somewhere new and typing in some family’s living room late night while the parents reprimand the kids for laughing too hard with each other and so not sleeping, but before the parents are done reprimanding, they’re laughing too. All the lights are out except the computer I’m using now. It’s quiet. There are no problems anymore.

But in the midst of those problems a couple weeks back, there was the strange thing with Andy. Andy is a girl. She is the first girl, maybe, who was nice to me. In descending order, the women I’ve loved have been, The well documented Little Red-haired Girl, and my longtime ex-girlfriend who moved to New York. Before that it was a girl my sophmore year of college, the most beautiful of them all maybe, Christina. She was heavily coveted but she was into me. She cut her study abroad time in half to come back to me early but then realized I was treating her badly so she stayed over there permanently with some new guy. It took me forever to get over that.

Before that it was a girl I pined for in high school for years. She was my best friend but I was an acne deformity during that time when she was blossoming into a fresh young perfect thing, so our hormones never lined up. But she loved me and gave it good and it drove me mad until eventually we dated for a month but she wouldn’t admit it to anyone. Eventually it all disappeared.

But before all of that there was Andy. I was 14 and she was 15 and her and her fat friend were playing pool in the condo clubhouse in their bathing suits and they waved me and Peter in when we rode by on their bikes. Peter went to them but I ran away.

Later, when Peter was hanging out with Andy and kissing, I felt comfortable enough to be friends with her. And then we were good friends, and we hung out a lot by ourselves and we always smelled like chlorine. I was bleached white with the chemical and then red on the shoulders by Florida’s sun, the whole time I could see Andy’s nipples through her bathing suit and I remember that she had woman’s legs, but I didn’t feel so insecure taking off my shirt with her. She felt like my first chance.

She returned to Pennsylvania but came back to her Summer Florida condo again. The last time I saw her, when I was 14, a week before she went home, my family had planned a Key West vacation. It didn’t seem fair that I’d have to leave; I didn’t see her much. And we were getting very close. I would wait outside Andy’s condo with bare feet smelling like chlorine while she ate with her family and she’d come outside in the middle of her meal and peak her head out the door and say to me, “I’m almost done.” I would have rather waited outside her door all summer than go to Key West with my parents.

But we drove to the Keys, away from Andy.

On the snorkeling trip my mother was sick and she puked over the side and millions of colors of small fish rushed up to eat her vomit. The rest of the snorkelers were very grateful to her, but it began the downward spiral of the family vacation. I didn’t want to be away from Andy on vacation with my parents even if we weren’t arguing but then it began to rain. And my dad lost his temper and was mad at as all. And when he said, “If you don’t stop we’ll go home right now, a week early, would you like that?” And I would have liked that so I pushed him, and with a loaded car, he turned and made good on his promise, yelling the whole way home, seven hour drive, and above the yelling, I couldn’t wait to see her.

Before the car was straight in our condo garage I was on my bike, blazing across the development to her condo. But I got there and her car with the Pennylvanis plates wasn’t around. I waited. Sat. Stood. Layed in the grass. Under the tree. Against the stucco. She never came. I never saw her again, except in the pictures she sent me of her winning beauty contests or cheer-leading or participating in other things which seemed very far from her character as I knew it. But we never looked on in each other in real time again. One time I told her on a long distance call that I loved her and she said she loved me too but we never made girlfriend boyfriend plans cause we didn’t even think to and I didn’t know how. Anyway, I knew she was already having sex and trying drugs and I was scared and ugly and wouldn’t come near those things for ages and so I let go of Andy because it didn’t feel good to be so far away.

But during this mess with Costa Rica and my parents and Jon and spilling that hot chocolate on my beautiful Greek woman, Andy wrote to me. She found my web site, She has had problems and a child and wants to live somewhere else. She still lives where she lived when I knew her; up north. She wants to move to the only other place she’s known, my parent’s town, Ft. Myers.

She told me she’d thought of me a lot of the 13 or however many years. I told her she shouldn’t idealize people. She’d already read all the writing on the site before accepting that her GOOGLE search had led her to the correct Michael Welch. And she still loved me in some way.

She told me she’s not treated right. She told me she might have problems moving with her child. And I still cared. That’s a long time to still care. I told her I would do whatever she needed, that I would do anything to help her. And so I may move back to Ft. Myers for a few months, with no car, and live on the beach with her and her daughter, and edit all this crap I wrote in Costa Rica, into a tight form, like the COMMONPLACE book, which you still haven’t fucking seen. It’s pretty. Anyway, I’m doing what I never thought I’d do, live again in Ft. Myers. I’ll see where that gets me.

Hope all is well down south, lv mpw