Dear Julia, I LOVE YOU. Love, Julia: Performed at PERFORMANCE ART NIGHT at Notsuoh, August 29th

Julia Claire Wallace read this letter on stage,
while slowly undressing.
She ended the piece naked.

Dear Julia,

I love you.

I love you.

I love who you are.

I love your hair, how you never know quite what to do with it, how you come up with bizarre ways to hide it, or you go through strangely beautiful fazes of different , not quite stylish attempts to make sense of it.

I love how you don’t keep up with its color, the tips are some unnatural red and the roots are the color of a mouse.

I love how you care about things, but you don’t care about things at the same time. I love that uncomfortable contradiction.

I love your eyes, a Gray Blue. Gray seems to be the color that fits you, the color of ashes, the color of your grandmother’s hair. Your eyes, your skin, your colors, remind me of the ocean, my favorite place, the salty heavy air, the dirty natural rawness of nature, with the water, a refreshing savior from itself.

I love the way you cling to existence, even when you are sick with emotion, with grief, with sadness, with desire, with loss. You can still see, you have always kept feeling even when you were hurting. You are so thankful.

I love the way you love people, I love the way you care so much. I love the way you give and love and understand. I love the way you look at people, who other people turn away from. I love the way you are scared of people, the way you shake and can barely breathe sometimes from anticipation and worry, I love the way you take deep breaths and try anyway. I love the way you shake and cry through the things you are scared of.

I love the way that you get so sick over fucking up, you care, you try to make it right, it becomes an obsession, sometimes the obsession makes you fuck up even more, but I have faith in you, you always seem to figure out eventually, you listen to yourself, you seek out the answers, you try. I love that.

I love your clothes, like your hair, you try so hard but you don’t give a shit at the same time. I don’t even understand it. I want to. I want to understand you so I can love you more. You pick so carefully and so oddly. Who is it for, Julia? I love the way you care so much, and don’t care at all, I love your confusion, your earnest confusion.

I love your body,

I love your clavicles, when I draw you I never leave them out. I love feeling your bones and organs through the thick blanket of your skin, what a miracle, you are, living breathing thinking seeing, everything. I can hardly believe that you exist. I am so grateful for that existence.

I love your wide hips, so female. I love your thick legs, so substantial.
I love your pubic hair! Never shave! I love running my fingers through it, I love its color and its stiffness. I love the smell of your pussy, it smells like sex, like bodies and togetherness and freedom.

I love your stomach, I love holding it, I love how you stick it out and look in the mirror and think, I look so pregnant and you smile! I love how you hold it in constantly, I love how you love it and worry about it at the same time.

And your ass, I love your ass, so big, and wide and womanly. So sexual.

I love your cellulite, when I see your cellulite I think of real sex, not television sex, not porn, not models in bikinis in magazines. I think of real true fucking. I think of glances you are lucky to get, secrets and vulnerability and the heart of things, I love your cellulite. I love that it makes you embarrassed, that it makes you worried. I love how it makes you nervous to ever wear a bathing suit, I love how it breaks your heart in dressing room mirrors, but it doesn’t need to, I love it. Its so beautiful.

You’re so beautiful.

I love you, Julia