Patrick Madrid ✌🏼

Shooters shoot. Don’t let anyone convince you Twitter isn’t a dating site

Have you ever read Richard Feynman’s love letter to his wife? I might cry saying this, but I’ll try. October 17, 1946 To Arlene, I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear it, but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me feel warm all over inside to write you. It has been such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years. But I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am: stubborn and realistic. I thought there was no sense in writing. But now I know, my darling wife, that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and what I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I will always love you. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead. But I still want to comfort and take care of you. And I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you. I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until now that we could do that. What should we do? We might have started to learn to make clothes together, or learn Chinese, or get a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you. You were the idea-woman and the general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick, you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried—just as I told you then. There was no real need, because I loved you in so many ways, so much. And now it is clearly even more true. You can give me nothing—yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else. And I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you will assure me that I am foolish, and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend—except you, sweetheart—after two years. But you can’t help it, darling. Nor can I. I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls—very nice ones—and I don’t want to remain alone. But after two or three meetings, they all seem like ashes. You alone are left to me. You are real. My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead.

I offer my sincere apologies to all old people. Now that I am old, it turns out that having my morning coffee, eating my vegetables, taking naps during the day, not driving at night, not having any company after dark, not leaving my house at night, and being in bed by 9pm is awesome. You guys were right. I was wrong.