Love letter # 458
In the sweet light I sensed you. Your colour and scent, the movement of your breath. And something nearing taste. I was in the cloud of your presence. God, how I wanted you.
Love letter # 374
Though I can see you on a screen and message you whenever I choose, you seem so far away. Two dimensional love is not enough. Emoticons don’t cut it. Even phone calls ring hollow. Physical distance, I fear, may one day become emotional distance. Our intimacy simply forgotten. The sense of you – touch, taste, scent, sound – reducing with each click to abstraction. Until we are lovers in name alone; sustained merely by a theory of togetherness. Evaporating in slow tandem, inching out of orbit. Now a passing satellite…now a thumbnail sun…now a far off speck of history. Does it feel like this to you too?
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Love letter # 589
There are many forms of blindness. I have endured a number of them; none more so than when I failed to see – failed to believe – the truth about you. The evidence was plentiful. In cold moments it was undeniable. But I was in a fog of fever.
In your defence, you did warn me. It’s just that I was…what?…not stupid, not merely stubborn…alight with a kind of madness. In hindsight, it was the measure of my desperation. Not so much for you but for what you represented. For I had located my dream of recognition in you. Foisted it on you really.
Yes, you could have acted with more grace, more kindness, but I accept that I left you with little choice but to push back hard. I was relentless. Even if you had loved me, my ridiculous ardour would have burned it up soon enough.
So now I am indebted to you. For holding out. I may well have stayed true to my vision, but so too you kept faith with yours. Ultimately, after the drama, I saw the wisdom of this. Moreover, I witnessed the extent of my own folly. It scared me. But it was also the beginning of real change in my life.
I barely recognise the raggedy beggar who stumbled after you. That’s how seismic our affair was. Your departure shifted everything. In some ways, it was the most important contribution anyone ever made to the trajectory of my life. When you left, I saw finally who I was. At first, I was appalled. After that, I just grew up.
I write today to thank you for saying no. For insisting on it. Best thing anybody ever said to me.
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Love letter # 472
Did I try to change you? I should not have. They were my bruises.
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Love letter # 622
As the sun shines, it goldens the lights in your hair. In the rainfall, dew on your skin, a gaze so softly cast. When the night comes, tender, the scent of touch, and the quiet breath of knowing. Still. With you. Always.
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Love letter # 504
I watched your silken movement. I was blind after that. And when I heard your voice, there was no other sound. Then, with the advent of your touch, there was nothing left to feel. For there was you – and I was remade.
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Love letter # 792
You have populated my dreams, day and night. Last night, you placed your hand upon my knee, and I felt your warmth. It woke me. I turned over to the mirage of your presence, and in the drowsy temple of my senses I could hear your breath, circling in the darkened hush.
Walking in the blue afternoon, I watch the wave of your hair, note the sun in your eyes. You fall upon me like brightness, moving through my body like the ruffle of breeze. Still you are a vision. A dreamt of kiss. An embrace imagined. The prayer of tenderness returned.
If I have loved you in the room of disembodied desire, so too I have yearned in the realm of flesh and blood. Perhaps it is only the invented you who walks at my side, yet I have travelled long in the wake of your attention. You have said my name aloud and I have suffered the vertigo of your scent.
Therefore, I conjure you beneath sun and moon, such that I may require no such vision. So that one day soon I may close my eyes and know that you are near; and I might sleep through the night in the valley of your form.
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Love letter # 464
Sometimes, your beauty is rupture. Wrenching. It rends the fabric of compromise. You stand within touching distance yet remain untouchable. The lovely details, each one sharpened. I feel them as the severing of hope. Your splendour is the sentence passed. The inexorable chasm between desire and its return.
Raher I had not seen you. For yours is the flower given elsewhere. Its perfume is the unbreachable fortress of time. It unfolds before the sun, to the bees of the season, and has not thought for the dews of the morrow.
I am that invisible mist; and though I might enfold you, mine is the vaporous touch, barely felt. Yet you are the solidity of hunger. The intolerable gravity. Force without attraction. The strained and breathless orbit of noticing. For some shall weep at stars and never know their warmth – and you shall be like fire.
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Love letter # 490
Did it happen while we weren’t looking…or when we were? Was it our turning away or our insistence? Not that it makes much difference now. Knowing won’t make you love me again. Nor I you. Yet, as I ponder the detritus, I am drawn ever closer to an abrasive conclusion; that we brought down the sky in a tussle over dust. These grubby specks are the trophies of ruin. This, the Pyrrhic victory of vane and selfish campaign. If I once threw up a wall thinking to keep things together, instead it drew a line between us, entrenching rival empires, who fought till the end of time, and left the scene with nothing. Save the evidence of blood.
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Love letter # 379
For I have walked the line between light and dark, and dwelled in the house without name. This I did for the love of you.
Though I have wandered far from home, and sailed without the promise of harbour, I have journeyed for the succour of your love.
I may thirst and hunger still, and shiver in a blackness that stretches beyond night, yet I am upheld by the breath of your name.
You may live at the furthest reaches of desire, and I may be in the exile of distance, yet there is no desert not crossed by the vaulting of light.
I look through the clouds, see beyond the intervening hills, gaze across the sea; and though in one moment I am blind, in the next I see nought but you.
