FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 113

There is an impossible distance and it sits inside me, the vast unfilled quiet between my breastbone and my spine, the echoing chasm, the unimaginable miles. You are out there somewhere, in that enormous other. I can walk for hours in the dark and still get nowhere near you; and every sound, however small, reverberates in the encompassing silence. I am just a dot now – a speck in the sky – and in that cold forever somewhere …

In the night I pray for sleep, hoping not to wake. The days are too long and I am almost crushed by the hours.

Every now and then I get distracted but I remember with an awful crash; and the horizon draws its circle around me. I keep waiting to get used to it – but in your horrible nowhere you are everywhere. I never knew that absence could be so complete, presence so hollowed out.

I do little things, one after another, by rote mainly – a sequence of somethings to paper over nothing.

How did I come to love you so much that I was left with this? You weren’t perfect. You annoyed me sometimes. How petty those quibbles now seem.

And now even they lie across the uncrossable ocean – further every day, as even memory falls apart. It kills me that I can no longer properly recall your eyes – or the way you laughed. Time is stealing you in tiny lots. One day … only my hunger will remain.

Perhaps even then I will still love you.