FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 182

You never really know at the time how deeply someone is going to affect you. It’s as though your senses are quietly gathering a million tiny fragments, the future stockpile of memory.

This must be what happened with you because even now – years later – the thought of you is so richly textured, so immersive. When that song comes on, or the light shines just so, I am almost back in your embrace, feeling that unfathomable wonder.

Perhaps it makes you laugh to hear it now but I loved you beyond my previous capacity to imagine it. You were like home. Like earth. I never felt more true that when I was with you. I wore no chains around you.

And I believed that you felt the same. Maybe you didn’t. I don’t know.

It makes no difference now. We are on opposite sides of the world. All I know is that, despite everything, I carry with me the treasures you left behind. Far from making me sad or enslaved, they are the doorway to a beautiful tenderness. I open it whenever the world seems unduly harsh or I seem to slide into bitterness.

I know it was never your intention but I cannot thank you enough. It’s as though the breaking of me was, in fact, the making of me. Perhaps I am not unusual in this. Nevertheless – I am all the better for having both loved and lost you.