FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 270

Today I was invisible. Sat there, pint in front of me, noise swirling around me, and the gaudy rush and bother of the party seemed to wash over me. I felt detached – unhinged from the world of warmth and recognition. I was just the lone man in the corner – the silly old fool who found himself thinking of you.

This is the freedom I fought for – my splendid isolation, my aloof lack of need. Here is my dead hunger, my self-containment in all of its solitary, untainted glory. The pristine loneliness that now conspires to empty me of breath and fill me with a space into which I can disappear.

And to think I left you for this.

My, how those heroic affirmations poured from my mouth. I fought you off with my language, boxed you up with my ideas. I confronted your honesty with an unholy disguise; and then when you were finally done I was left to walk around in the wafer thin garb of well-chosen words.

I would gladly admit to the lachrymose self-pity of the mistaken if that was what it was – but really I always knew that the bubble I called a thousand different things was just a bubble. I will not confess it to anyone else, but to you I can say that I find this so-called liberty an awfully lonely corner.

I gazed out at all those lovely, colourful people, heard the sweet burble of their conversation and was utterly and profoundly locked out from the world they moved in. Perhaps not in reality but in the much more visceral realm of my heart.

And I longed for the warmth that you so freely gave.

You were right. I just thought I was. You were real and this was the fantasy. Yet this, I am certain, is of no comfort to you. Love cannot be retrospectively applied, nor tears so easily wiped away – and anyway words have done enough damage already. Haven’t they?