FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 284

We appear to live in a world that has little time for real love. Romance and sexualised obsession – yes – but that more subtle and profound feeling of care and deep desire – less so. I sense this so-called sophistication in your urbane stand-offishness. I think perhaps this is the fear of emotion in disguise.

No doubt this is why my feelings for you seem so over the top. They conflict with the cult of imperviousness that prevails these days. We speak the language of ‘being in tune with our emotions’ but we most often use it to talk down and cover up how we feel.

I have been as guilty of this around you as you have around me. But now I simply cannot abide the constraint. I think about you all the time. I dream us together. I imagine the tenderness we could be sharing.

At the risk of terrifying you with my primitive frankness; I love you, I desire you and I absolutely want to be with you. And even though I will cut myself to pieces waiting for your reply, I say these things without fear because the polite, evasive, non-committal style we have adopted up until now is no longer an option for me.

I will accept your rejection before I will slink off into the future never knowing if I had a real chance with you. And I will sport the bruise with honour, knowing that the finest of human qualities – namely, the capacity for love – did not lay dormant in me and did not bow to cowardice or fashion.