FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 84

Talking to you now, after all this time, I am reminded of what it is I miss: emotional availability, compassion, unabashed honesty and the withholding of judgement. These are the qualities that still typify you and I. Even now – long after the storms that broke us up.

Perhaps it is an easy thing to be calm with distance. Only natural that some of the original warmth should return after the angst of parting has subsided. Yet I cannot help but feel it is a deeper and more lovely thing than a simple cooling of the heels. For I can see now that the little wars we fought were over nothing. That it was never our love that failed. It was something more mundane. Details. Vanity. Fear.

And now – much later than I should have – I can say without hesitation or caveat that I love you more than anyone I ever knew. More than myself. That you recognised me – and allowed me to see you.

I say this not as a matter of regret or apology, or even as a way back to you – for we both know that would be nostalgia gone mad – but as a long overdue honouring of the years we shared. It is clear now that we really did have something. A thing now patently lacking. And we both know how we lost it.

Yet I do not dwell upon this. I think instead of the beautiful, slender thread that still crosses the oceans between us. Of the door always open. Hearth still aglow. Love undiminished.

Even at the end of everything, this light I shall see by.