FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 306

Back when I was even dumber I pictured the perfect girl. In later years – sensibly – I gave up on her. Until you came along. The walking, breathing form of everything I ever privately dreamed. Beauty in the guise of a woman.

Perhaps this is why I’m finding it so damn hard to let go. Part of me wants to fight for you – do whatever it takes, even if the rest of me knows there’s no point.

I guess I never really expected that you would materialise – so I prepared no defence. Had no strategy for the possibility that you might decline.

It is a sobering thing to discover that even your fantasies can turn you down. I am sure that in the time honoured way of the white, suburban middle classes the truth of this will get smoothed out into neat hindsight and re-configured as a ‘lesson’, complete with all the euphemistic language of self-improvement and other such beige coloured lies.

In the meantime, I watch you walk away.

Though there is an undeniably painful aspect to all this tissue box melodrama, I find myself taking some kind of heart from the mere fact of your existence. At the very least I will one day be able to say that she was real. That for a brief time I knew her. And that her light was just as I first saw it in a dream.