FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 461

Of course this is a bit ridiculous. I mean, it’s so out of step with the modern age, isn’t it? – all this still loving you after all this time. I can almost see the look in your eyes, the shake of your head. Why don’t you just stop!?

Why don’t I just stop what? Thinking of you with tenderness? Feeling that incredible wave that first came over me when we were together? Understanding the irreversible knowing of love?

I know, I know – but what is love? Isn’t it just a kind of poetic selfishness, a euphemism for hormones and evolutionary imperatives? Maybe it’s those things as well, I wouldn’t doubt it, but here’s what it also is – for me at least. It’s that breathtaking connection; the one makes it seem, just for a moment, like you are breaking from the cell of the ego and really seeing the other and, in that, something profound about the nature of self.

So of course I still love you – how could I not? I still love all those who wandered into this channel, who opened the floodgates. The teenage siren of misty eyed memory, the undergraduate beauty I swore I wanted to die for, my ex-wife … and you, the one who blew the covers off everything.

I’m saying this to you now just in case. Because we never really ended, did we – it was just that drifting apart was easier, more sensible. The terrain never burned, it just got vacated. Left behind like something a little too difficult.

I fully get why this might appear absurd, even a bit crazy, but the kind of thing we had makes it worth the risk. Maybe I want you to unequivocally say it – the last rites and all that – but what I really wanted say was this: the light is still so dazzling and beautiful and humbling some days that I would rather risk the shuddering finality of no than the unbearable idea of if only.