FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 439

This evening, conjured by the angled sun, called up by the softening folds of seasonal air, you were with me once more. Present in my charged senses. Or rather, I was back there – then – decades evaporated – on the trundling red train, moving up the hill to your teenage welcome.

Perhaps I should have known. The freshly scented spring. The first few weeks after equinox. Sky not yet bleached by summer. And the light. Crisp still, yet turning by shades to honey. The splendid colour of you. Of remembering.

For you arrived like the flowers, like bird chorus and bee thrum, and love was grown from bare limbs. Sweetness woken from its frosted sleep. It was the Eden of everything. All the fruit anew. No thought for shame, nor serpents.

And then…spring, summer, autumn…we did not make into winter; and you found warmth with another. I very nearly froze. Yet eventually thawed. Went back to the garden. Found other blooms. Grew older. Kept only pictures of you. Faded, crinkled, sitting in a shoebox. The butterfly pinned. Dry.

Except now. Emerged. Alive in the scent of the gold toned evening. The full swoon in flow. As though I could smell your hair. See the little freckles on your cheekbone. Feel the cool euphoria of your skin. We walked. Talked as always. Laughed. And your beaming eye shot a fire right through me, so that now my blissed out tears are opal. Tonight, for an hour, perhaps more, I will love you again as though loving had just been invented.

What flowers you have tended with your touch. What seasons you have brought to bear. What thanks I give for these patient seeds, nestled in muscle and time, that they might bring such bounty to my door.