FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 563

Even now, you reveal me to myself. As though, across time and distance, your voice in the form of echoes, magic in the guise of miasma.

I came out of the meeting late, dusk settling. Walked along the street of our past. The places we drank. Kissed. Fought. The short cuts we took back to your room. The same, yet not. You and I ten years older, everyone else ten years younger. Looking at their phones. Flashes of you in their gestures. Their laughter. The taut sheen of complexion. Unknowing actors, approximating you.

In the heady whirl, I felt both your presence and your absence. The taste of you and the dryness of thirst. Your warm gravity…and the light years. I loved you, ardent and new; and yet it was as though you never were. That I did not even dream you. Figment of figment.

Then, as I turned the corner, I saw. No closure, no final getting over. Wound as fresh as farewell, haemorrhage relentless. All I have learned is how not to notice the blood.

Now I am home. Bleeding, eyes averted. The spectacle of memory over. The theatre of loss vacated. Only the canvas of silence. Only the space to fill. And, as I breath, love without its object, wave without the crash. You without me.