Love letter # 2240

Like forever, yet only yesterday. Another life, yet still alive. Neither of us who we were. Me at least, in the reconfigured country of distance, horizons clean, as they are after storms. The calm that belies the bombardment.

Of you, I am little qualified to speak – except to say that you are now forty. Hard to picture, when you are inked in the substrata as twenty-two. Wild, flailing flower. Smashing against the walls of the world. Hungry, playful, tyrannical. A firework in the sky, a conflagration below. The forest in flames. You with matches. That look in your eyes. Innocent, calculating. Impulsive, cruel.

Also…your dazzling silence, the ice cliff between us. Made of shame and terror and caprice. By a need to get away.

We were so honest, and yet so many secrets were kept. I felt I knew you, yet was ever a stranger. Never more than a word from the limit of your love. On days like today, when I think fondly of you, I remember the press of that blade slender edge.

I walk today with such cuts on my soles. Tonight perhaps, I will wipe another spot of blood from the floor.

Then, before sleep, I will yearn, momentarily, wondering where you are, hoping you are well, aching sweetly for the absence beside me, where you once curled, and I believed myself complete.     

And I will drift, and it will be gone, and nothing will have changed.

I will blow you tiny kisses, whisper your name in the privacy of my bed, and give thanks. It was not your intention, but I was remade. By your touch, which was a spark, and by its withdrawal, which tore through everything.

I used to think you nearly killed me. I know now you saved me from doing it to myself. Everything else is detail.