Fear and Hope.
Many years ago, you and I wrote one another letters, and sent them across one and a half continents, and a sea. Back and forth we sent them, letters chronicling the details of a moment in one day, of what we saw where we stood, letters laced with bits and pieces of love and lies.
I had to destroy the stack of fifty, twenty, one-hundred, I do not know how many letters but I was angry and sad and felt somehow the larger spinning world was punishing me for not being good enough for you and it was the only way to forget.
So I tore every single last one of them to bits, the postcards, too. And I threw them in the trash.
You say you still have my letters, and I believe you.
Now I want to rebuild my collection. I began with your inscription in my birthday gift, a book. A beautiful hand, especially for a man.
My fear is that I will not receive a letter at all, or worse, that it will be as the final letter from you which began, ” Dear M——, You don’t know how difficult this letter is for me to write.” Since that letter from you, I’ve had to write these words to someone else, and it’s true, it is painful. I thought of you when I had to do it, and cried for all of us, every last one of us who has every broken a heart, had a heart, loved, loved in spite of all good sense and still loved and loved and loved.
So that. No letter or a goodbye.
But what I hope for is this. That you’ve written that letter, love. That you wrote it, and stamped it. That you filled it with nothing details about your trip south and subtext and reading between lines and that it lies somewhere in a great warehouse having been scanned and weighed and carried, driven and flown, and is ready to be delivered to me. To me. That there will be only joy in those letters and dots, those crossed t’s and punctuated sentences. And maybe days later, two, five, ten, another will arrive, with more of you. I will read it knowing that those moments you took to sit and write with your coffee (with two cubes of ice, literally two) there, just to the right of your papers, while you were writing what is in your mind, filtered by your emotional state and experience and knowledge, you were also thinking of me.
That’s what I hope. Letters from you. Stacks of letters. Let’s start with one.
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