We exchanged emails. Very professional, even cool in temperature though she used the term "not effusive" which may be more accurate than I like. She was very accepting of my news on maybe moving across country this year, though her reasoning wasn't said. We agreed that random contact isn't the best idea but we're keeping the door open in case one has something to be heard by the other and that's where it's left. She was flighty about seeing each other one more time but she didn't say no either.
So I took the time and the winter storm to write a few last words and post them. She'll read them, I'm sure but what I hope is that she'll read them again and again and maybe it'll grab hold of that woman who was so "effusive" back then.
Oh well. It's the best I can do and it's not even half of what the situation deserves. I suppose as always I am at the mercy of the person's interpretations and not my own clarity.
===
How about how many times have I written this letter? Well, I've finished it a couple of times and started it dozens more. Unfortunately, it never comes out as I want and I think it's because it's all so complicated in my heart. So, truthfully, I'm done trying to get it perfect and will concentrate on making it right. This is it then; this letter is an abject failure because what I feel is so much more than what you're reading.
I miss you so very much. There's no other words for it, so all I can do is repeat it. I miss you so *very much*. A day doesn't go by where I don't think that to myself and mean it a bit more than the day before. And yet I know that every time I say it, it doesn't undo the shame I feel for letting you go so long ago or the fact I cannot remedy any of this. Your absence is the same as if I have lost a limb or an eye: even if I am not thinking of you, my quality of life is detracted for it. Something in everything is lost to me when you aren't in my life.
Life without you does not seem much like living to me. It has been so long, I feel like I've outlived you. Like you died, and I am left behind - and yet there is no promise of ever meeting again. But we're both alive (alive, perhaps, but are we living?) and I live in hope that there is an answer to all this. To go on without you has already proven to be a private Hell for me. I will keep going for as long as it takes, even if its after I've been shoveled into my grave.
So what are we going to do about this, you and I? All I know is that I will waste my life if its not with you, that to so much as consider anyone else is a disservice. It is as if I am trapped on an empty sea facing a shoreline I can never reach. Why is it, my dream of so many years, I cannot be with you? How is it I must lie apart from you, from us? Will our separation improve the world? Will the moon reach higher or the birds to sing brighter? I do not see how. I don't see how this can be anything but a very private grief. But if that is all have of you, I'll carry even that.
I can't explain it better than that. I've tried because I've erased this a couple of times and I'm still not satisfied with it. But there it is in all its roughness. My love for you stumbles as words but not in feeling. Everything is between the lines and between now and my seeing you again.
I consider myself full of great fortune to have known you at all. I've never seen a sunrise to match your looks or found a person in any other life to match your graces. All I can bring to match any of your natural gifts is my appreciation, and my thanks and perhaps that this pale letter in apology in that the sum of me is not worth a fraction of you.
Please remember these small things: I will always love you and carry you with me. You will always have a place with me. That you will always be safe and cared by me for no matter what you may think of the rest of the world. That something inside of me belongs only to you and that it weeps inconsolably for you in the dark of every night we don't speak. That the old feelings of my hands in your hair at the train station or your breath in my ear or the gentle sounds you made when we intertwined on my couch - they are all sacred to me and that I ask to experience them again. I feel unfulfilled without experiencing the gifts only you posses. And though they may not be yours to give now, I will wait for them for as long as it takes. I have never said anything in my life I've believed more than that last sentence.
I think you have my phone number. You certainly remember my email (and even if you forgot it, my "professional" one is my first name with my last name and a period between, at the same email host) and Skype and some other things. Maybe when you're awake at one in the morning, you'll read this and remember and consider emailing me or texting. And you should, because my answer will always be "yes, please do" no matter how silly or slight you think it is, it will probably change my world forever to hear a handful of words from you. A man can be a man by himself but he will know nothing of Manhood without the love of the right woman.
I hope to hear from you one day, in this life. And if not then, I take sure comfort that because so much of what I am is because of you, that I will find you across that wide river we must all cross, many years from now. Perhaps then I can know a time with you, as I have spent so much of it without already.
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