Amanda,
How about how many times have I written this letter? I’ve finished it more than once 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. 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 have died, and I am left behind - and yet, there is no promise of an afterlife, of ever meeting again.
So what are we going to do about this, you and I? All I know is that I will waste my life if it is 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 be apart from you, and you and I from us? Will our separation benefit the world? Will the stars be fixed to new constellations? 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; there it is in all its roughness. My love for you stumbles as words but not in feeling. Everything is between the lines of this pale letter and my seeing you again.
Please remember these small things: I will always love you and carry you with me. You will always have a place with me. 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. That the sum of me is not worth a fraction of you, or that 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.
Je t’aime, ma petite voix.
