A Love Letter Unsent
Note: This is the first part of a series of love letters I wrote to my wife so many years ago. I'm posting it here for documentation and for your reading pleasure. Sleep Warm.
A Love Letter Unsent
Dear Baby,
This weekend without you? I can handle it. Of course these drizzly days will be much longer than it might have been if we had been able to spend them in some proximity to one another. But there will be other weekends and many rainy days wait ahead for us. When I think of the cold nights that passed without you, a little longer wait is merely that, a little wait.And should a week pass, or more than one, until we are one, let it happen. I’ll only feel I’ve earned the right to chronicle complaints when every hope of ever being together no longer floods my head and heart as it does now each waking/sleeping moment.
Yesterday after I have arrived, I slept from mid-afternoon to sundown, trying to let the day pass quicker. And yet waking found me wondering when when will come. The time that sees us seeing one the other again face to face. The spoon-sleep of afterlove is missed as much as love itself, if not more, because it is of longer duration. There are times when holding the great pillow is not enough.
I remember your lips. Your neck, your shoulders, your back a new adventure to me every time. Did any other explorer lay hands on fresh new relics without anticipation? My thumb finds freshness from familiar rib and shoulder blade. Your kisses without warning ease all aches that never were.
It is early morning here now, outside birds are beginning to wake, happy that the sun came out awhile once more to give them warmth. And I envy them, for they have the sun, and I am without you.
The ocean rumbles on. Wave after wave, one over the other, faster than the preceding wave recedes. On the horizon, nothing. As far as I can see at either end, nothing.
There was again a small rain this morning. No trace of it now, not on shore or sea. A school – or at most, of bait fish zigzagged back and forth when the sea was calmer. Earlier a colleague walked down the beach. Never bending. Not stopping. Not collecting.
How are you? Is everything all right? Did you remember to take breakfast and what did you have? Questions pile up like wood as I try to account every hour of our days apart from each other. Yes, I do other things than think of you. My work gets done. Life moves along and there are times – a few minutes every day – when I forget about you. Well, maybe less than a few.
Last night on the bed, I awaken sometimes, because I feel your touch or because I feel the warmth of you too much to manage without loosening a grip around you or a position change. Of course, you are not there, but then I hurry back to sleep to make it so again. And as I do so, we fall back under the sheets again as I remember it, practicing new embraces until we are just one shadow.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever know how much of us is memory and how much made up because of my awful need to be with you. I know, I know, be patient. I am, we are. Soon. If soon is tomorrow, I’ll be here. If soon means days, months, years, or sometime, I’ll be here.
I love you. I’m sorry if it has been too long since I last told you so. I whisper it often and I think it always.
I love you. I love you.
Baby
THE OTHER LETTERS
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