I'll Send You A Lot of Letters, But Not This One

I loved you from the first moment I saw you.

I would never tell you this. There’s a power balance in relationships, and I’m already so much in your debt that more ammunition is quite unnecessary.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t loved you every moment since then, and there were many moments, days even, when I gave up on us. There were moments where I doubted that I even loved you, or if you were simply the getaway car from the wreck of my last relationship (although it wasn’t so much a wreck as it was a barren desert where nothing ever happened and dreams go to die). There were moments where I thought it simply would not work, you were too old-fashioned, old-soul’ed, old.

But the first moment I saw you, I loved you. You walked into my neck of the woods of business law, accompanied by your newly-inherited assistant. She told me your name, and in the next minute it escaped me, but everything forever changed. It was as if there was a fork in the road of my life, one the left was the old me, dim lighting, closed spaces and low ceilings. On the right was sunshine and video game music and the smell of sex and money, success and snacks and every love song I had ever heard.  She told me your name and immediately my course changed, my eyes lifted to a pink sky with cotton candy clouds and I floated along the right path. The stars had aligned, everything the universe was building toward had come to fruition in this moment, we had met at last. Something happened that I had been waiting for for a long time but didn’t know it or didn’t remember. It was as if I had made arrangements years ago to meet an old friend, and here he was, at exactly the prescribed time. She told me your name, and I told you mine, and we began the slow song and dance that would derail both of our lives, pushing us further down the path of love and commitment than we had ever been.

You looked at me and I saw the flicker of a spark of interest. I was heavier then, in body and in spirit. You were the lightest thing I had seen in years, and I gave you a rare smile. I cracked a joke, which is the easiest thing to do when my senses escape me, and you laugh appreciatively, your eyes disappearing into your face. You joked back, and I forgot to laugh as my mind raced trying to understand why my heart too was racing.

But it would be months before you would bring your head barely an inch to my face in the middle of a fight so that we can see “eye to eye”. It would be just over a year before we would stifle our laughter under the blankets so your visiting mother wouldn’t hear us watching old boxing movies downstairs and drinking fruit juice in the middle of the night.  It would be just weeks, however, before those hands would reach across for mine for the first time between two glasses of rum and ginger ale. But I didn’t know it at the time, all I saw was you, and all I knew was that the arrangement of your face and the look of your hair made my stomach twist and my knees weak.

You were certainly not my “type” or what I assumed was my type. You stood tall, yes, but there was no beard in sight, and despite a clear latent strength, no one would describe you as muscular.  You were easy and relaxed, you were unassuming and gentle, the air around you seemed softer somehow. In a room full of suits, you reminded me of a simpler time, of a country mouse, of home.  Your demeanor was inviting, which was a breath of fresh air to me, who had only days before been described as “a sexy, uncomfortable high-heel shoe”. I was brash where you were refined, I was direct where you were kind, I was abrasive where you were soothing.

When you walked out of my office a few short minutes later, I would note with a certain sense of alarm the curiosity you had stirred in me, my heightened awareness of your presence would continue for the weeks to come as I plod along in my relationship and found out that you too, were taken. Of course, it was too late for anything at all, you were taken, you were spoken for and that was that. Of course, as we both know now, that was not that, and this was merely the calm before the storm that would awaken fires in both of us we had long thought extinguished. Even now, as I look at you sleeping every night, I marvel at my luck that that, was not in fact, that.

So as far as you know, I fell in love with you, fully and finally, the day that my estranged mother died. You know that I was feeling irrationally sad, it was illogical given her toxic impact on my life, but it was how I felt. I curled up on the couch, tears pressed into the cushion, hands clenched in pain. You felt my irrational pain with me, and through blurred eyes, I faintly registered you inexplicably moving furniture around. Suddenly you were lying in front of me, the two couches combined to form a cocoon of sorts, your body totally separate from mine, except for one hand gently rubbing my back. You had made it so that we were as close physically as we could be without the question of physicality arising, you had made it clear that I was free to be sad but you would lie there and be sad with me. My heart broke, it was never about the sex, it couldn’t be further from being about the sex. I turned my face to yours, and we were both crying, it was then I realized that you felt what I felt, and I murmured that I loved you into your chest as I pulled you close, my body enveloped in yours, the current between us charged with oneness.

To this day, years later, you think that my love for you was born in that moment. You think this because I spent months pretending to be indifferent, hiding my love for someone I thought I could never have whilst making every effort to find the same feeling in someone else, anyone else. But it was that fateful day in February, an otherwise wretched month, when you walked into my life, that I began to love you. That day remains the only niggling thought in my mind when I state my disbelief in a higher power, because this, and only this, must have been planned since the beginning of time.

If you know this, that I have loved you without reason since the moment we met, I fear you will realise the unmatched power you hold over me, the fact that I could never leave, how completely done I am with anything that is not you. And while, I would like to hope that this knowledge would change nothing between us, I rather not find out. I am in love, and I am happy, and this makes me the most vulnerable person on Earth.

So I’ll leave you to think that you somehow earned my love, but I know when I am on my final breaths, my mind will flash back to the exact way your hair and eyes and face looked when you awakened my life the day I found out your name.