The Letter Of Lane Lagowitz.

It begins with a letter. No, not just a letter—her letter. The one I never thought would come, the one that somehow found its way to me after ten years. Ten years of silence of distance, of worlds apart, and with it, a reminder of everything I had long buried.

There’s something unsettling about the weight of it. The paper feels familiar as if it holds the memory of our every word. I could almost hear her voice—the way it would have sounded if she had said the words aloud. The way she would speak, deliberate, calculated, yet heavy with something else, something unspoken that only I ever truly understood.

A letter, impossibly real in my hands, threatening to disrupt the careful balance I have since built around myself.

My Dearest August,

I write to you now as one would speak to a shadow—an echo of something that was once real, but is now a mere trace of a memory, distorted by the inexorable passage of time. You, whose name still hangs on my tongue like a forbidden fruit, whose absence weighs upon my heart with the same inevitability as the turning of the seasons.

How curious it is that I should attempt to capture something so intangible in mere words. Perhaps that is the fate of us all—to be forever haunted by what we cannot hold, forever yearning for that which slips through our fingers like water through a sieve.

I have lived a life that many would envy—rich with power, cloaked in the dignity of success, armoured in the cold logic of law. Yet for all the mountains I have climbed, for all the empires I have built with the architecture of my mind, I have never reached the height that you once offered me so effortlessly. Love—yes, love, that delicate, ephemeral flame—I was too proud, too afraid to let it burn in me. I believed that to acknowledge love was to succumb to weakness, to let the forces of the world that I had so carefully controlled break me apart.

When you came to me, at 26, so full of the brightness of a soul unencumbered by the burdens I bore, I mistook your love for a fleeting wind, a passing gust that would soon blow itself out. How foolish, how terribly blind I was. For what is youth but a mirror to the eternal—its passions untampered by time, its purity unscarred by the cynical truths of experience? And what is love but the bridge between the divine and the mortal, a glimpse of something greater than ourselves? You offered me love, without hesitation, without fear. You loved me with the intensity of one who believes in the permanence of the sun, in the unbroken promise of light—and in my arrogance, I turned away.

I told you that love wasn’t real, that it was a weakness—a delusion crafted by poets too fragile to face the world as it is. I said it with conviction, my voice steady, my walls firmly in place, and you listened. You let me speak, even as your eyes betrayed the ache I tried not to see. I tore it apart, piece by piece, until I could no longer distinguish what was yours and what was mine.

I convinced myself that you did not understand the world, too innocent to grasp the weight of what we might become. And yet, in that very innocence, in that very vulnerability, you held the truth that I had spent a lifetime trying to suppress love is not a luxury, it is a necessity. It is the force that binds the world together, that makes the cold calculations of existence bearable. But I—being who I was—ran from it, as one runs from the flame, afraid of being consumed. I walked away not only from you but from the truest part of myself, the part that you had awakened.

Time has a peculiar way of revealing the truth, of stripping away the illusions we so carefully craft around ourselves. What I have come to realize, perhaps too late, is that power, prestige, and success are but empty vessels if they are not filled with the substance of love. In the end, they are no more than hollow echoes—reflections in a mirror that never quite capture the fullness of the soul. I have seen my reflection, and I have seen the emptiness that resides there. I have lived a life so carefully constructed, so perfectly ordered, that it has no room for the chaos of feeling, no space for the unruly beauty of love. And so, it is hollow. And so, it is empty.

And I am left with this—a lifetime of power, of victories, victories that matter not a whit. They are like the ruins of an ancient empire, standing silent and forgotten in the desert. I have conquered the world, but I have lost my heart. And so, I stand here, writing to you not as a leader, but as a woman who knows that what she has truly lost cannot be replaced.

It was when I reached this conclusion that I began to see you every day. There is something almost beautiful in this—something tragic, perhaps, but undeniable. The years have only polished you, shaped you into something more radiant, more confident. You move through the world like one who understands her place in it, not as someone seeking approval, but as one who has long stopped asking for permission.

At 7:42 a.m. Every day, without fail, you turn the corner as I cross Virtue Square, your umbrella slicing through the rain like a figure in a film, the world around you pause in deference. Your damp curls cling to your face, wild as ever, your sharp features softened only by the glow of the fountain behind you, where the water dances in eternal circles.

I never allow myself to look directly at you. Instead, I let my gaze drift past, lingering on the edges of your presence, as if that’s all I deserved. The tilt of your head as you listen to a conversation, the way your fingers grip the strap of your briefcase—still steady, still certain. Each motion of yours carries a kind of quiet mastery, a confidence that both terrifies and mesmerizes me.

Did you ever notice? You always noticed everything. Every hesitation, every glance, every heartbeat too loud to mask. Did you ever hear the way my heart faltered every time you drew near?

Whether you still live in the house I once knew, whether you ever read this letter, I’ll never know. The distance between us has grown too wide, and I have no illusions left about being able to bridge it.

I can only say that I will be at Virtue Fountain, every Sunday at 5:00 p.m., standing there as the world rushes by, waiting for you. Not for an answer, perhaps, but for something more intangible, something that only you and I would understand.

I was always yours, 

Lane Lagowitz.