To Your Silhouette – Love Letter

Beloved,

As I begin this, Evermore by Josh Groban has just begun to play through my headphones, and I can feel my heartbeat in my eardrums. The sensation is like I suspect this letter will be, painful and beautiful.

I haven’t written a love letter in years. I have written you so many times, and yet, this is still the first. Because I don’t know you. I still haven’t met you, 39 years and counting. We haven’t touched. We haven’t kissed. We haven’t dated. We haven’t married. You haven’t crushed my hand as our daughter is born into the world. We haven’t adopted. We aren’t parents. We haven’t fought, nor made up. I have written you so many songs, and still, I have yet to write you a single one.

Perhaps we have crossed paths, love. But that woman I met isn’t you, love. She hadn’t been through what you have been through now. She won’t have gone through the things you will go through between now and our future. And I am so much more and so much less than the man I was.

I watched the new Cyrano movie with Peter Dinklage tonight, my heart, and I realized how much I grieve for this version of me who has no choice but to fill the world with words of love for you. I realized how terrified I am that you aren’t out there. I am so scared that there is no one resilient enough to be loved with the kind of passion that writes a woman a poem every day for five months. That no one can be flooded with 600 poems in a year and not drown without some kind of life preserver that has nothing to do with her love for me. 

I am afraid that no one has the courage to be loved in this way and love me in her own way in return. I don’t need your love to look the same as mine, dear, I am not Narcissus. Your eloquence need not mirror mine.

It is easy for me to understand Cyrano. I have martyred myself for the happiness of women I loved before. I have kept silent. I have kept secrets. I have said goodbye because I knew our relationship would have been a stress I decided in my arrogance that she would be better without. But fuck is it lonely on this cross no one asked me to bear.

It is easy for me to understand Cyrano. How I hate the ugly things about myself, and how I hold them against me. I hate the fat that has collected on my body. I hate the chronic pain and how my fear of it keeps me from imagining myself with women who present themselves as active. I hate this strain of HPV that revealed itself after my last long term relationship ended. I hate that I only feel safe feeling sexual in my fantasies. I don’t lack hope in the same way Cyrano did, love, but I understand. My best is incredible, incomparable, but it somehow was never enough long before I was this broken.

My depression is easier for me to accept instead of hate now, but I fear that is only true for me. It is always raining inside me, love, and everything I do is in the rain. Sun shines in my life, but it shines through the rain. I dance, but I dance in the rain, and sometimes dancing is the eye of the storm. But I let it rain, in the hope that maybe there is a limit to the amount of moisture gathered in the seemingly endless cumulonimbus within me. We can build shelter, use an umbrella, wear a raincoat, but we cannot change the weather. My hope is that if it rains long enough, it will prove to have been just that. Weather, and not just the climate of my soul. 

This is what I want to be for you, love. Cyrano writing to Roxanne. Lancelot choosing Elaine instead of another Guenevere. The version of Tristram and Isolde that was raw and real, and not adulterous. I am Duke Orsino, in love with love, tired of Olivia, waiting for Viola.

This is who I want to be for you, love. Revealed. Apocalypse was originally the Greek word for Revelation and this is my apocalypse: my vulnerable, aching, lonely, unfulfilled self set to the page, tattooed on the memory of the world. I want an apocalyptic kind of love. Let us find our way in the post-revelation landscape and remake the world in our image.

I think I died three years ago, love. Maybe not for the first time. Or maybe it was my last breath after suffering one unhealing wound after another. My heart limps still where those scars are tight across the heartstrings. I am so tired of this torpor. This waking coma my life became.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I love you. How much I always have. I barely have memories in which I did not love you. I still remember the first dream you were in, the princess whose form you took in that dream, the single room fort in a verdant deciduous forest, and I a prince named Dart. What was I? Six? Seven? I have been prepared to love you my whole life.

And maybe that is why I am still alone, love, because I thought each time that someone else might be you, and I loved her the way I love you. Maybe it was too much for her. Maybe a part of her knew this love wasn’t hers to keep. Maybe she was afraid to be you at the time. But I know you will love me more for loving each one as if she was you, because I was looking for you in each and every one. Because I gave them everything they deserved as if they were you. And you love me because I believe they deserve it, whether from me or another. 

I have loved you from the shadows and from the spotlight. I have loved you on dance floors, in bookstores, on mountains, on rooftops, and cuddling on the couch buzzed on peach wine. I have loved you at my most inspired and my most mediocre. I have loved you well and I have loved you badly, but I have always loved you. Always.

A part of me thought to write that I don’t know who I am without you, love. But I always know who I am. And what is clear to me is that I am not I without you, love. This love is such a part of me that when it is not expressed, I am diminished. I am less. When I can love you at my fullest, I am nourished and nourishing. Without you, I am the oak in winter, the unyielding skeleton, naked and unmoving. Never has it meant more than it does today, what Neruda said, that “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

The things I have learned about love, corazon. That love is a quantum thing, a tesseract, that with love all points in space and time exist in connection with all other points in space and time. That the heart is an organ that exists in infinite dimensions, all closer together than atoms. But these are only words to describe how I have always loved you. A child does not need to understand physics to catch a ball, and I did not need metaphor or science to love you. 

My mother used to worry about me because I am such a romantic. She worried that love would break me, that I, like Romeo, would not survive the pain. She was right. Love broke me. Love killed me. And yet here I am, not so much a Phoenix, but some strange kind of immortal who dies and yet wakes the next morning. At least as far as this love for you goes. And I will put one foot in front of the other for the potential of this love until this delicate human shell collapses and my love is but energy spreading out into entropy.

It terrifies me that I might not meet you, love, because I know that this is only the shallows for me. This love is the grapes to the wine we will vint together. This is the love I have for your silhouette dancing in the shadows cast by the flames of life and how we will burn when you step out of that fire and into my arms for minutes we’ll count as years and years we’ll count as epochs. The sun has been born and died in the time I have waited for you, and new galaxies will blink to life when your stardust finally meets mine.

I look forward to our creations: our relationship, our love, our family. To the unsung songs, the unwritten words, untravelled towns, unlived in homes. We will shine in the world, love, we will be twin suns in our solar system and new worlds will be modeled on the one we create. You inspire me, and we will inspire the lives we touch, together. 

For tonight, enough. I hope you get to read this someday, love. 

You should know, beautiful, you look an awful lot like my heart.

Sincerely yours from my first breath to my last,

M.