The Letter

 

Feverish hands rippled with lines across filmy parchment skin, threaded with red and blue life lines search hastily through teak drawers. Creaking fingers close on yellowing parchment. Lovingly opened, watery eyes veined and blood shot caress an old familiar script. The love letter is read.

 

~*0*~

 

Dearest

In this life there are moments, sweet, beautiful, angry, heartbreaking moments. Momentary slivers of time strung together by content stillness and rapid movings. Many of these moments slide into subconciousness, living half remembered half forgotten. Times unorganized archives, lost and remembered rarely. But then there are those moments those short slices of hidden beauty. Those moments when ones breathe catches, ones mind sharpens. Those moments when life tingles and the soul vibrates humming an old unfamiliar melody that only that moment remembers. Yes dearest there are those moments, too few and so rare but when experienced remembered forever.

 

My darling the day I met you was one such moment. Because of that moment the very reason for our life together I write you this love letter. Tinged with the sorrow of parting and the ever present bitterness of what was so sweet. Even now as I write this while flickering shadows dance their way across a barren wall, while sleep wraps its woven blanket around me, while heavy lids tremble and pale hands scratch their notes on this page, while I sit embraced by the only light in this mournful house. Yes even now my heart flutters its memory, my lips part in that sweet crescent and eyes long dull find some light. Because even now dearest when parting is imminent and we must go our separate ways, even now that cord pulls me and reminds me with sweet assurance, I have loved and been loved.

 

Yes, love. Bittersweet complications, ironic revelations, merging temptations. All the bitterness and sweetness of that jarred, lackadaisical, thrilling emotion belonged to us. I still feel your thwarted tear on my cheek; its salty sorrow clings to me stinging the wound of what has to end. I still feel the sultry heat of your breath on my neck its memory warming the chill of the night. I still feel your arms around my waist, my head pillowed by the sinew of your shoulder. The lethargic strains of that old melody seducing my ears. Those tender moments snatched through time, blurred around the edges, but never in this lifetime; through the ages, past and present, never now, never then, never ever, forgotten.

 

Dearest we have loved and known love. The heavy tide of our emotions has drowned us in dappled sunlit water. We’ve sunk to the depths of it and bedded on the smooth pebbles. Floated to the surface of it, become entangled in the reeds, fought ourselves free and sunk once again. Yes indeed this was and is love. But dearest you know this well and I know it too. Loves debt collector is nigh. He lingers in the shadows waiting to exact his price. Like frightened children we sneak past him and dance in the light. Except now the shadow consumes me and the price we know of so well is acknowledged. For all those that know love must know loss.

 

So now comes the part where this pen stills, where rivers on ink run into each other sprinkled by a rain of tears. A pale inky hand finds a heated forehead, flushed cheeks begin to lose their heightened colour. I grow weak dearest, weak with the loss I must accept but weaker still with the thought of the loss you must live with. For I know as all those who have transcended from the now into the forever know; it is the one left in the now that bears the pain of letting you transcend into the forever. This is the price love must pay.

 

Goodbye my darling goodbye. Such simple words of simple inadequacy yet all that is left to say. No pretty words can mask the truth; no sweet murmurs can soften the harshness. Death has embraced me like it will all others. Too soon this breath will still, too soon these eyes will close, too soon I will steal from you, too soon beloved. So I say all that is left to say and end this letter that will become clumsy and flimsy with over use. Goodbye my darling goodbye.

 

~*0*~

 

Yellowing pages flicker and flutter with strains of ink through the air, slowly hesitantly alighting on cold stone. Leather clad feet shuffle to an easy armchair, knees creak, a back bends, he eases into velvet comfort. Eyes that read a familiar script watch the littered floor, salty tears from those self same eyes sting the wound of what is lost. In a room that once held and lost a beloved he closes those eyes and ceases the rise and fall of an old chest. His wait is over. Ethereal hands reach out and touch those of a writer of a love letter.