Love Letter to the World

• PART I •


This is really hard.

I miss you.

We were pretty good together, huh? Not perfect, yes, but then nothing is.

For sure I can see us reunited, but the image is blurry. Feels like I’m looking through a foggy window at moving shapes and muted colours.

I hate that.

Yet we’ve both changed so much. It feels impossible to simply pick up where we left off.

Some days I can hardly even remember where we left off.

Ohhh, the mind …

Or, do I exaggerate? Apart from you it feels dangerous to be sure of anything.

I mean, we can’t outrun this. Can a separation like ours simply be documented, archived, and forgotten?

Doesn’t feel that way, in spite of what I’m hoping.

What are you hoping … ?

Anyway, yes, ahem! there’s no sense wallowing, as you always said.

Remember those cute posters? "Keep Calm and Carry On" or whatever?

They’re not as funny as they used to be.

I loved them; you hated them. You said we did have to keep moving and you lived that way every day.

I wanted to pause, to contemplate. And now that I’m being forced to do those things it feels like you’re spinning away from me.

I know. I know it’s not rational to think like that. But I do anyway and deep down it feels like my only recourse.

I mean, the old you wouldn’t agree but being too rationale got us into this mess, didn’t it?

We could have lived more simply, more haphazardly, more in time with our own heartbeats.

To be honest, I think that’s what I’d like to do if we are ever together again.

I hope you understand.

With love,

Me

• PART II •

Hi babe, me again.

Our Zoom call tonight was great and cute and everything but I still felt the urge to communicate some more like this. The old-fashioned way.

Can you bear with me? It’s totally okay if you don’t read this until tomorrow.

To end our call just now, I said I love you and you said you love me, but why can’t I say the more complicated things that I feel in the moment and to your face?

Is it because it’s only a pixelated representation of your face?

And my voice just a digital recreation of my voice?

Or is it more than that … ?

Living like this, I just don’t know if I can trust my feelings. Fuck, most days I don’t even know if I can feel them.

I remember and cherish our love but is it also slowly becoming a pixelated thing?

Can you relate at all? Maybe I’m alone in this.

This is gonna sound heavy, but … sometimes I really worry that I can no longer love you because right now in all this craziness I can no longer love anyone.

Sure, I walk through the park and I might interact with people, briefly and from a distance, but I feel totally disconnected from them, as if the whole thing is a piece of theatre and we are playing parts, pretending to be the neighbours or co-workers we once were.

Do you feel that way or do you just get on with things like you always have?

Maybe I’m crazy but I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve always considered myself to be a loving person, but can you love someone from six feet away?

Those people may as well be six miles away, it feels like.

Yes, I’ve never been much for chit chat. And neither have you. Is that why we made a good match?

And if we are still such a good match, why do we have to pretend so much that the Zoom calls are not forced and awkward?

I’m sounding very definitive, but no, I’m not breaking up with you. Neither of us wants to go through all those conversations again right now.

There won’t be any “It’s not you, it’s me,” because it’s not fucking me.

In fact I feel like I’m drowning in my own love for you because I can only express it through a computer.

Oh god.

The medium is the message, right?

It’s an absolutely insane thing but I sometimes think that it would be easier for me to love one of those life-sized latex dolls right now because I could at least … touch it.

They made a movie about that with Ryan Gosling. Remember how you refused to watch it? Don’t worry, I haven’t ordered my own doll … yet.

Hahahahahaha.

Shit. Even as I was typing that simulated laughter I knew that you wouldn’t be laughing along with me.

Sorry. I know you’re not good with change. It’s just the way you are.

And I can’t expect you to ever be different. That wouldn’t be fair.

But my love, I just don’t think I’m the same person anymore. It’s so hard to hang on to something that feels more and more like I dreamed it.

You were heavily into Pink Floyd … so can you relate when I say that I’ve become comfortably numb?

I’m throwing a lot at you, I know.

My insides are turning and through the window, faintly, I can still hear you, the world, revolving.

Love,
me

• PART III •

My Dear,

Without flinching or reddening or averting my eyes, I say this.

You were my world.

Oh yes, I was submerged to the bluest depths, free from all encumbrances. So free, so enamoured of my newfound power, that I could see naught but for your trees, your mountains, your lakes and rivers, your rhythms, your knowledge, your quietude, your cosmos, your typhoons.

All the while I was your little cyclone, dancing about at the edge of things here and there, kept securely within the sweep of your far greater winds.

I wasn’t trapped. I had all the air that I needed and all the love that I could endure.

I didn’t even care that I couldn’t grow.

But, hey, you know this. You’ve known this. All of this.

I’m committing it to ink on this page much more for my benefit than for yours.

Which begs a rhetorical question: Does nothing surprise you?

Does nothing cause you to flinch or redden?

I ask not with the intent to criticize.

With your eyes always so locked, so content with what was ahead, there was never a reason to avert them, was there?

Were you aware that to be seen I had to bring my little cyclone dance directly into your line of vision and remain there long enough for your field of focus to adjust?

It often took a few moments. And so I began to tire, losing my centrifugal force.

I have precious little left of it now. That’s obvious from my retreating words, right?

I’m proud of how through it all I never once masked my feelings from you even when they were very much hidden from me.

Case in point: In my last two letters, I was still doing the work to deny that our love had come to an end.

I no longer am. It feels like a different kind of free.

In times past, I would have been concerned for you right now. In this new frame of mind, that concern seems naïve. It’s not that you “move on quickly” or whatever. You simply move forward at your regular, steady pace on your 24-hour clock.

That steadiness, your humming cadence, those thing formed a big part of what mesmerized me, of what fastened me.

Oddly, our temporarily enforced parting has helped me to understand all of this.

Yes, a tiny part of me wishes that I could feel intensely scornful, but I simply cannot conjure that up right now. Instead, I hope it’s obvious that I don’t resent or regret—and that forgetting is out of the question. How could I ever fully escape your influence? You are now a foundation in me upon which I will build new ones.

But if I’m not blaming you, then who?

Well, I’m blaming love, actually.

I mean, fuck, it worked its magic, didn’t it?

At first, when all is pristine and phosphorescent, you simply can’t fathom that it could ever end.

And then when it does—painfully or no—you can hardly countenance even one more hand-held stroll at day’s end.

That’s both strange and vexing, no?

Love might be the consummate lover, the purest of impassioned souls, but at heart, love is not a romantic.

Far from it. Whereas we might look back, love never does.

If it’s rekindled, it’s always a wholly new incarnation.

What does love know that we don’t?

Maybe one day it will tell me if it whispers into my ear again.

My dear, I want only good things for you.

Now that I can perceive much more of your essence, I’ll say this.

Part of you is burning, part of you is drowning, part of you is graced with—for the first time in a long time—skies of your bluest depth.

With a full heart,

Me