Her

an excerpt from one of the Four Letters

I love you dearly and fiercely and without regret. You are the one who shines through all of the time passed beneath us. My whole life up until now, I hoped to meet one like you. I know it would never work with you (damn the hope) and I know you have left me thoroughly for another, as I left you thoroughly for a life of living and dying on the raging main.

The night I told you I loved you, you hit me. Not with the coy punch in the shoulder of a buddy or the giggling acceptance of a girl manipulated by the most used and trifling and powerful of words in our tongue. You hit me and with tears raining from your tourmaline and serpentine eyes like the Southwind storms, you slapped me with all the force of one who had delved into the depths of humanity and emerged as something better and deeper than the normal. You slapped me because I was leaving for a year, maybe forever. At least you were honest. Had I met you long ago, I would have changed everything, I hope. He had no right to ruin you for me. As I had no right to ruin bitter single motherhood for you. That’s why I worry some days. I worry that you are living with someone less than you because I reminded you of the bond possible between an honest man and his woman. And an honest woman and her man.

When I met you, I knew I had to leave. I didn’t want to tell you because I knew the toll of the left behind. I wanted to experience a woman, but mostly just individual beautiful you, without being afraid and lonely and with you hanging under my domaclean departure. We shared our bodies, in life and death. In love and the end, we shared all we had and I took you into me.

But these nights, when I sit in the cold, and when I am honest with myself, when I was lonely with anyone else, I missed you. I would drive by your road and think of turning my old Ford up your way. In life and death, pervasive during those terrible times, from bullet or pathogen, you were a lover and friend. And now, forever gone to the wilds of finding yourself. You reside easy on the mind, but so heavy upon me that some days I can’t think about anything but you. I want you. I think I need you. But you are not one to be needed or wanted, not by someone like me. You need someone more permanent.

And permanence is a sick joke. We both know that better than most anyone.