I'm not as strong as you. When I first met you, I thought you were a fragile little thing, someone I had to protect. Now I realise I had us all wrong. You are the strong one, the one who can endure living with the possiblity of a love like this, and the fact that we will never be allowed it.
I need to be somewhere where sheer necessity forces you from my thoughts minute by minute, hour by hour. That cannot happen here.
I lie here imagining him lying next to you, his licence to touch you, to hold you, and I would do anything to make that freedom mine.
I will be a better person for you, darling. I want to live well, wish for you to be proud of me. If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.
I do not give my feelings easily to paper. I do not give them easily at all. You deal in the business of words, and I cherish each one you write to me. But do not judge my feelings by the fact that I don't respond in kind.
Trust that I am here. Trust me by my actions, my affections. Those are my currency.
I hate the thought that I could cause you any unhappiness.
Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.
Alive, these past four years. Living, breathing, sipping cups of coffee and typing. Alive. She could have written to him, spoken to him. Gone to him.
She had wanted one small piece of him, one beautiful, precious memory, to carry with her.
And while what she was doing meant she might be disgraced in the eyes of those around her, she could show her daughter that there was another way to live. A way that did not involve anesthetising herself. A way that did not mean you lived your whole life as an apology for being who you were.
I hope you're living a better life, she told them silently. I hope you're freed from whatever held you there. Everyone deserves that chance.
I'm not sure how I earned the right. I don't feel entirely confident of it even now. But even the chance to think upon your beautiful face, your smile, and know that some part of it might belong to me is probably the single greatest thing that has happened to me in my life.