Third Letter

III.

a morning, the cold one

Dearest Winter,

I had dreamed about you last night and every single fibre of my being didn't regret it even once. Not even slightly. If anything I felt something closer to relief, that even when I'm asleep, even stripped of all my careful discipline, my soul still found it's way back to you. As if you are the only thing my mind returns to the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth. Involuntary and a little painful and completely impossible to stop.

In the dream you were simply sitting across a table from me, and the light was shining above you, every inch of your skin was glittering how you looked so impeccable without even breaking a sweat, too golden, and you were looking at me. Actually looking. Not past me, not through me, but at me, the way I have looked at you a hundred times without you having the knowledge of it. And suddenly I woke up and the room was grey and ordinary and you were nowhere in it, and I felt the absence of you like a physical thing, it was painful, and something slipped in my mind “Ah, if only I had the ability, I would've loved to get ahold of you even just this once.”

I want to be honest in these letters since they are the only honest thing I have, things I can express in the midst of this madness that's happening inside me. So here is the honesty, it is not gentle, what I feel for you. I have been describing it as gentle because gentle is survivable and this, this is not always survivable, there were times it felt like dying. Sometimes it is enormous and it has edges and it presses against the inside of my ribs like it is trying to get out, blood pumping through my chest, like it is furious at being kept, like it knows it deserves more room than I am giving it.

I give it this. These letters. This small, insufficient room.

Your name is the same as a season and I cannot enter that season without feeling all of it at once, every unsaid thing, every careful distance, feeling like I'm always a light year away from you, every moment I looked at you and swallowed it back down. A quarter of every year. Yours, without your knowledge. Yours, completely.

And I am not afraid of that. That is perhaps the most terrifying thing of all.

— burning, and pretending otherwise