Ninth Letter

IX.

a morning I won't forget

Winter Dearest,

You have sent me a messaged me last night. After midnight. It said, I kept thinking about what you said today. The thing about light. I had said something offhand about the way afternoon light comes through dirty glass and how it always looks like it's trying. A small thing. A nothing thing, it should've just passed both your ears.

Those were the kinds of things I used to say without thinking, spilling over because I am always too full of things and they come out sideways sometimes, disguised as observations about light.

But you thought about it. After midnight you thought about it enough to reach for your phone, enough to find my name, enough to use some of your time just to tell it to me.

I lay there for a long time with the phone face-down on my chest, your words pressed against my sternum like a held breath, and I stared at the ceiling and thought, she is somewhere right now, also awake, and she is thinking about something that came out of me. She let it in. She kept it. She carried it all the way to midnight and then she gave it back.

I don't have words for what that is, even I am struggling in writing this in letter, this was the very first time my heart and hand trembled at something. Fear is something, but it wasn't fear that was consuming me whole, it was the pure, unscattered thoughts of you. You are so vulnerably haunting, your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible and I can't help but feel all of it in every drop of blood inside me.

I only have this feeling, it's white and consuming, it was a lot like standing too close to something very bright, like being seen by something you have been watching for so long that being seen back feels almost unbearable.

Almost. Almost unbearable. And completely, completely wanted.

awake, and finally unafraid of it