a love letter to all the lives we’ve lived

dearest,

    it's been the longest time, and yet, we still have the rest of our lives left. it seems unthinkable that we have so much time to be together, that our stars didn't just collide by accident and continue on their fated path across the cosmos. you loved me before i loved you (well, i suppose i loved you in the first message i sent, but that was a very different type of love.) and looking back, i was a fool to have not seen it sooner. i didn't want to hope that someone as lovely as you could possibly find something worth living in me; i'd never experienced heartbreak and i hadn't planned on pinning such negative emotions to your sunflower smile. "but she had eyes, and she chose me," says the tragic hero. "one that loved not wisely, but too well." and such wisdom has long left me in lieu of utter adoration.

we've spoken late into the night; they felt like whispers over the ocean, under greek marble, lost in a sunflower field, morning kisses grazing sleepy eyelids under the rising italian sun.

    shakespeare must have loved too, for in his words i find truths about love that i am ineloquent to express. the noble boy stands in the bounteous orchard of his adversaries, but gazes upon the greatest beauty and cannot but whisper in wonder at she who makes his heart beat so. "but, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? it is the east, and juliet is the sun." in my all my fantasies, i can see us taking centre stage in such romantic tragedies, yet i do not wish for such an end. for me to proclaim my love in the finest doublet as you reach from the balcony so that your fingers might brush mine; your hair is a halo and the sunshine illuminates you; you are blinding and i would rather go blind than look away. such a dream will stay in dreams, but when i see your face, it is close to coming true.

when the gods built us, darling, they were aching for a love story. 

i don't know how long ago they pulled our souls from the night sky, where they had been fixed, stationary, shining like distant planets, waiting for an eclipse. for all i know, it was at the formation of the earth. for all i know, it was yesterday. 

    i know you loved the works of sappho much more than the cruel bard - no woman would mutilate another lady in the ways how lavinia suffered. sappho is much softer, gentler, and i hear her in the gentle plucking of a lyre and the sound of the tide coming in on the island of lesbos. you made this music for me, and i listen to it more than you know. when i hear the lyre singing, i can pretend that you are with me.

love from miles away,

- a