A Love Letter

Dear Tom,

I realize that, in all the years we've lived and loved, I've never stopped to really tell you how very much I love you.  Now, I am faced with the very real possibility that the great love of my life is forever out of my reach.  I really hope that isn't true, and I imagine these words are too little and too late, but I want to tell you how I feel about you.

I love you. I doubt that I can say it any better than that.  Love like you and I have shared is not subject to reason or logic.  It simply is.  I have believed that we were destined to find each other, to live this life we've lived together -- meant to be who we have been with and for each other.  I still believe that.  I will always believe it.  Always.

I remember when I first came to be aware of you, just an interesting online personality on that long ago list serve.  Even then I was caught by your confidence, your sure-footed sense of who you were.  Though part of me bristled at your assumption of your own rightness, I felt drawn in by something so powerful it reached out to me through the naked words that marched across my computer screen -- words that were my first sense of you.

 In my memory, our first interactions were more like sparring matches than conversations.  I was so prickly and wary, but you were patient and pleasant and likeable -- helping me to find my way into what, for me, was a new and strange world.  We talked, just a little at first, and then more and more -- and it wasn't long until I lost my heart.

I'll never, ever forget driving across the country, 1200 miles, to meet you that very first time.  Crazy.  Everything I'd ever known and everything I'd ever believed told me that it was lunacy to go so far to meet some total stranger for such a completely unheard of interaction.  That was a trip that lives in my memory, charged with excitement and anxiety and anticipation and such total cognitive dissonance that it still feels almost vibrational even all these years later.

There was that breathless, forever space of time when we came to know one another through chat and email and phone calls -- those months when our love grew and blossomed and remained a secret even from the two of us.  That night when you looked at me across the length of the sofa, and told me that you loved me still shines and twinkles in my heart with all the same magic that it had in the first instant.  Words that I thought I'd never hear you say, crackled in the air between us and changed my life forever.  I was so happy in that moment, and everything that has been for us since is precious to me.  I will never, ever regret a single moment that we've shared -- and I will treasure every single moment that we may still have together.

For so many years now, we've laughed and cried and walked and played and yes -- we've battled by times.  We've been the biggest, wildest, craziest, most improbable love match in history during all the good times and all the bad times.  We've outlasted and bested the most impossible circumstances and come out stronger and better and more in love -- that is who we are; who we've been.  I can't imagine my life without you, and I will hope for us, and fight for us, and believe in us as long as I have breath. 

You have always insisted that, in the moment when you cut your initials into my flesh, you released marks that existed from the beginning of time, on my soul -- that you and I were partners from long before the moment we met.  I have believed that was the truth, and I have worn that truth on my shoulder with great pride and great joy.  It remains for me, the simple and pure truth.  I believe that we will always and forever come back around to one another -- in every lifetime through all time.

I've admired your strength, your indomitable will, your tenacity, your ability to see your way through to answers when others saw only insurmountable obstacles.  I have believed that there was nothing that you would not face down and overcome.  I've lived, through some of my own darkest times buoyed by your optimism and energy.  I've never seen you give up.  I don't think that there is a single ounce of "give up" in you.  I just believe in you.

I feel like I've made a terrible, hackneyed mess of this.  It is a pitiful shadow of what I wish I could say to you.  There are just no words to make it clear how much it means to me that you have loved me, and I will never, ever be able to adequately express to you how honored and thrilled I have been to be allowed to love you.

Yours always and all ways...
swan