It’s been a few years since I read your letters. I can’t read them without touching the grief I keep hidden because you’re gone. You are gone and there are so many things I haven’t been able to say since you died.
Reading them this morning, I saw with older eyes just how much you loved me and I feel as though I took it for granted that it would always be there.
That you would always be there.
You told me about how there was a book you wanted to write, your magnum opus, and you wanted to get it done because you felt like you were running out of time. And maybe that day you’d had some foresight, I don’t know.
People always thought you were so grumpy and so cranky and angry at the world. With good reason, because you were, but they didn’t know it was because of how hard you loved. You gave everything to what you loved. So much of yourself there was barely any left for you, and what you saw in yourself, you despised.
Your brother sent me all the letters I sent you when he was clearing out your apartment. You’d kept the whole stack. The mountain of letters, you called it once. I have them rubber-banded with yours to me. It doesn’t feel right to separate them. I read the last one in the pile I sent you (even though I know I sent you one for your birthday the year before you died, that one is not in the pile), and it made me desperate to know if you actually believed I loved you.
And would you find it silly of me to miss you with such a desperation now, six years after you’ve died? I can barely look at that grief, Henry. I can’t even glance at it because your loss is indescribably awful. I won’t say you’ve ruined love for me, but you have made it next to impossible for me to ever feel loved by someone as much as you loved me.
I wish I could sit in the stillness of a thunderstorm with you.
salisbury.fake 