to whom it may concern

no-one writes letters anymore, and that is a shame. letters are by far the best gift anyone can receive. the letter below remained unsent - which is very sad - until recently. the said couple were divorced, and he had just heard that she was about to re-marry. the two of them had known one another since they were 15. upon hearing of her engagement he wrote to her what seemed like a goodbye letter. true story, i swear. there's a program on tv chronicling the best love stories and the narratives behind them. even the most hardened cynics amongst us were moved by the missive below.




dear so and so

i write this letter with both hope and hesitation. hope, that it will be recieved well and will find you well, hesitation, knowing that i attempt to reconnect when we have suffered the most severe of discconects over the last while. i rue the time we've lost, all those unspoken words, having not written to you for so long - too long. i felt slightly embarrassed this morning as i began to write this. the truth is i didn't know whether i was ready to try and negotiate these many nuances or examine these boundaries of all of this newness and surrounds.

i'm different from you in that I am never able to really forget someone. Their memory stays with me and the remembering, eventually, just stops being such a nuisance. It reminds me of one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from "Giovanni's Room". A good book, if you ever have the chance to read it. It goes:

"Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."

in the above sense, and perhaps embarrassingly so, in all senses, i am still mad for you. when I heard you were getting married, I once again became plagued, by a strange and perhaps cursed sense of trepidation. My heart broke. I knew that the long awaited end was now putting itself into proper effect. In this world we barley began let alone ended buffer buffer stream stream

all my love and then some,

yours