What I am trying to say is, if I had ever known love, it was for you. That is why I keep thinking only of the horrible hurt I cradled in my heart all those months through. I don’t think of the summers of aching from when I was fifteen or the still sunshod afternoons of last December,when I think of having loved.

So here I am writing about you again. I would not want to quote Neruda at you if I saw you now, believe me, I remember always having thought your features comically misaligned upon your face.But there has never been anything I could romanticise with the same ease as I can absence, so here I am.

Because that is just what it is. I have fallen for absence, for impossibility for distance, and even as I do not long for you anymore,that is what i continue to do. In writing to you, I am keeping alive the only thing I ever loved- I am keeping alive a mirage. For surely it was only the dusk playing tricks upon my eyes when I fancied I saw the softness in yours?

But that was a long time ago-a long time back when I would perch upon the balcony and watch the sunshine ruffle through the leaves with all the wonder of a child first seeing light. Everything that was dazzling and glorious then has simmered into banality now. A winter has passed and a summer and a winter …and here we are.

I don’t know if you know about the acute horror with which the world is collapsing around us, around all we once swore we held dear,and I cannot do much but write to you. Write to me. If, once, I had so much love to hold in my heart, surely our lives are not quite as redundant, our aches not quite as futile, as we have come to believe?