I once built a whole love affair on letters.

Well, that’s not fair. I once built much of a love affair on letters. Words, books, poetry, songs, prose: you name it, we seduced one another with any and all of it.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I met someone and together, we journeyed a great and terrible distance. Through it all, we wrote to one another. Religiously, feverishly pouring out heart, mind, and soul onto the page. Together, we were rocked out into a separate universe of our own creation, the ink becoming blood and the page our living flesh.

It was a heady time; it was a delicious time. It was a dangerous time. I remember feeling that as I walked through the world, my feet hardly touched the ground. I felt oddly detached and disconnected from this terrestrial plane and eventually became completely disconnected from myself. I was far away and lost with him in this beguiling and intoxicating place of a communion so pure, I didn’t think it was possible. Lofty. Beautiful. And not real.

At one point in the relationship, I felt compelled to take all the letters and put them in a binder, chronologically. I did so without really realizing the power of those Words. As much was done electronically, I had my letters and his responses, and I had his letters and my responses. They chronicled the rise and fall of the relationship: the excitement and newness of it all, the first trustings, the initial revelations, the deepening vulnerability, the opening of our lives to accept the other, the flirtation, the desire, the wanting, the need, the consummation, and the suffering and devastation that accompanied all of its impossible complexities and complications.

I have since buried the binder in a box under old diaries and keepsakes. I sometimes forget where it is, and when I come across it, I handle it as if the box is filled with poisonous snakes. I never want to sit and read them again. Only twice in the years since the affair ended have I unearthed the notebook and read the letters. To do so rips my heart from my chest and tears apart my soul – even now, all these years later. I simply can’t do it, and so I don’t do it.

But I keep the letters.

I hear from him now and again. His new life. His new wife. His world: so quiet, so calm. The turbulence of those years is behind us; the emotional maelstrom now nothing but memory. But, I remember. I wonder how something so powerful (and misguided), how something so real (and not real at the same time), how something so important (it was important, yes, it was very important to both of us) could simply disappear – evaporate into thin air as if it was never there in the first place.

How do these things happen? How do you promise to love someone in this life and beyond this life and then when things get complicated, you let those promises be swallowed up by fear and insecurity? How does that love simply vanish?

I submit that it doesn’t simply vanish. I submit that once discovered, love endures. I submit that nothing dies; it simply changes form. I submit that somewhere, deep down inside of him, he has his own box of letters he cannot revisit, lest it decimate him and tear at the fabric of everything he’s so carefully constructed for himself.

I submit that because I know him, because I know his heart, someday, when he least expects it, he will wake in the dark, cool hours of the morning and sit straight up in bed, his heart pounding in his throat, awash in the distinct sense that he’s made a terrible mistake, that something is horribly wrong, and that somewhere along the way, he gave up something incredibly rare and precious. He will wonder, panicked, where he is and worse, who he is; what his life is and why. He will fear these sensations and sleep will flee him, and he will not know what to do. He will swing his legs over the edge of the bed, and he will sit quietly, trying to moderate his breathing, and he will struggle. And as the light changes to blue, as morning breaks, he will feel a strong longing for something he can’t name, and he will pray that these sensations leave him as quickly as they arrive.

But, they won’t. They will haunt him.