Simon.

It’s too much, sometimes. All of this. This amazing day of filtered, glittering sunshine. This shelf of books to ingest and grow from. This life full –so so full – of hope and bloom and glorious discontent. This poor, stupid, stretched-out heart of mine crammed full of the love of you. You are such a beautiful place, Simon. You are a warm, familiar landscape. You are a heart-stopping panorama view. You are an adventure on the next page; an afternoon drive through greening hills soaked in wonder and heavy with light. Simon. Such a thing is this life. How we always have so much of what we don’t want, and never enough of what we do. I suppose though, if somehow everything we wanted most fell neatly into our laps, wrapped in silver paper and tied with careless abandon, we would soon enough come to find those things dull and unimportant, and begin to long for something new. For what is man if not inconstant. An everchanging melody, never content with the verse it is on, but constantly moving through choruses and up and down transitions, leaping through narratives like badly transcribed gazelles.  Ah, these metaphors. But this is how things are with me, well you know. Flashing images pressing one hard upon the other in my restless brain. And I strive to catch them as I can. And here, I can afford to be extravagant. For no one will see these pages. Least of all, you. But the laws of reason demand that there be some kind of outlet for all of this. And I can’t seem to bring myself to write in a journal. It seems either too stuffy, and that I must make it some kind of ledgered record of the hideously mundane events of quotidianae; or, even worse; sickeningly egotistical, overflowing with every last emotion, and written in bubbly, pre-teen letters, possibly in purple ink, with all of the I’s dotted with little hearts. And so, as I can’t write that way, and because I like to pretend (I am ever so much bolder in my imagination) that I will actually say these things to you, these shall be letters. Letters to you, Simon. The boy who I, so long ago, tripped over and fell smack into love with, a fall from which I have not been able to rise. This may be because I haven’t the will to try… it’s hard to say. Sometimes I’m convinced that you’re not really anything that special. That everything I love about you is just my own imagination coloring in all the unknowns. And that loving you this way is folly. And then we speak. Or I see you somewhere, in some completely commonplace activity, and you shine, as you do, and then I know that it’s you. That you’re the one. And it doesn’t matter whether or not we can be together as others are. That it doesn’t matter even, if you know all of this, or if you feel anything similar for me… that none of this matters because none of it can be helped. And so, then, for the sole purpose of the unburdening of a too-full heart, I’m writing you. Words you’ll never read. Which gives me license to overindulge. Just a bit. Read gently, then, as you don’t read these words. With some sympathy, and whatever understanding you can muster, dear Simon who does not hold these pages in your hand. It’s all for you.