Letters to a Dead Man

I can’t believe I am writing a letter to a dead man. It’s crazy. It’s not like I really knew you. I loved you though…all those years ago when we were young and stupid and hot like old fashioned summer.

But like old fashioned summers things cooled as we grew older and more sensible, each with an eye on the future.

It’s more than thirty years since I saw you; a chance meeting in town. I’d got off the bus and almost fell into your arms. We stood awkwardly outside the Town Hall, the familiar intimacy of old lovers battling with the distance time had put between us. You stripped me of my hospital uniform with one glance and as I started to melt beneath your chocolate gaze, you said something stupid and the spell was broken. That was the last time…

Over the years I have thought of you; not often or long, but fleetingly. You belonged in my childhood, right there at the end of my innocence, which I gifted to you many lifetimes ago. Whenever you crossed my mind you were a shadow; young and long of limb with warm skin and hot breath. In my grown up world you no longer had substance. You were a distant dream that never became real.

And then some thirty years on, I open an email from an old friend which takes me back and I find myself looking at your smiling face. I don’t immediately recognise you, but something in my soul connects to the smile in your eyes…

And the words around the photograph tell of stupidity and waste and they carve a path that hurts deep down inside. I find myself needing to tell people you are dead. I tell people who never knew you and they nod politely but they don’t get it. I tell my husband and he gives me that look – the one that says I love you crazy lady – but he doesn’t look at the screen; he refuses to see your smile.

Your widow says such lovely things about you in the paper and I get the urge to reach out to her. I decide I will write her a letter. I sit and I stare at the blank page. What do I say? I have no words.

I loved you but I didn’t know you. I never knew the man you became; the family man sitting in the sunshine smiling sweetly at someone who wasn’t me. I don’t know your wife. I never even knew her name until I saw it in the paper. I can’t write to your wife, I can’t tell her how sorry I am her husband is dead and by the way he was my first love…oh and although I didn’t give him a thought in years, now he is dead I can’t get him out of my mind. No I can’t write those things to your wife….

So instead I sit here in the dark, in the middle of the night, sleepless, writing letters to a dead man.