A Lantern Must Be Alternatively Covered and Unvovered In Order To Say Anything Across Time And Space

Dear K,

I don't think you need to change anything about yourself except how much you like yourself. I've been telling you for years that you're too harsh on yourself by not just half but whole. You say you're a monster, you berate yourself for the things you've done that anybody would do. Dear K, if you are a monster then we are all Draculas and Wolfmen and Frankensteins. You're one of the good ones, one of the dear hearts, one of the true believers. You hold a lantern in the darkness. You hold love in your heart and water it secretly and outside of this you've built a shell of pessimism, but I am not so blind as that. I can see right through this flimsy little shell that you've built. I see through to your heart I see the love that you are so desperate to give away. I see the fires you keep banked. I see their warmth. I know that you are just waiting for the signal, waiting for the horn to sound, and that secret fire of yours will rage through your whole body. You'll burn in it. I know this, because I can see my own kind, the kind that loves love. The kind that throws themselves on the train tracks of fate. The kind that will say they love somebody two months in, and mean it, or if they don't say it they will think it and mean it. We are the dear hearts. We are the lighters of lamps. We are the audience and the author. We are the ones who spin this world of broken dreams around our impossible schemes to scale the heights of loves lofty cliffs and so often fall to the rocks below and then we see a distant glimmer of hope and start the climb over and over again. Oh dear heart I have faith in you. I have placed all my worldly faith in you. I believe you will be happier than you ever thought possible and still happier than I could ever dream for you. I believe that you will meet someone who likes coffee just as black as you. Someone who pushes puzzles pieces together just the way you do. But this tall and dark and handsome man, with a chin to write home about and coal black eyes that make you think of railroad tunnels and Raven black hair, this man will make you think of chess in the night and love in the morning and he will come to you and how to you and make you his and he yours and love will rain down upon you like an August thunderstorm. There will be a trumpet sounding in the hills, and dogs barking in the street and the clock towers will sing out your new love. I know this to be true, for one of the gifts that God gives the dear hearted is prophecy. Our prophecies come truer than most and hardly ever at all but, it's a lot like tilting your head and squinting an eye or better still one of those pictures where you have to let your eyes unfocus and then you see the sailboat, it is how you look at it. I believe in you and your future, and there is sunshine ahead for you, but first storm clouds and strong winds, because your boat needs to be blown in the right direction, because God and Nature abhor straight lines.

As for me. I will love again. I know I will. I still dream about her though. This week I've been out in the wilderness that she fled to. I've been with my family, and I've thought about her. I have my regrets and my bitterness, but now I am more me than I was then. I have regained myself. I don't think she had taken my sense of self, or if I threw it away, but I had lost it and now I've got myself back and that I think is a choice I would make a thousand times and one. But still, the barbs are there and they are deep.

Oh well. We must all cry and suffer and scream and then we will be washed in the light of love and made clean, in this life or the next or the one after and if we're lucky we can catch glimpses of how big the world is and how small we are and that makes our pain less.

I love you, I bless you, I hope all things for you,

Dear heart,

K