Love Letters
I met the man of my dreams on my parents’ front porch at nineteen – too young to know true love and too green to appreciate the bittersweet beauty in having your heart broken when love was gone three years later. For two years, I sat enraptured in the presence of this creature, larger than life – the same man who stood before me eleven years later, quite a bit smaller than I had first imagined him to be. Life takes away the grandiosity leaving us with our perceptions irrevocably altered, and most often not to our liking. We live through it, though, keeping some small part of the genuine wonder in that place in our hearts that stays forever young. When we put others on pedestals, they have no place to go but down. Life Lesson Number One.
I’m six miles out of town by now, an eternity away and my journey only barely begun. My destination is always home, but I know that when I arrive there later, a falseness will encompass me and I will be homeless. Home is where the heart is. I wonder where that leaves me.
When I was younger, I would often write love letters for my friends. My “way with words” won the hearts of many young men, articulating so well not what my friends were feeling, but the truth inside me that had to come out. They reaped the benefits of my having so eloquently stated what is we all wanted: that special person in our lives to share the struggle, someone in our corner when it seemed no one else would stand there with us. We all had no idea then what we were soon to be up against. I never felt guilty for impersonating my friends’ affection; it was an energy we all shared and I knew then that in sending it out, even if only for someone else, I received a little bit of it back. Vicarious requited love – good work if you can get it when the real thing isn’t readily available. Remembering the letters, I change the station to catch the end of a desperate dedication to someone out there who probably isn’t even listening. I want to write love letters to them all.
I take the next exit for my second stop. Convenience stores late at night break my heart. There are so many people out there who are
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