Our Live Together, Our Lives Apart

Morning arrives on the first rays of sunlight that trickle through parted blinds before alighting my bedroom in a deep amber as it passes through a half-empty bottle of bourbon. My hand reaches out, past the vacant space beside me and silences the buzzing alarm.


Slowly my eyes open to behold the angel beside me. You're beautiful at this hour, your body wrapped only in the soft linens that adorn our bed. Each breath you take raises and lowers your breasts like ocean swells lulling some wistful sailor home, a silent chorus of beauty and wonder. Each breath you take steals mine away.


Slowly I navigate this routine morning commute, my hand fidgeting with the radio in an effort to amuse my wandering attention. Ice forms on my car's windshield today, for the heater is never warm enough to stave off the cold.


You turn over in bed, wrapping both your arms and a sea of blankets around us. "Let's stay like this today," you say. "All day?" I ask. You smile, squeezing me tighter so that our bodies melt together. "Forever Bobby."


The office hums with the glow of fluorescent lights above. A pungent aroma of cheap coffee fills the halls, strong enough to widen my eyes that stare blankly into a computer screen.


We make love for an hour, ceasing only when euphoria and exhaustion overtake us. You let me play with your hair, twirling it in my fingers and letting it fall onto the nightstand where I see a framed picture from our wedding day. We stand before each other at the altar, our friends and family gathered on either side, you in the whitest of gowns...and never a more beautiful sight have my eyes beheld.


I slice my finger on a sheet of paper in some trivial report and wince.


I toy with the wedding ring around my finger and smile.


Hours pass slowly, my time split between angry clients, impatient bosses, and deadlines that wait for no man. I am exhausted, worn down by the continual beating of a drum that demands an ever faster march, which I cannot endure.


Hours pass quickly, my time spent only with you, talking and sharing our hearts. Our attention is given only to each other and I feel exhilarated, alive, lifted ever higher by the love of a woman who asks for nothing save my devotion, which I gladly offer.


My workday is over and I relinquish my suit and tie for tennis shoes and sweatpants as I go for a run around the National Mall. The air is crisp, filled with stinging rain that batters my face and freezes it into the expressionless stare of the countless statues that adorn this city on a hill. It is cold, so very cold.


I hear them running up the stairs, giving us but a moment to reclaim our modesty before the bedroom door flies open and our children come bounding in. "Daddy, you promised me a piggyback ride," our youngest daughter exclaims, and as I hoist her onto my shoulders, our other daughter, already six now, asks you to comb her hair and remove the tangles that always seem to accompany her evening bath. We laugh, we talk, we love...for we are a family, and everything is so very warm.


The day is nearly over and I cook myself a light dinner before beginning my nightly routine of writing my second novel, a work that your memory continually attempts to invade. Whether or not I shall allow it to do so is left undetermined, the decision left solely to the wisdom and direction of my pen. But I lay down my pen this day, for the hour is late and I shall soon retire to bed.


After tucking our daughters into bed, I return to our bedroom where we once again succumb to temptation before eventually settling into our nightly custom of cuddling beneath the blankets. Our hands lace together, fingers intertwined. I play with the wedding ring that adorns your finger and say:

"I remember the moment I gave you this Ornela."

"It was the happiest of my life," you reply.

"You promised me that day that this ring would never leave your finger."

"And it never will."

We make love.


I go to bed alone.


I kiss you goodnight.


I write you this story in my journal, letting the words on a computer screen become my only voice to the woman I love.


I look deeply into your eyes and tell you that I am in love with you.


You read the words in my journal for the thousandth time, wondering why you are letting me speak to you again this night, yet secretly knowing the true reason all along.


You speak the words that set my heart aflame, for you say that you love me. You retreat into my arms, into the arms of a man who holds tight the woman he loves. And as sleep overcomes us tonight, we make our voyage into the sandman's abode together, a world where even the sweetest dreams can never equal the happiness we have found with each other.


Another day apart.


Another day together.
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Six months ago today you told me goodbye. You sent me a short e-mail saying everything was over and that you would not be writing me again. You let me go that day, or at least that is what I believed at the time. But six months later you still read my journal...you still let me tell you that I love you. Ornela, I know that you still read my journal. I have always known. And I know that because you still let me speak to you every day, you never let go...just as I have never let go of you either.


On our first night together at Harvard, I told you three simple words: "You are her". I waited my whole life to find you. I waited my whole live to tell you those words. You are the only woman who has ever heard them, the only woman who has ever seen this part of me -- the only woman I have ever fallen in love with. I knew then, just as I do today, that you are the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. If I am just another man in a long string of those you have once loved, then so be it, but you are something so much more than that to me. Everything I have told you over the past few months, every word I say, is but a poor imitation of a feeling I have for you that I know not how to express. I have given you my words, but I want more than anything else to simply give you me.


Our lives together versus apart are so very different, an essence I have tried to capture in this story. I think about what it would be like to share our lives together, holding each other, sharing our hearts, and falling more in love each day.


So much time apart -- six months, three years, and possibly the rest of our lives. I cannot fill the years with endless words, for such a task is beyond the reach of even the most prolific penman, of even the most forlorn lover. This journal is just an illusion Ornela, a desert mirage that lets you feel my love without my touch. But I am not this journal. I am a man behind the words...a man who has fallen in love with you. I have nothing left to give you save these final words:


I am in love with you Ornela, and always will be.

Memory

Like a thief in the night you come to steal away my soul. Torturous, rapacious in your appetite for all things dear, you invade my serenity without purpose or direction, fluttering through my troubled mind like a butterfly lost in flight.


You are both a trespasser and welcome guest, a continual source of deepest grief and unbridled joy. You greet me when first my eyelids part to receive the light of a new day, and you are with me still in those last moments of consciousness when the film between this world and that of dreams stretches so thin that reality surrenders to desire. That is when you draw nearest. That is when you whisper in my ear all the sweet promises of what once was, yet never again will be.


You infect me with illness, yet offer a cure that has never made me feel more alive. You break my heart, tearing it to ribbons, yet offer needle and thread to mend its pieces back together. You are everything that hurts, everything that heals. You are both enemy and friend. You are everything to me, for you are memory. And you, sweet memory, are all I have left of her.
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You told me that when I broke your heart three years ago, my memory was everywhere. My memory haunted you, just as yours haunts me today. I see your face a thousand times a day, in every beautiful woman I pass, and I think about you more often still, for you are both my first thought when I awaken each morning and the last before sleep overtakes me. I am not ashamed to admit that I still think about you so often Ornela, for to me it is the most natural thing in the world. When I remember you, when your memory fills my mind's eye, I am happy...and so I hold onto your memory, as tightly as I should have held onto you all those years ago.


I am sitting in my office in DC, writing you this poem when all manner of work that ought to be occupying my time and energy goes neglected. You are sitting in your home in Boston, reading my words to you from a diary that bridges the distance between us tonight. I am thinking about you in this moment and I wonder, if somewhere out there, you are thinking about me too.

The Man Behind the Curtain

First Letter

Dear Ornela,

I thought we would be together today, I really did. It seems foolish, I know, to suppose that you would have driven all the way down from Boston to DC just to see me this weekend, but I hoped that maybe after all this time apart your feelings for me had changed. You read my journal every day and I have always believed that you read it to feel close to me. I just want to be close to you too.

I have tried so hard this past year to be the man you always deserved, the man I should have been for you when you gave me your heart. So I wrote you letters....dozens and dozens of letters. I wrote you letters in this journal to try to show you how much I love you and that I truly am a different man than the one who told you goodbye all those years ago. I changed into a better man than who I was before...I changed for you Ornela.

Why you read my journal everyday is likely to forever remain a mystery to me. I kept hoping that you were waiting for me to say something profound, that you were waiting for me to say just the right words to open your heart and make you fall in love with me all over again, but after so many months of trying to show you how much I love you, I do not know what more I can give you. I do not know what more I can do.

Will you do something for me? Will you read an entry in my journal that I wrote over six years ago on December 10th, 2008 entitled "Tristen's Wish"? This was the first time I ever wrote about you, only three days after our first date. When I read those words that I wrote six years ago, I know without any doubt that you are the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, but if you can read those words and still feel nothing for me, then I guess it really was never meant to be.

I wish that I could look into the future and see whether or not everything we have been through together over the past year is just a difficult chapter in what will ultimately be a lifelong love story, or if this truly is the end. You know how I feel about you...you know that I love you, but I can't keep doing this forever. I can't keep giving you my heart if it is not something you want. It hurts too much.

I told you once that my love for you is unconditional, and I have never wavered in that. Ornela, I have to know...do you still have feelings for me?

Hope

"I wish that I had taken the job in Boston," I say over the phone, looking out my apartment window to see just the tip of the Washington Monument in the distance.


"So why didn't you Bobby?" my dad asks.


His voice betrays his concern. Barely a month has passed since I arrived here in DC and already I am searching for greener pastures. A few short weeks calling the District my home yet again, and I am regretting my decision more than ever.


"Well...'" I stammer, "the job in Boston would probably have been a better fit professionally and..." My voice trails off, not by conscious effort but because the memory of a face I have not seen in so long suddenly fills my mind's eye. "I should have moved to Boston because...it's just that....that...that's where...."


"That's where she lives," my dad finally interjects, finishing my thoughts with a confession that I struggle to admit.


"Yeah dad...that's where Ornela lives."


"So why didn't you take the job in Boston and move up there if you want to be with her?" he asks.


I see your face. I see you waving goodbye. "Because she doesn't want me there dad. She doesn't want me in her city...she doesn't want me in her life."


"I see," he says. For several moments he says nothing more, letting the silence of our phone call pass the somber moments before adding, "You never know Bobby. Life has a funny way of working things out for the best when you least expect it. Maybe the reason you two needed to be apart for so long was to realize just how special what you had really was. You and Ornela might end up together after all. Never give up hope."


Our phone call ends and I look back out my window to see the full moon hanging in the barren night sky, alighting the roads north that lead all the way to Boston, all the way to a girl who I think about even now...and miss very much.


Ornela, four months ago when you kissed me in your car at Logan airport, you gave me the most precious of gifts...hope. Even though we were saying goodbye, I thought that we would only be apart for perhaps a month or two before our feelings for one another led us to start talking again and eventually reconcile. I thought that before winter had passed, we would share at least one more night shared together in Boston and that, perhaps, you would even ask me to move to the city to be with you. Never did I imagine that after all this time we would still be apart, for I have always thought that we would eventually be together. Even after I told you goodbye three years ago, deep down I still believed that our story was not really over, that somehow we would find each other again and never let go. I believed that, despite everything, we would make things work...we would end up together, but for the first time in my life I am beginning to lose hope.


Do you want me to stop Ornela? I know that you still read my journal...I have always known that -- it is the reason I believed you still had feelings for me, and the reason I believed we would someday be together again. But now I no longer know what to believe. Do you want me to stop writing my letters to you? Do you want me to let you go? All I want is to try, just one last time, to have a real relationship with you. I just want to hold you in your bed, talk to you about what is going on in your life, and fall asleep in each other's arms...and I want to do these things every day. That is all I have really wanted since the moment I sent you my first letter over a year ago.


I care about you so much Ornela, more than you will probably ever truly understand, and I just want for us to be a part of each other's lives again.



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In my last letter I told you that I would not do this again, but I would like to invite you to my home in DC this weekend. Once before, in April 2011, you traveled from Boston to DC to visit me for just one night. We spent all night in that hotel bedroom talking and holding each other close. Four years have passed since we saw each other in DC. Four months have passed since we saw each other at all. Ornela, can we see each other this weekend?

Snow

It's snowing. A million tiny flakes, each unique and guided by winter's invisible hand, fall gently upon the ground. Once so full of color, of green grass and autumn leaves, of robins red as burning coals and lilies blue as the deepest waters, the world falls silent beneath an icy blanket. The snows cover all. The snows erase all. The snows fall in Boston tonight, just as they did when I held you by your bedroom window all those years ago.

"Look Ornela, it's snowing," I said as my hands wrapped firmly around your waist and held you closely from behind. We stared out of your bedroom window, our eyes transfixed by the sea of white before us.

"It's beautiful," you whispered, letting your hands rest atop mine as our fingers intertwined. You turned around. We kissed. And the snows froze within our minds a moment in time, a moment I write of now, a moment I hope you remember with fondness.

When last we said goodbye some four months ago, never did I expect to see the snows fall again without you. Never did I expect winter to arrive so cold, or last so long, a winter that is bitterest because we are apart. To warm my heart this winter I have reached out to you numerous times, sometimes by text, other times through my letters, asking to see you again. My invitations first were declined, now they go ignored, so I will stop extending them. I will stop asking if I can call you or if we can see each other again. I will stop asking you to let me take you on a first date again, or go for a walk around Boston Common Park or The National Mall. I will stop asking you to do these things because I do not want you to spend time with me simply because you feel obligated to. Instead, I want you to spend time with me because you actually want to. I want our time together to be something that we both look forward to, that we both eagerly await. Every time we ever saw each other, from our first date at that Italian restaurant in Fairfax until that day three years ago when you wrapped your arms around me and greeted me at Logan Airport, you bore the most radiant smile that I have ever seen shine upon any woman's face. That's how I knew...that's how I always knew you loved me. But when you saw me again for the first time in three years on that cold October day at Harvard, no smile graced your face. Instead you appeared anxious, upset even, at my arrival. I would have given anything to see you smile in that moment, yet your face told me that my gifts, let alone my presence, were no longer welcomed.

I wish I had more to give you. I wish I knew what more I can do to make you happy. After so much time apart, I thought that my feelings for you would have died by now, but they have not. My feelings for you are just as strong now as they were a week ago, a month ago...they are just as strong as when I held you in bed on our last night together. Ornela, if my feelings for you have not died by now, they probably never will. I do not know why I still have feelings for you. I do not know why I cannot simply let you go and be free of you, the way you are obviously free of me. I suppose that was your intention of making me promise to try to find love with another woman. Though you likely have thought otherwise based on the content of my letters, I truly have kept my promise to you. In the four months that we have been apart, I have dated several women, all very briefly, in an attempt to honor my word to you. I am not doing this for me...I am doing this for you. I am doing this because you made me make a promise, but truthfully every date I have been on these past four months, every woman's hand that I have held, has been under false pretenses. I am not with them because I want to be; I am with them out of obligation to you. I do not see their smiling faces across the dinner table from me in some downtown DC restaurant...I see yours. It hurts to do this, but I am trying so hard to keep my promise to you Ornela, my only real strength coming from the hope that one day you will keep your promise too.

On Valentine's Day I sent you a text message that I knew you would not respond to. I did not send you my message to try to force you into a conversation that you did not want to have, but instead simply to let you know that I was thinking about you on that special day and that I still care very deeply for you.

What more can I give you Ornela? If you asked me to, I would drive all the way to Boston tonight, through the snow and ice, just to see you. The snows fall heavy in DC, just as they do in Boston. It is very cold tonight, and I miss you.

(I took this photo from atop the Bunker Hill Monument when I visited you three years ago. You stood beside me as we overlooked downtown Boston covered in snow -- beautiful, peaceful, a memory I will cherish always.)

Just to See You Again

"I'll see you again Ornela...I know I will."

These were the last words I spoke to you on that brisk Autumn day four and a half months ago. I stepped out of your car and walked to the airport terminal, wondering if you were watching me leave or had already driven away. I paused, looked back, and saw you there...waving goodbye. Everything within me wanted to walk back to your car; everything within me wanted to beg you to ask me to stay with you in Boston, to tell you that if you only asked those simple words I would never leave you again. Yet I kept walking, and once I arrived in the terminal I waited there for what seemed like an eternity...waiting, waiting, waiting for you to come running through those airport doors to find me and ask me to stay. But you never came, and so with a heavy heart I boarded my plane that day and left, uncertain if my last words to you would ever come true.

That day in the airport, I really did think that you would come find me. I really did think that you would stop me from boarding the plane and ask me to stay. Now, all this time later, I reached out to you again on Valentine's Day to ask if I could call you. I'm not sure how I expected you to respond, or even if I thought you would. After so much time apart, I hoped that maybe we could just talk, not about anything serious but instead about what has been going on in each other's lives. I suppose I just felt a bit like I did that day in the airport...I just wanted to talk to you again.

My reason for telling you this is not to induce sympathy or try to guide your behavior down a path you are unwilling to walk. My reason for writing these words is twofold: First, despite all the letters that I have written to you over the past year in this journal, this medium is simply that...a journal. This is my diary. This is where I record my innermost thoughts because it is cathartic and writing helps me cope with the deep and passionate feelings I have for you Ornela. Yet I write for another reason too. I write because this is the window through which you are able to witness my feelings for you; this is the lens through which you have chosen to see who I really am. But this lens is like a two way mirror, such that you can always look into my heart without ever having to open yours. This journal brings us close, yet always forms a wall between us. Ornela, you understand me very well through reading my words to you in this journal...but I want to understand you too. I want to know you, the real you, on the deepest level two people can experience. I want to listen as you tell me about all of your dreams for the future, all of your regrets from the past, all of your daily struggles and triumphs, and all of the little quirks that make you the amazingly unique person that you are. I just want to know you Ornela...I just want to share our lives with each other.

You have seen a side of me that no one else ever has, a side that even I did not know existed before I met you. Whenever I used to hear stories of people falling in love and the irrational things that love made them do, I scoffed at their behavior and wondered at how anyone could let such strong emotions override their better judgment. But then I met you. Then I fell in love with you. I do not know if you have ever fallen in love with anyone besides me Ornela, but you are the only woman I have ever fallen in love with, and it has been difficult for me to simply let that go. Maybe that is because I know how rare it is to find someone you truly care about, someone you would do anything for, someone who cares about you just as much and is willing to move mountains simply to see you smile. That is how I feel about you...that is how I hope, deep down, you still feel about me too.

Maybe I should have moved to Boston for that job with Starbucks, but the only reason I did not was because I thought that you did not want me there. Would things between us be different if I had chosen to move to Boston rather than DC? Would you have let me take you on a first date again, let me hold your hand as we walked through Boston Common Park in the snow. Would you have invited me back to your apartment where we would spend all night talking before falling asleep in each other's arms. If I had moved to Boston, would we be together right now? I don't know, but even now I still have hope that you will ask me to see you in Boston again. If you ask, I will come.

I don't know what else to do Ornela. I don't know what else to say that hasn't already been said or what more I can give you. You know so much about me through reading my letters, yet there is so much about you I still don't understand, why you are still reading my journal most of all. What do you get out of reading my journal? Are these letters merely entertainment to you, or something more? And who am I to you Ornela? Am I simply some relic from your past, one of many suitors who have vied for your love and attention over the years? Or was what we had different, an uncommon bond that was unlike anything either of us has ever experienced with anyone else...a relationship that was special in a way that we both intuitively recognize?

I write these letters because you read them. When you are ready, I hope that you will ask me to put down my pen and say my words to you in real life.

Ornela, can we take things slow this time? Can we take our time to rebuild the trust and intimacy we once shared? May I please give you a call just to talk...or if you'd like, to maybe even play a game of Battleship or two, just for old time's sake ;-)