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.
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