Dearest Tina,

            I watched your lungs expand then contract. Filling with air as you quietly napped. Trees outside rustled. Indian summer was upon us the skin on our bones sticky, sweet. A roller coaster turns upside down as voices scream into oblivion. I am in carnival and it isn’t clear, whether or not you are standing there.

             Every invitation received becomes the extinction of memories shared. The moon glows above, a sliver of light, palpable. How often have you left me breathless? Mirror images become inflections of my heart. See where the light bends? Find me there, waiting. Snow covers our laughter. Do you laugh at the ruins we have created? Of course not, your heart is gentle, kind, everything.

             At the doctors office women wait one by one to create new life. Though death becomes a friend, a familiarity we are unfortunate enough to share. There’s a couple in front of me. It’s simple. He holds her hand gentle though in the blink of a moment and the furrow of a brow his energy changes. Perhaps she has held his hand to close.  I see now that he has not held her close enough; I have made the same mistakes.

            It’s harvest time in our city. Girls in pretty dresses twirl in twilight, the glimmer shown on their warm bodies. This is the city that introduced me to Love, to you. Harvest creates frenzy. Frenzy creates chaos. Chaos becomes the compulsion to create meaning.

The time you breathe becomes the time that meaning turns to you and I as one, as always and forever.

            Love is fluid like the ocean whose waves tumble the sand beneath, creating new dreams. The extinction of my feelings was never the goal. Though I, strangely, find myself there wanting and waiting for a certain heart, yours. 

 Patiently yours,

 Bette