WRITTEN FOR ME ( thomas shelby )

013 ━ His Stampless Letter ..

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" His Stampless Letter "

HELLO DARLING,

          It is strange to be writing to you despite knowing very little of you whereabouts, too little to even hope that this letter will ever be sent through post to wherever life has taken you. It is night for me and I confess I have just awakened from a dream, which is the subject of my current restlessness that I hope, by learning something from you, I will cure through writing this.

Months have passed since your last letter and I cannot even say that I blame you for not writing to me anymore. I could go ahead and blame every single formality that has delayed your letters, but at the end of the day, I have failed to answer when you called for me, and that is a guilt I shall carry to my grave. It is a guilt that I have carried to this anniversary of a year and a half since you've left Birmingham; most my nights since your departure have been spent too drunk on various substances to have a knowledge of myself or too awake to rise up in the morning not detesting the world you've abandoned me into.

But tonight was different. Tonight, I had a beautiful dream. And I'll tell you all about it, because you were part of it.

Since you left, my dreams have been horrendous reminders that I might have taken you for granted while you were near. All sorts of regrets I never had before haunted me: I did not memorize the exact shade of your hair, nor the color of your eyes. I recalled very faintly the details about you that have charmed me since the Cheltenham Races into falling in love, but tonight, I remembered everything in such detail that I could have sworn it wasn't a dream at all.

You smelled of lilac, because now I know how lilacs smell, or perhaps because I imagine you've kept the gift from you Japanese friend and you now wear it as often as possible so that you always feel at home. A selfish part of me wished for a while that I had been the one to gift you that perfume, but now I find peace at least in knowing you have it, regardless of who gave it to you.

There's so much I want to tell you, that even on paper, writing slowly and as tidy as I ever had, I am bound to the weakness of thoughts derailing themselves like branches off of a tree's trunk.

I digress, we were speaking of the dream.

When I opened my eyes to this dream, blue skies and a bright sun blinded me entirely. Your laughter was somewhere close to my heart and I grew aware gradually that we were laying in the grass together. A gentle breeze tickled the hairs of grass onto my left earlobe and it was then that you sighed away into a giggle whatever had brought you joy and you raised up, blocking the great luminescence above. The wind travelled through your hair and you let it loose for the day, so the sun behind you fooled me to believe a blanket of fire had been cast above me, one underneath which I would happily be burned alive.

Your little upturned nose, the softness of your smile, the pure green of your eyes, it all embraced me into a warmth I oftentimes reassemble only to the first bite from bread fresh out of the oven, stolen by my own hands during the brightest days of boyhood, where worry was sparse and everything was easier to take as it comes. I swear I could feel your touch, caressing the side of my face, down to my jaw and then grabbing my chin. I knew you wanted to say something, but neither of us could speak, so we just allowed the wind to murmur around us for a while.

That's how dreams go, they are blurs of sequences that only a waking mind can make sense out of, but this time, everything was slow and natural, a mirror to how it would have gone in real life; save for our silence, I suppose.