Dear Past Love, Letter #3

Dear Past Love,

Reach in and syphon more of me, like I’m an endless well filled with the comforts to relieve your ailments. Make me believe in the healing rays of my soul, that they are emitted bright enough to mend the pieces of you that someone-else broke. Let me love you with all my heart, as though it is the only purpose of my being. And let me lick my own wounds when I fall down, because you’re busy tracing the scars of your past bruises. Touch my palm and search wildly in my eyes, for some hope that I choose to let my body warm yours- the greatest source of your comfort, like a euphoric distraction from your woes. Let me love you the only way I know how, because it is the only way I’ve ever been loved by those I love. And I love you so much.

I can feel your body heat in sync with mine, but your eyes don’t hold the lust I’ve grown accustomed to. It instead holds the diluted intensity of want, somehow emanating the thought that my mind...soul...body are not obligated to you. It’s as though your eyes are calling to me, yet not pleading for an anchor to your sanity. They're just begging me to love you....and I don’t know how to scream that I already do, without giving you bits and pieces of myself that I need to survive. And your eyes don’t seem willing to accept that sacrifice.

Maybe a simple ‘I love you’ would give you the affirmation you need, but I don’t know how to say those words to you. I’ve never had to say them before. But I want to. I can feel them forming at the base of my throat. I would ask you to be patient, I would ask you to wait for that lump to be transformed into words. I would seek comfort in knowing that someone is waiting when my heart is ready to share in a three-dimensional type of love. But that would be unfair. You shouldn’t lose yourself waiting at a standstill. Being the martyr may seem filled with nobility, until you begin to hate the person you were trying to save. Until you become a vessel used and rarely replenished...hoping that someone else will come along who is willing to be tarnished in your revival.

And I wish you a life of absent of tarnish.

Love you forever,

Kleema Mac