My dear friend,
I worry sometimes that all of our talks mean more to me than to you, that the words I remember leaving my lips have left all memory, that to you and all the world they were never uttered, that I did not risk saying them and only thought them - mulling them over with the nasty conversationalist in my head and caving to the doubt that they were not worth saying, that my opinions, without roots, lack the depth to be explained, that who I am to you is a weak reed bending with the lightest touch.
I fear that my deep sincerity never reached you, that only the shallow ironies - the quips that fail and instead reveal the pit of my insecurity - made impact, Can any attempt at communication tell you how much you mean to me? How in moments with you every hope I have for companionship appears, how my heart lifts and tenses in clarity and I feel I have arrived at some heaven-on-earth exchange of alike souls, a brief framed view of completeness, of platonic unity, sudden sacrifice of ego in favour of a pure relief that could never marry vain self, then consumed, with crashing humiliation, self-reflection and paradise lost when my words fumble, fail again and your eyes glint without recognition, without same feeling.
I am in states, worrying, thinking that we were never as I thought and that it is only me worrying, grieving, only me in all the world deluded to think that I have you with me, suffering these moments, of which I hope are not sane, where I do not have any bond, where I am truly alone, playing solitaire at the table and you do not enjoy my jests, you do not like the timing and timbre of my laugh, you cannot bear my voice and what I say, when I speak, I do interrupt, how I speak, is without tact, and if you share, I only take. Surely the seeds fell on barren soil - every effort to send you the real and the tangible to show my understanding of you, every message to relay your value and recount our shared history, our mythology that justifies the sovereignty of our care for each other.
I watch myself as I fail to reach for you, I am weighed according to some alien feeling, whose voice is it denying my right to comfort in your presence? Declaring me awkward and wrong, that no - I was never so close to you, so free with you and without self-perception.
I worry that it has all come to nothing and no amount of pushing uphill, up against the howling would allow me the title 'friend'. I must be the despised one, always fighting this accusation that you never spoke once to me. You call me companion and you mean it. I know you mean it and we share an indescribable quality that breeds goodwill towards the other, inspiring virtue and growth in a never ending effort to entwine our two trees and bear fruit that show the produce of our tête-à-têtes and mutual challenges. How I look forward to the development of our loves and how I hope our endeavours come to something. How I hope my grip does not loosen, that you never slip from me, that my clasp never crushes, never suffocates what is after all an eternally fragile stem, this forever green quest for friendship.
Still, I worry that it has all come to nothing and that I am a stranger in your midst, a beggar at your front door denied the sight, the warmth and wealth of your interior, that I am a dirty thief feigning beauty and bounty when in fact ugly and empty, having no glut to offer you, I, a beggar prostrated, wet in tears from my mourning for what I fail to offer you, I will labour forever for you, trying to deliver a pale shadow of who I yearn to be in your life as long as you are here.
You, my dear friend, my words reach to you across the canopy, may I be with you as far as you go and when you leave, may we travel as seeds on the same breeze, dancing together, in and out, over and under, landing close, always.
