Chapter Text
I.
Dear Lance,
you are five feet away from me as I’m writing this, farway in the land of sleep, and somehow that’s both too far and too close for me to handle. If we lived in a universe built just to make me happy, I would be right next to you. Our dorm would only have one bed–– our bed––and we would would wrap around each other like two vines. There would be no beginning, no ending, just us. Magical.
But it isn’t and that’s okay. Or at least it will be a bit more okay after I’m done with this letter, after I have captured all of my feelings on paper so that I can finally seal them away. Over the last few weeks they have begun to exceed my heart’s capacity. They, my feelings for you, have filled my heart to the brim and now the seams are straining. Think of it like piece of paper with your name all over it. I have filled the lines and the margins and have written between the lines too. And yet, your name is the only thing that comes to mind when I pick up a pen.
So this why I’m writing this, so that I can then get a new notebook to fill with other things and not just feelings that I have caught even though you haven’t thrown any. It’s not like you’re gonna read this anyway, so that’s a plus.
I hope that I will finally have the brainspace to focus on anything but you after this. Do you know how distracting you are? No, seriously, it’s becoming a problem. My eyes are drawn to you whenever you enter a room as if I were a sunflower and you were brighter than the sun itself. Wherever you go, I turn with you.
At first, I thought it was simply because you were pretty––prettier than anyone had the right to be––with your golden brown curls, freckles like stars, eyes like the sky or the sea and dimples I only just discovered last week. That was way back when the only thing we knew how to do was annoy each other and the only thing we had for one another were cutting remarks.
Oh, how the times have changed.
Don’t get me wrong my eyes are still drawn to you and your face is too much for me even on good days but now there is more. Pretty turned into beautiful, inside out. You’re now a friend, the most unexpected and the most sincere. I know that I can now allow myself to fall because you will be there to catch me. I can allow myself to be vulnerable because you can stand in as my armour if am too weak to develop my own.
You’re so giving and I don’t know if I am able to give all that back to you. You deserve the every star in the sky, deserve to call all the galaxies and nebulae your own but even if I were to pluck them from the sky one by one, it still wouldn’t be enough.
But I hope you stick around anyway. Because I my life would lose colour and vibrancy if you don’t.
You’re slowly stirring now, so I must come to an end. The day is starting and I am excited to spend it with you.
Love,
Keith
II.
Dear Lance,
I thought I could live without writing one of these again, that this… whatever this is, would get better. But it got worse, so, so much worse. Because freeing up my heart just led up to you filling it again. My newly acquired brainspace was only used to learn new things about you or relearn older things it had already come to adore before.
But that isn’t even the worst of it. No, not by far. I have a come to realise a truth I cannot deny, a truth that had been inevitable from day one even if I didn’t want to accept it:
I love you.
And even though I know that you don’t love me back, even though I know that there will never be something like that between us, that I’m setting myself up for pain and heartache, I can’t help it. It’s as though my heart is built with the sole purpose of loving you and never stopping.
But then again I can’t blame it, you’re perfect! You make me see the sun even when the skies are grey and you bring me joy in its purest form. You make even the longest days bearable and make me smile in ways I least expect it. You’re this force of nature, this bigger than life personality, bright and vibrant.
I just… can’t help it.
You make me wish and want and crave. To be part of your life permanently, to be another puzzle piece in the grand picture of your happiness. But it’s not my place to be and loving you, truly loving you, means accepting that. Accepting that your happiness is more important than any of those things I wish for.
It isn’t easy, God knows it isn’t, but one day it hopefully will be.
Until then, I’ll remain caught the web that is my love you,
Keith
III.
Dear Lance,
I should probably just tell you this in person but there is so much happiness inside my body I fear I wouldn’t be able to string a coherent sentence together, let alone say it. Not when you’re looking at me like you always do, like I am the secret to your happiness, like you are the lucky one in this relationship.
You aren’t by the way, not by a long shot. Now that I know what it feels like to be held by you, loved by you, to wake with your body curled around mine––there is now way that you are the lucky one out of the two of us. You just make my life so much better. Sleep comes more easily now, knowing that you will be the first thing I’ll wake up to. Not that I need dreams anymore, now that reality surpasses them all. You make my life better in ways that you can’t even imagine. You see the good in me and continue to see when I’m too caught up in the bad to notice.
I love the way your eyes light up when you see someone walk their dogs, how you smile at babies in the grocery store and make face at them until they smile back, the way your hand fits inside mine, the way your fingers feel against my skin. I love the way how one of your kisses can break me into pieces and put me right back together again, love the way your hands learn and relearn my shape when we fall into bed at night and the way you let my hands do the same.
But above all, you make me see the world differently, make the world better by simply being in it. Everything that was harsh and grim, now holds more colour, every sharp edge is now softer, rounded. And this feels like the kind of thing that would last, too, a thing I can allow myself to get used to for once.
I wish for this feeling to never end.
Yours,
Keith.
IV.
Dear Lance,
there has been a question sitting the back of my throat, one as inevitable as the sun rising in the east, and yet, I can’t bring myself to ask it. it gets louder every time you smile at me, every time your fingers weave through mine, every time we share a kiss that then grows into a couple more.
Do you want to marry me? Writing it is so easy, almost too easy, as though the words were nothing more than a string of letters in an order completely arbitrary. But each time I open my mouth, my voice fails me. The words refuse to come out and the question in my mind quiets down like the tides pulling away from the shore. Then you smile at me, because you caught me staring again, or because I said something funny, or just because you felt like making my chest expand with love.
We just got back from visiting your family last week and there was this one moment, that happens about as frequently as a blue moon falling on a Tuesday: Your house, save for us, was completely empty. Somehow everyone had something else to tend to and for an hour there was no one but us. It was then, when I couldn’t help the daydreaming, the wishful thinking. You were standing in the kitchen, stirring the soup your Grandmother refuses to give me the recipe of and for that moment, I could pretend that this was our house, our home.
A home for the family that we were going to built together and Lance… I startled myself with how much I wanted it, how much I craved that future. For the first time in a while, the thought of the future doesn’t scare me anymore, doesn’t fill me with dread. I am excited, filled to the brim with restlessness and impatience. Because the future can’t be daunting with you at my side.
But I still have to ask first, don’t I? Still have to gather all my courage and ask the one question to make our future possible.
I am scared, am absolutely terrified, but I’ll do it anyway, because I can’t help it, because my longing for the future we could have together drowns out enough my fears to make the rest of them bearable, because you are so, so worth it.
I’ll ask you soon, please say yes.
Yours for hopefully a lifetime,
Keith.
Dear Lance,
tomorrow is our wedding day and I still can’t quite believe it. You’re currently in the shower, have been for twenty minutes already, but that’s no surprise, we both know how much you love your showers. I can see our suits from where I’m sitting, well… at least I can see my suit from where I’m sitting. You still refuse to tell me what yours looks like and I’ve given up on asking at this point.
But yeah, if everything goes according to plan, this will be last letter I’ll write and if if things go absolutely perfect, I’m currently sitting across from you as you’re reading this. Our wedding will have happened, we will have stolen ourselves away to find a bit of peace and quiet, the first one we’ll share as husbands. (Please, ignore the shakiness in my handwriting here, it’s just too surreal, even now.) You have probably given me your gift by now and it will be the second best thing that has happened to me today. (Can you guess the best thing?)
We’re married now and you can’t imagine how happy I am that I get to have this, that we get to share this. We have laid the foundation for the best of our years. God, you can’t imagine how many things I want to do, want us to experience. Together, as we should always be.
Lance, I love you.
You have made my life so much better, you’ve brought me so much joy and happiness that I can barely contain it. I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow, tangled in the sheets together, to share our first cup of coffee and to have you roast me for drowning mine in sugar. It would an ordinary morning, yes, but… with us as a pair of husbands. It would mark the beginning for a future as bright as the stars themselves, filled with love and laughter.
It would mark the beginning of our future––together––and I can’t wait to see it.
Yours, forever and always,
Keith