Work Text:
My love,
I miss you. Now, more than ever, it would seem.
Jacob is lovely.
He’s got black hair, slightly wavy, and a soft smile. He’s lithe, I suppose, and gentle. He’s really sweet. You’d probably both hate and love him. You’d mock him for being too nice, but I think you two could compete for being the most sarcastic people ever, if you pushed him.
He’s generous. He works with me at the shelter — the kids love him. They love him so much they’ve stopped asking me about you. I’m not sure yet how I feel about that. He dotes on me. I sometimes catch him looking at his phone with a huge smile when I message him, I see him scratching David behind the ear and sneaking him a treat. He brings me breakfast in bed and wakes me up with a kiss every day he can. He gives himself to me.
I think, in time, I could grow to love him. Not in the same way I love you, but enough to see a future with him — a future in which I am happy, just as you wished.
"if i could spread it out on my desk, i'd find the corner of your mouth where it pinches with my fingers, and i'd smooth it away and you'd be marked with the names of saints like all the old maps. i get the nomenclature now - saints' names belong to miracles. give yourself away sometimes, sweetheart. there's so much of you."
I’m giving myself away. I can only hope that wherever you are, whatever you are, you are — above all — proud of me.
I dream of you still, but those nights are now few and far between, interspaced and entwined with dreams of a new future. I will always want our future more than any other; one where we grow old together, sitting on our front porch and talking about our children and their children, so on and so forth.
All this to say, I suppose, that I want you to know I’m not replacing you. You are irreplaceable, unique, entirely your own design. I could never even dream of allowing someone to take your space, or the space you carved out in my heart. Instead, as I grew, I made more space for new love. The love of June, Nora, Pez, Bea. Jacob.
I spend Thanksgiving with your family every year. This year they even invited Jacob. It was a lovely meal — we talked about you some, and him some, and me some. It was all so, so perfect. I haven’t felt this happy since you left. Jacob wasn’t calm, to begin with. He worried that that was too much. That they’d think I'd gotten rid of you for good, that you were never important. But I knew that you’d want him to go with me. You’re good like that.
You are Good.
You are so good. Even now, when you are not here, you are still guiding me. Teaching me to grow, to change, to be better, and I will never have the right words or enough time to thank you enough for that. You are more Good than anyone really deserves. You are life and fire and passion and noise and peace and quiet and calm. You are everything plentiful and good, all rolled into one.
You are those things, even if you are not here.
You will forever live on.
I have dedicated a library in the shelter to you, your speeches play in Law School classrooms, you have books and paintings and poems, all in your name. All in your memory.Everything I do, I do for you.
Sometimes, when Jacob is asleep and I’m counting rings of paint on the ceiling, I drift away. Perhaps to another timeline, another era, another plane of existence — who knows where we go when we fall asleep? Wherever it is, you are there. Is it really you, or am I just imagining things? I like to believe it’s you.
Don’t hate me. If there’s one thing I could never bear the thought of, it is you hating me again. Nothing I ever do is to hurt you — you mean too much to me, I’d give this all up in a heartbeat if you had some way of even hinting at it. I’d give up anything for you, Alex.
He is good to me. I promise. He is what you would want for me, please know this. He proves it to me all the time. Like the other week, for example.
You had a box of our photos that you kept in the bottom of our wardrobe. I’d figured that maybe, after all this time, I was finally ready to look through them. To relive those moments, to flick through the album and imagine you talking to me. I thought I was ready.
But when I saw your handwriting underneath each picture, messy and sharp, the pain resurfaced and bubbled like hot, lethal lava, threatening to sweep me away in the flood. Pictures of us. Me annoyed at you, me laughing at something you’d said, me not paying attention. Us holding hands, you kissing my cheek, you smearing ice-cream on my cheek. Me flipping you off, you play-wrestling me. Your smile. Your lovely smile. Captured forever, immortal, just like our love felt in those moments.
I was crying by the time I finished. I was shaking, a mess, a wreck of a man. Pictures lay all around me. I hadn’t even noticed myself pulling them out, or clenching them in my fists. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t feel, everything in my mind was you, you, you.
Then Jacob found me. He only had to take one look at me, one look at us, and he was right by my side. Holding me. Kissing my forehead (but not my lips, he knew he couldn't kiss me properly then). He loves me. He loves me so honestly. So openly. He saves me time and time again from being washed away in the reckless waves of you.
He loves me. I love him. But…
I love you. I never stopped; I never will stop. This isn’t me letting go of you. This is me learning to live with myself. To love myself for who I am, not what others need from me. This is me taking the steps I need to take to live the rest of my life happily until we meet again. This is me
loving.
Me loving you, me loving Jacob, me loving myself. This is me, happy.
Thank you for everything. You don’t even know half of what you have done for me.
One day I’ll find you, we’ll meet again, and I’ll tell you everything.
I love you.
Your Henry.
PS: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” - A. A. Milne