Work Text:
17th of June, 1818
My dearest Franklin,
I hope I am not being absurd.
I paused too long before writing your name, then caught myself overthinking the comma. A pause? A breath? Should I have written 'my dearest, Franklin' instead or written no comma at all?
The very act of naming you sends my mind spinning, reckless and aware—but I've remembered myself, now. What does it matter if the form falters? If any sentence should stumble beneath my hand, these words will be mine alone; a confession without consequence, a truth without witness, and I will let them stand exactly as they fall.
I noticed your smile today, though I pretended not to.
It came and went quickly, as such things must, but it altered the whole afternoon.
I've read your poem as well—twice, in fact, once for sense and once for the sound of it—and I find myself unequal to it. You are a prodigy, Franklin, though you do not know it, or else you know it too well and have learned the good manners of concealment. There is a clarity in your words that unsettles me, as though you have named something I have spent years circling without daring to touch.
I tell myself that this is admiration, nothing more. That it is natural to notice such things, to be pleased by talent, by intelligence, by a familiar presence made momentarily unfamiliar by light or laughter. I tell myself that I have always been attentive, that this is merely habit dressed up as meaning. And yet I find my thoughts returning to you without instruction, rehearsing moments that require no rehearsal, lingering where they ought to pass on. I ask myself when attention becomes attachment, and when attachment becomes something I am no longer permitted to name.
I begin this letter intending nothing more than a remark, a courtesy, a small acknowledgment easily excused and easily forgotten. I tell myself I will stop here, and I tell myself that this is enough, yet the words continue, and with them, the uneasy knowledge that I am already too far gone to pretend this is accidental.
I am a fool, Franklin.
I am sure you know this; you have heard the raillery of my companions often enough—my poor performance in the company of ladies, my awkward silences when others flirt with ease, as though I were forever rehearsing for an interest I do not possess—but it is not entirely for the reasons you think.
For though I have tried to dress my heart in good manners and send it away, it returns each evening, hat in hand, asking after you.
In a sky full of stars, you are my moon; in a world that rushes past, you are the pause where my breath remembers its own name.
I have learned your absence like a second language, spoken only at night, when desire grows articulate and I must answer it alone. Every road I take bends toward you, even when I insist I am merely passing through. If affection is a tide, then I am forever drawn, ankles caught in its bright persistence, pretending not to feel the pull.
I carry you in the quiet places—between heartbeats, behind my ribs—where hope kneels and waits, unashamed.
I have written poems to avoid the simpler truth; I have praised the weather, the hour, the grace of ordinary things, when it is your hand I am naming in disguise. Words, which have always obeyed me, grow suddenly mannered and shy when they approach you. They bow. They falter. They refuse to say what I cannot, what a gentleman ought not, what a coward delays.
I am a coward, Franklin.
A coward that hides behind metaphor and meter, behind silence made to look like dignity. I wait for courage to arrive dressed as circumstance, for fate to do the speaking I lack the spine to attempt.
And yet—if you were to look at me and understand, if you were to speak first, or merely stay—then I would follow. I would cross whatever dark remains between us, hands unguarded, heart alight, content at last to stand where I have always been standing, waiting for you to see me.
They taught me this early, Franklin—so early I scarcely knew it was a lesson at all.
My mother was the first to warn me, though she spoke as if she were protecting something fragile rather than burying it. I told her once, only once, when we were boys and the world had not yet sharpened its rules, what I felt for you. She did not scold me. She only asked me to be careful, to keep such things close, to understand what might be taken from me if I were careless with my heart.
She loved me. I know she did. And because of that love, I learned to lower my voice even in my own thoughts, to fold my wanting into something small enough to survive. And when she was gone, the warning remained, and I obeyed it as one obeys a final instruction, too late to ask whether it was ever meant to last forever.
As I grew, others took up the lesson where she had left it, though with none of her gentleness.
They have told me (daily, loudly, and with the confidence of men who have never loved anything honestly) that what I feel has no proper name, or worse, that it has a name best left unspoken.
The world tightens around such desires; it calls them sins, maladies, jokes told behind gloved hands.
I learned how arrange my face into something neutral and harmless, how to love you as though it were a private illness rather than the single truth that steadies me. Every look must be measured. Every tenderness disguised as coincidence. Even this longing, which feels to me as natural as breath, must be kept small, starved of daylight, lest it be discovered and punished for daring to exist.
And still, it has followed me—out of childhood, out of mourning, into every version of myself I have been required to become.
It has endured rank and duty, expectation and inheritance, the slow accumulation of a life built to contain everything except this. I have carried your name through years of restraint as others carry a faith, silently and at cost. If I have learned control, it is only because I have had so much to contain. If I have learned obedience, it is because the wanting never left me, and I had to learn how to live beside it without letting it speak.
And you have watched it happen, Franklin, have you not?
You have seen me grow careful where once I was unafraid, distant where I was once yours without thinking; we were not permitted to remain what we were. Not friends, not acquaintances, not once the world decided what I must become and what you must be to me: heir and servant, master and man, roles that left no room for the simpler truth of having been friends, or anything more dangerous than that.
For this, I owe you an apology I have never spoken.
I am sorry for every time I let formality stand where affection belonged, for every moment I allowed duty to interrupt what we might have said if we had been allowed to say anything at all. I am sorry that I learned to protect myself by pretending not to know you as I once did, that I accepted a distance that cost you more than it cost me. If I seemed to forget you, believe me when I say it was an act learned for survival, not a failure of feeling.
I have never stopped seeing you. I have only learned, clumsily and all too well, how not to reach—how never to reach—for I am not ignorant of the risks; I know what becomes of men who reach for one another too openly.
And then there is the matter of what we are to the world, and to each other.
I am permitted my longing only because it is presumed impossible; you are made distant by design, kept at the proper remove by title, by duty, by the careful architecture of class. I am expected to inherit, to represent, to preserve a name polished smooth by generations of restraint, while you are expected to serve, to remain legible and useful and unseen.
To want you is to violate more than affection—it is to trespass across a border I was raised to defend. I am meant to desire someone appropriate, someone who mirrors my station, my future, my obligations. But my heart has chosen otherwise, recklessly, without consulting my responsibilities. I want you despite these divisions, but as I am achingly aware of them, I must never let this see the light of day.
I know what it would cost you. I know what it would cost me. And still the wanting persists, stubborn and unteachable, asking what all these rules are worth if they demand the surrender of the one thing that feels unmistakably, disastrously true.
Though I will never send this letter, I write it as though it might reach you, as though the act of setting these words down were not itself an act of treason.
When the ink dries, I will fold these pages away and become again the man the world expects, seeing to it that this confession will live only in my desk, in my mind, in the private geography of what I have denied myself.
And yet I know this: even unsent, even unread, it has already told the truth. It has named you where I have not dared, and it has admitted what my mouth refuses to.
Though this letter will never be yours, Franklin, it is still mine, and it bears witness to the fact that once, quietly and without permission, even if only in thought, even if only in ink, I loved you as fully as I was able.
Yours Forever,
Percy.