If I were to make a list of your greatest qualities, one to be preserved for all time, subtlety would not be among them. Don't protest, dear, it's not an insult. Don't fling your hands up like that, offended, I meant it kindly. You see, for you there is no hiding your light under a bushel, no doubt your emotions are real and sincere: you telegraph your feelings loud and clear, for everyone to see. It's one of the things I love most about you, I think. And yet, what's on the inside of a person rarely matches exactly what's on the outside, and I wonder what really goes on inside your head, that you keep to yourself.
I know that you lie awake as I sleep, staring at the ceiling or at me, thinking away. Often when I turn in the night, you turn with me too, fit our hips and knees together, readjust your arm around my waist, link your fingers through mine, move your pillows more snug against your neck, sigh. As you lay there, do you contemplate the day just gone? or are you reliving past glories and adventures? or are your thoughts more philosophical than you'd like anyone to think, about the nature of life and love, and how we two came together to this particular point in space and time. Go on, blush and look away, down at the ground, up at the ceiling, you won't tell me, I know. I'll have to make my own assumptions. You're a romantic deep down, and so I'm drawn more strongly to the latter conclusion. Also I catch you, sometimes, sitting on our bed and staring at that faded old dog-eared photo I have asked you a hundred times to throw out, lips moving silently, clearly pouring out your heart to it. You used to sit cross-legged, like an Indian, lent back against the headboard, loose limbed and at ease within yourself, but now you sit, stiff and still, on the edge, feet firmly on the floor, hunched over my image like it's the holy Madonna. When I see you like that, lost in thought, I wish that you would talk to me and not my picture, but I understand: I can talk to God direct, but you have different methods of confession.
I know the days of yesteryear are still with you, bright and bold inside your head, and that they form, in their way, a retreat for you against the realities of this modern era. You were born, my love, in a different time, a different century, millennium, and I know that sometimes you yearn to go back, to the world that you so fully understood and lived. That picture is your portal. The world has changed so much, and you so little, that sometimes the past has more meaning for you than today, and this is how it is with all of us. We were alive, then, more so than now, and did not understand our own actions. For we had the desire to do what was right, but not the ability to carry it out. And so we did not do the good we wanted, but the evil we did not want is what we kept on doing.
Don't tut at me like that, you know what I'm referring to. I know you hate it when I use verses to make my point, when I reference the words my father instilled within me, but that book is part of me, now and always, and I cannot, and will not, remove it. I know you think it is to blame for the bad that has gone between us, but the fact is, that that was of our own making, a creation of our own minds and hearts, shaped and moulded by our lives. Anyway, there hasn't been so much bad, not for lives this long. We've been happy, you and I, for many years now. In part, you know, we have my father and his teachings to thank for that. When I returned to him, my heart for once as obvious as yours in that hallway, I spent many hours reading those verses, over and over, waiting for a sign, a message, an indication that we would be struck down as my father promised. But all I found, seeping into every story, every page, every verse and word, was the message of redeeming love. When God commands, go again and love this woman, that is what you do. Hosea knew it, and I knew it, and I did. So give thanks, my love, to God on high and then lay down with me, and sleep.