My Darling,
I have grown very old. You would not recognise me anymore: my hair is grey, my eyes are tired. My skin is as wrinkled as the shell of a chestnut. I am sure that as you read this, your own hair greying at the temples, you will be unable to picture it: as I have always thought of you as we were as teenagers, I know that you will only ever be able to see me as I was. I am aware that in writing this I sound sentimental: worse, I sound nostalgic, but I assure you that is not the case. Nostalgia and sentimentality carry connotations of rose-tinted spectacles, and though I do look back on our time together as a golden age, I am not blind to its many faults. Permit me to say that I have a clearer view and understanding of our early love than I ever had at the time: if I am to be accused of sentimentality, I believe such an accusation better reflects the besotted boy than the hardened old man I have become.
But that is not what this letter is for. We have fought our battles and I have won. It would be pointless and gloating to run over the well-worn tracks of blame. Instead, consider this a peace offering of a kind, a promise that through the years I have always believed your soul to be good. How could I have loved you any other way? When I think of you, it is never of the dark days of pain and cruelty, but of the sunlit hours spent together in your aunt's back garden. Of my teenaged self, besotted, happier than I had ever been in my life: I believe that it was the happiest you had ever been, too. We are both intelligent men, and we both know that had we been able to spend our lives together there would have been conflict, as always occurs between the meeting of two minds. And yet I still think we would have been able to last. I have imagined happy days of teaching together, myself as headmaster, you perhaps in the position of charms or Defense Against the Dark Arts. You made an excellent teacher when I was your age, I think your skills in such a profession could only have grown if given the chance.
Why write this letter in the first place? It is sure to only bring you pain. I imagine that upon reading it you will experience a sensation of betrayal at the revelation of my continuing love for you to this day whilst I allow you to remain in one of the cruellest, coldest prisons in the world. The answer is of course that I cannot help myself: I am soon to die, and as such all the emotions I have kept at arm's length are finally unravelling out of me. And the answer is also that while it may make you angry, I hope that this letter will also provide you some comfort when I am gone. I think you a cruel, sadistic man, but I also cannot help but continue to think and worry for you. Perhaps you read this letter with a cynically raised eyebrow, an expression I remember all too well from our days together. Perhaps you weep: perhaps you have torn this letter into a thousand pieces upon sight of my familiar scrawl.
Being the type of man to believe in the soul, I write this letter in the firm belief that one day, should your heart still wish it, we may be together once more. Perhaps it will be in the form of a pair of blackbirds, or two flowers intwining one another. Or maybe, souls in different bodies, far in the future there will be some spark of recognition between us. Let this letter not be a final goodbye, the last of the many exchanges between ourselves so touched by finality, but an expression of hope. We will see one another again, in happier circumstances, and I will hold your hand once more.
Albus Dumbledore.